The Burlington Magazine, November 2017
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 159 (November 2017)
A R T I C L E S
• Oronzo Brunetti, “A Nymphaeum for the Villa Salviati at Ponte alla Badia in Florence,” pp. 893–99.
R E V I E W S
• Jeremy Warren, Review of Mark Gregory d’Apuzzo, La collezione dei bronzi del Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna (Libro Co. Italia, 2017), pp. 912–13.
• François Marandet, Review of Hannah Williams, Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Ashgate, 2015), pp. 918–19.
• Peter Murray, Review of Jane Fenlon, Ruth Kenny, Caroline Pegum, and Brendan Rooney, eds., Irish Fine Art in the Early Modern Period: New Perspectives on Artistic Practice, 1620–1820 (Irish Academic Press, 2016), p. 923.
• David Cowan, Review of the exhibition Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites (National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2017), pp. 930–31.
• Xavier F. Salomon, Review of the exhibition Caroline Murat, Sister of Napoleon, Queen of the Arts / Caroline, Soeur de Napoléon, Reine des Arts (Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ajaccio, Corsica, 2017), pp. 940–41.
Call for Papers | American Art Symposium, [Un]making Empires
From H-ArtHist:
Fourteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium, [Un]making Empires
Yale University, New Haven, 7 April 2018
Proposals due by 26 January 2018
Portrait of Chief Hendrick, engraving, ca. 1755.
The history and experience of immigration, colonization, and nation-building in the Americas have contributed to a complex artistic legacy. From Incan quero vessels to Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, the arts of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean have engaged and served different imperial visions. A means of both consolidating and challenging state power, material and visual cultures of empire have also shaped the identities of individuals, larger communities, and entire countries alike.
The Fourteenth Annual Yale University American Art Graduate Symposium invites papers that present new ways of thinking about art’s relationships to colonialism and empire. We invite submissions from graduate students working on American art across all time periods and media. Papers of an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural nature are especially encouraged.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Artistic expressions of confederation, empire, or sovereignty by indigenous American peoples
• Early modern colonial art and architecture, including relationships between colonies and their respective metropoles, inter-imperial exchange, and global currents
• Colonial subjects and artists as agents of empire
• Slavery and diaspora
• Questions of artistic agency, appropriation, authenticity, and hybridity in colonial art
• Colonial tropes and allegorical representations of the Americas and ‘Americans’
• Arts of exploration, conquest, and Manifest Destiny
• Colonial ‘afterlives’, heritage, and memory (ex. the Colonial Revival, museums such as Colonial Williamsburg, etc.)
• Post-colonialism, independence, and decolonization
• Art of non-political empires (ex. religious or commercial empires)
• Neo-colonialism and modern imperialism
Interested graduate students are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a CV by January 26, 2018. All submissions and questions should be directed to americanist.symposium@gmail.com. Accepted participants will be notified in early February. Accommodations will be provided in New Haven, Connecticut.
Keynote Speaker: Zara Anishanslin, Assistant Professor of History and Art History, University of Delaware
Call for Papers | A Farewell to Critique?
From H-ArtHist:
A Farewell to Critique? Reconsidering Critique as Art Historical Method
University of Copenhagen, NORDIK conference, 25–27 October 2018
Proposals due by 23 March 2018
Session convenors: Sara Callahan (PhD Candidate, Stockholm University), sara.callahan@arthistory.su.se; Anna-Maria Hällgren (PhD, Stockholm University), anna-maria.hallgren@arthistory.su.se; Charlotta Krispinsson (PhD, Humboldt University), charlotta.krispinsson@culture.hu-berlin.de
Since the advent of so-called New Art History, critique has been an omnipresent as well as welcomed part of the discipline. Critical perspectives on traditions and methods proved previous discourses of objectivity and neutrality to be inherently ideological. This new, critical art history enabled methodological approaches that questioned taken-for-granted assumptions of the discipline. Further, it brought attention to underlying social and structural aspects of art production and opened up new, exciting avenues of knowledge. In hindsight, thinking critically has resulted in some of the most ground-breaking research over the last few decades.
But when did thinking critically become the only way of thinking? Within the humanities, critique has turned into a default-mode, near synonymous with what is regarded as good research. This situation has of late come under scrutiny, most notably by Bruno Latour and Rita Felski. While Latour has argued that critique simply has “run out of steam” (Latour 2004), Felski stresses the importance of regarding critique as one method amongst others. In The Limits of Critique (2015) Felski argues that critique—like all methods—comes with its own tropes, narratives, and blind spots. What, exactly, are we doing while engaging in critique? What is the cost of habitually “reading against the grain”? Of continually deconstructing, denaturalizing and demystifying the world as we know it? What could we do otherwise? Felski does not offer a ready-to-use methodological alternative to critique—her concern is to examine what we do when we engage in critique and to challenge the view that it is the only game in town.
