Print Quarterly, December 2017
The eighteenth century in the current issue of Print Quarterly:
Paul Sandby, The Fire of Faction. The Fly Machine for Scotland, 1762, etching (London: The British Museum).
Print Quarterly 34.4 (December 2017)
A R T I C L E S
• Aaron M. Hyman, “Patterns of Colonial Transfer: An Album of Prints in Mexico City,” pp. 393–99.
“The rediscovery of an album of European prints in Mexico City promises to fill in some of the scholarly gaps by bringing to roughly 500 the number of extant, loose-leaf European prints in Mexico that survive from the colonial period—vastly more than scholars were aware of only a decade ago. . . The album is loosely organized chronologically and by national schools, with the earliest prints appearing at the beginning, followed by the eighteenth-century material that constitutes most of it.”
• Ann V. Gunn, “The Fire of Faction: Sources of Paul Sandby’s Satires of 1762–63,” pp. 400–18.
“On 23 September 1762, ‘The Butifyer, a touch on the times. Also a poor man loaded with mischief, or John Bull and his sister Peg . . . Likewise the Fire of Faction’ were announced in The Public Advertiser, the first of three of a series of seven satirical prints created by Paul Sandy (1731–1809) in late 1762 during the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War . . . This group, however, has never been examined as a whole before. This article discusses the context within which these prints were made and identifies the imagery and literary sources employed in them.”
N O T E S A N D R E V I E W S
• Louis Marchesano, Review of Kristina Deutsch, Jean Marot: Un graveur d’architecture à l’époque de Louis XIV (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), pp. 437–38.
• James Grantham Turner, Review of an issue of Casabella 856 (December 2015), dedicated to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia’s 2016 exhibition Giulio Romano’s I Modi and the Modi of of Carlo Scarpa and Alvaro Siza, which featured drawings by two modern architects with sexually explicit Italian prints from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, pp. 441–42.
• Antony Griffiths, Review of the exhibition catalogue Freyda Spira and Peter Parshall, The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 468–70.
P U B L I C A T I O N S R E C E I V E D
• Sharon Liberman Mintz, Shaul Seidler-Feller, and David Wachtel, eds., The Writing on the Wall: A Catalogue of Judaica Broadsides from the Valmadonna Trust Library (London: Valmadonna Trust Library, 2015), p. 462.
• Christien Melzer, ed., Im Zeichen der Lilie: Französische Druckgraphik zur Zeit Ludwigs XIV (Bremen: Kunstverein Bremen, 2017), pp. 462–63.
• Petra Zelenková, Jan Kupecký a ‘černé umění’ / Johann Kupezky (1666–1740) and ‘The Black Art’ (Prague: National Gallery, 2016), p. 463.
• Anna Schultz, Johann Gottlieb Glume (1711–1778): Das Druckgraphische Werk (Berlin: Galerie Bassenge, 2016), p. 463.
• Laura Moretti, Recasting the Past: An Early Modern ‘Tales of Ise’ for Children (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 463.
Exhibition | The Business of Prints
Press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:
The Business of Prints, 1400–1850
The British Museum, London, 21 September 2017 — 28 January 2018
Curated by Antony Griffiths
The British Museum has one of the greatest collections of prints in the world and holds the UK’s national collection. The majority of this collection, which totals more than two million prints, was made in the years before the invention of photography. Due to the sheer volume of the collection it can become difficult to grasp its contents, and many of the prints are today very unfamiliar and puzzling. For the past century, prints have usually been discussed either as finished works of art or as illustrations of a particular subject. This exhibition reverses the perspective in a way that has not been attempted before, and endeavours to show prints as an object of trade.
The exhibition The Business of Prints is in part based on the book The Print before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820 by Antony Griffiths, published last year by British Museum Press. This won the Apollo Prize for the best art book of the year 2016. It is the first work ever to attempt to explain how the print world worked.