The aim of this session is to invite a discussion on critique in art history. We invite paper proposals that may include, but are not limited to, replies to the following questions:
• What are the challenges and/or benefits of critique and post-critique?
• What, specifically, would post critical methods look like within Art History?
• What are the geographical and cultural variations when it comes to the historiography as well as present state of critique?
• In addition to research practices, the academic profession involves teaching, participating in seminars and conferences, writing proposals and supervising students and junior researchers; can the discussion of post-critique be useful in developing these practices in some ways?
Please submit your proposal via a form on the conference website, where you will need to fill in personal information, an abstract no more than 1800 characters, a brief c.v. of no more than 360 characters, and full contact information by 23 March 2018.
In all, there are 19 panels now accepting proposals:
1 Post Democratic Culture and Culture in Post Democracy
2 Art and Design in Translation: The Circulation of Objects, People, and Approaches
3 A Farewell to Critique? Reconsidering Critique as Art Historical Method
4 (In)hospitalities
5 Medieval Nordic Art and the Un-nameable
6 Queer Art, Artists, and Identity: Nordic and Global Contexts
7 Futures from the Past? Nordic Exhibition Histories
8 Mixed Media
9 Nature, Non-Human and Ecology in Modern Art, Architecture, and Environmental Planning
10 Networks and Collaborations in Nordic Architectural Culture
11 A Whiter Shade of Pale: Whiteness Perspective on Nordic Visual Culture
12 Art, Artists, and Art Institutions in Times of War and Conflicts
13 Showing Not eTlling: Art Institutional Practices of Inclusions/Exclusions
14 Art and Spirituality in a Secular Society
15 Remembering: Art History and Curatorial Practices in Nordic Post-War Exhibition Studies
16 Life: On Art, Animation, and Biology
17 Decolonial Aesthetics: A View from the North
18 To Be [Titled], or Not To Be [Titled]? Art History and Its ‘Well-(un)Known’ Masters…
19 Untitled Spaces: Scenography and Nordic Art History
Research Lunch | Emily Knight on Portraiture as Remembrance
From the Paul Mellon Centre:
Emily Knight | ‘The Last Sad Testimony of Affection’:
Portraiture as Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 8 December 2017
George Romney, Ann Wilson with Her Daughter, Sybil, ca. 1776–77, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 100.3 cm (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B1983.1).
In 1773, six year-old Sibyl Wilson died. Her grief-stricken parents George and Ann commissioned the artist George Romney to complete a portrait of Ann and Sibyl. This touching work shows the mother’s head cast downward but not quite touching the head of her now deceased daughter, her arms softly embracing the child’s delicate form. The young girl looks out to the viewer with a solemn expression, connected to her mother in space but not time.
Using Romney’s portrait as a starting point, this paper will examine the particularities of posthumous portraits of children in light of new ideas about childhood put forward by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke. I will analyse the resulting impact that this change had on artists who fulfilled the commissions of grieving parents and argue that the various ways in which artists attempted to capture a deep sense of loss reveals much about familial relationships during this period and provides a deeper understanding of overt expressions of emotion that emerged during the age of sentimentality.
Over the course of the paper, I will demonstrate how artists in the mid-eighteenth century assumed a varied yet interconnected mode of emotional expression in portraiture that was distinct from the symbolic devices used by previous generations, and compelled the viewer to unpick embedded artistic and cultural references.
8 December 2017, 12:30–2:00pm, Seminar Room, Paul Mellon Centre
Emily Knight is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford working on posthumous portraiture in the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries in Britain. She has undertaken research as a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British and she has recently been awarded a Robert R. Wark Fellowship at The Huntington. She is also Curatorial Assistant at Historic Royal Palaces working on the current exhibition Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World and is the Paul Mellon Centre’s Doctoral Researchers Network Co-Convenor.
Call for Papers | Visual and Material Culture Exchange across the Baltic
From H-ArtHist:
Visual and Material Culture Exchange across the Baltic Sea Region, 1750–1850
Berlin, 22–24 March 2018
Proposals due by 1 December 2017
Although one of the world’s greatest cultural crossroads, the Baltic Sea has often been overlooked by scholars as a site of cultural exchange in favor of exploring national and regional identities. Since the 1990s, the concept of a Baltic Sea Region encompassing the sea and its surrounding land has fostered transnational thinking about the region, transcending Cold War binaries of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in an effort to view the area more holistically. Still, common terminology such as ‘Scandinavia’ and ‘the Baltic States’, suggests these cultures are mutually exclusive, or, as the case with ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, ambiguously monolithic.
While historians have been examining the Baltic Sea Region—present-day Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Sweden—as an important center of cross-cultural interaction, the area’s visual and material culture, one of the most important avenues of exchange, is often reduced to illustrative examples of historical phenomena. Art historical narratives continue to be tethered to national and ethnocentric approaches, a bias this conference seeks to complicate.
This project (three conferences—Greifswald 2017, Berlin 2018, and Tallinn 2019—and an anticipated edited volume) emerges from these twin desires: to study the Baltic Sea Region as a cultural crossroads and to depart from isolated, national/regional narratives. By foregrounding visual and material exchanges and the ideological or pragmatic factors that motivated them, we seek to establish common ground for viewing the Baltic Sea as a nexus of intertwined, fluctuating individuals and cultures always in conversation. We invite papers that engage material/visual culture as conceptual lenses through which to reevaluate the history, meaning, and significance of the Baltic Sea Region.
The 2018 conference focuses on the period 1750–1850. We invite proposals on any relevant topic; possibilities include:
• art education: students/professors at foreign academies
• itinerant artists/craftsmen
• foreign artists at royal courts
• art commerce: agents, dealers, collectors, advisors
• visual and material culture of race, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, Enlightenment theories regarding the ‘noble savage’
• relationship between art and science, constructions of ‘visual epistemologies’
• impact of print media/books
• artists’ travel
Proposals must include (in English):
a) an abstract of maximum 150 words summarizing your argument
b) academic resume
c) full contact information including email
Papers will be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by discussion. The language of the conference is English. Contributions should be sent to Michelle Facos (mfacos@indiana.edu) and Bart Pushaw (bcpushaw@gmail.com) by 1 December 2017. Notification of acceptance will be by 15 December. This conference is sponsored by Indiana University-Bloomington and will be held at IU’s Berlin Gateway in Kreuzberg.
New Book | The East India Company at Home
From UCL Press:
Margot Finn and Kate Smith, eds., The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (London: University College London Press, 2018) 500 pages, ISBN: 978 178735 0281 (hardback), £50 / ISBN: 978 178735 0298 (paperback), £30 / ISBN: 978 178735 0274 (open access PDF), free.
The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors, and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians, and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain.
The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.
Margot Finn is Professor of Modern British History at UCL. The author of After Chartism (1993) and The Character of Credit (2003), she has published extensively on the families and material culture of the East India Company. A former editor of the Journal of British Studies, she is President of the Royal Historical Society.
Kate Smith is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Birmingham. Kate specialises in material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. She published Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830 in 2014.
New Book | Cultivating Commerce
From Cambridge UP:
Sarah Easterby-Smith, Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, 1760–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 252 pages, ISBN: 978 131641 1339, $99.
Sarah Easterby-Smith rewrites the histories of botany and horticulture from the perspectives of plant merchants who sold botanical specimens in the decades around 1800. These merchants were not professional botanists, nor were they the social equals of refined amateurs of botany. Nevertheless, they participated in Enlightenment scholarly networks, acting as intermediaries who communicated information and specimens. Thanks to their practical expertise, they also became sources of new knowledge in their own right. Cultivating Commerce argues that these merchants made essential contributions to botanical history, although their relatively humble status means that their contributions have received little sustained attention to date. Exploring how the expert nurseryman emerged as a new social figure in Britain and France, and examining what happened to the elitist, masculine culture of amateur botany when confronted by expanding public participation, Easterby-Smith sheds fresh light on the evolution of transnational Enlightenment networks during the Age of Revolutions.
Call for Papers | Frenemies in British Art, 1769–2018
From the Paul Mellon Centre:
Frenemies: Friendship, Enmity, and Rivalry in British Art, 1769–2018
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 19–20 July 2018
Proposals due by 14 December 2017
Joshua Reynolds, Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney: The Archers, 1769, oil paint on canvas, 236 × 180 cm (London: Collection of Tate, T12033).
From the earliest histories of art, the friendships and rivalries of artists have been the subject of anecdote and gossip. For that reason they have been associated with the popular storylines of art, rather than with the scholarly discourse of art history. However, the wide-ranging re-evaluation of affect and emotion that is taking place in the humanities, and the increasing recognition of a synchronic, network model of understanding rather than a diachronic, emulative one in art history, have suggested that artistic friendships and rivalries are key agents in the production and reception of works of art. This methodological shift has helped art historians perceive the significance of interpersonal relationships to art-making. It has drawn attention to the sociability of artists, and to the entwining of their personal and professional networks. Meanwhile, across other disciplines, the impact of friendship, personal networks and communities of rivalry upon cultural production have been the subject of important studies. Furthermore, the idea of productive or inhibiting enmities (a more awkward but still profoundly important category of affective relationship) is also becoming a fruitful avenue of exploration.
The long history of British art furnishes many examples of complex and productive friendships and bitter, crushing rivalries. The Royal Academy, from its foundation to today, is one major locus of such complex affective networks, as has been its annual summer exhibition. In conjunction with the exhibition The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, to be held at the Royal Academy between June and August of 2018, and curated by the Paul Mellon Centre’s Mark Hallett and Sarah Victoria Turner, this conference seeks to explore the impact of friendships and enmities on subject matter and artistic method, as well as on the formation of artistic careers and on the reception of works of art. We aim to re-evaluate and elevate these relationships, shifting them from the peripheral status of cultural gossip to central aspects of making and meaning.
We seek applications for 20-minute papers that address these questions in imaginative ways, and which focus on the history of British art in an international context, from 1769 to today. Whilst proposals that look to the Royal Academy as a locus of interpersonal artistic exchange are welcome, we also invite papers on other relevant topics. Please submit titles, 300-word abstracts and a brief professional biography and c.v. to Ella Fleming on efleming@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by December 14 at 5.00pm 2017.
The symposium is funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and convened by Georgina Cole (The National Art School, Sydney), Mark Hallett, Mark Ledbury (The Power Institute, University of Sydney), and Sarah Victoria Turner.
New Book | The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860
From UNC Press:
Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 384 pages, ISBN: 978 14696 32605, $50.
In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A ‘carto-coded’ America—a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful—had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography’s spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors, and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner’s comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Martin Brückner is professor of English and material culture studies at the University of Delaware.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Preface: Introducing the Social Life of American Maps
Part One: American Mapworks
1 The Artisanal Map, 1750–1815: Workshops and Shopkeepers from Lewis Evans to Samuel Lewis
2 The Manufactured Map, 1790–1830: Centralization and Integration from Mathew Carey to John Melish
3 The Industrial Map, 1820–1860: Innovation and Diversification from Henry S. Tanner to S. Augustus Mitchell
Part Two: The Spectacle of Maps
4 Public Giants: Re-Staging Power and the Theatricality of Maps
5 Private Properties: Ornamental Maps and the Decorum of Interiority
6 Self-Made Spectacles: The Look of Maps and Cartographic Visualcy
Part Three: The Mobilization of Maps
7 Looking Small and Made To Go: The Atlas and the Rise of the Cartographic Vade Mecum
8 Cartographic Transfers: Education and the Art of Mappery
Epilogue: Cartoral Arts and Material Metaphors
Appendix 1: Price Table—Maps and Their Sales Prices, 1755–1860
Appendix 2: Inventory of “John Melish Geographer and Map Publisher”
Graphs
Index
New Book | The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America
From Harvard UP:
S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 480 pages, ISBN 978 067497 2117, $35.
After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic.
Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented.
Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.
S. Max Edelson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
C O N T E N T S
List of Maps*
A Note on the Maps
Introduction
1 A Vision for American Empire
2 Commanding Space after the Seven Years’ War
3 Securing the Maritime Northeast
4 Marking the Indian Boundary
5 Charting Contested Caribbean Space
6 Defining East Florida
7 Atlases of Empire
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Map Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
* Maps
• Detail from Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (London, 1763). From The National Archives of the UK, Open Government License v3.0
• Detail from Daniel Paterson, “Cantonment of His Majesty’s Forces in N. America,” 1767, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, gm72002042
• Detail from [Samuel Holland] and John Lewis, “A Plan of the Island of St. John in the Province of Nova Scotia,” 1765, The National Archives of the UK, Open Government License v3.0
• Detail from John Pickens, “Boundary Line between the Province of South Carolina and the Cherokee Indian Country,” 1766, The National Archives of the UK, Open Government License v3.0
• Detail from M. Pinel, Plan de l’Isle de la Grenade ([London], 1763). From Baldwin Collection, Toronto Public Library, 912.72984 J24
• Detail from William De Brahm, “Special Chart of Cape Florida” [1765], Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, 75693274
• Detail from J. F. W. Des Barres, [Chart of Hell Gate, Oyster Bay and Huntington Bay,] 1778, in The Atlantic Neptune (London, 1777–[1781]). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, Richard H. Brown Revolutionary War Map Collection
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