The exhibition focuses on four major topics: the production of prints, the lettering on prints, the usage of prints, and the collecting of prints and the concern for quality. In addition, books and series are being shown in table cases, and framed prints on the wall. Famous works by artists such as Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya are being shown alongside far less familiar subjects by artists of the print trade who have almost been forgotten. Among them is a rabbit used as target practice, a prompt for an early form of karaoke, and prints from plates that had been so heavily used that they had almost worn out. The display offers a more complete understanding of the lettering on prints, the information it gives us, and some of the complicated ways in which images were linked with text.
We are now so used to the deluge of photographically-derived imagery of the modern world that it is difficult to imagine a period which lasted for nearly 450 years, from around 1400 to 1850, when every pictorial image had to be designed by someone and then cut by a craftsman onto a copper plate or wooden block—there were no mechanical aids. These were then printed by another expert, and distributed by printsellers to buyers around the whole of Europe. Behind them stood the publishers and entrepreneurs, who financed the production, and frequently came up with ideas for new subjects. It was a huge business, which gave work to thousands of people. The exhibition sheds light on this forgotten trade of mass production which required numerous collaborations in order to produce a single print, whilst revealing some of the complexities of the craftsmanship and the process, the varied nature of the prints themselves, and the ways in which buyers used or collected them.
Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type in Mainz in the late 1440s. However, type is designed to deal with words, and as soon as the need to communicate goes beyond the verbal, the support of another variety of printing must be called on—one that is specifically suited for images. Two such technologies were used alongside type, one based around cutting designs into wooden blocks (the relief process of woodcut), the other in which the design was incised as lines into a copper plate (the intaglio processes such as engraving and etching).
The uses to which these technologies were put were enormously varied. The printing of maps and music, wallpaper, diagrams, decorative paper, bank notes, playing cards and fans, as well as many types of decoration of textiles and ceramics, depended on woodcut or engraving. Many of these applications spun off to become separate businesses. In museums the field is conventionally narrowed to one area of this vast expanse, that of pictorial images on sheets of paper. This is still very wide, covering a wide range of functions, such as portraits, devotional images, current events, landscape and topography, caricature, fantasy and designs for the decorative arts. Many of these classes of print did not need the support of typography, and most intaglio prints carried their text engraved on the plate itself alongside the image. One example that demonstrates the volume and diversity of the European print trade is the mass production of the recognisable image of a devotional saint which would have been sold by pedlars and worn as amulets by peasants. These were often printed on vellum, a more durable material than paper, to withstand daily wear and tear.
When speaking of the display, curator Antony Griffiths highlights that “this is the first exhibition ever to demonstrate what prints can tell us about the vast business of trading prints. The exhibition aims to open the visitor’s eyes to the business of printing. Prints were multiples made in the hope that people would buy lots of them. The range of subjects, sizes and purposes was huge—far larger than people realise today.”
Call for Papers | Fashion and Clothing in European Museums
From H-ArtHist:
Fashion and Clothing in European Museums: Collection, Research, Exhibition
Musée Alsacien, Strasbourg/Haguenau, 17–19 May 2018
Proposals due by 19 December 2017
Courtyard of the Alsatian Museum in Strasbourg (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, June 2009).
This interdisciplinary international conference Fashion and Clothing in European Museums: Collection, Research, Exhibition is organised by the European Research Interest Group Appearances, Bodies and Societies / Apparences, Corps et Sociétés (ACorSo). With the intent of reflecting the current museum landscape and of developing debate on future directions for museums of art, dress and textiles, ethnography and history, members of the Research Interest Group welcome papers that respond closely to the following issues:
• What fundamental themes and debates have museums attached to their collections of textiles, dress, and fashion?
• What ambitions have been attached to the development of dress, fashion, and textile collections? How are these collections integrated within the global project of museums and the museum itinerary?
• How can we overcome the status of differences that exist between (high) fashion and everyday and ethnographical dress and their museum display?
• Should the promulgators of the new museologies of the study of fashion and dress—so far mostly applied to analysis of museums of international standing or to specialised museums—take an interest in the work of small and medium sized museums?
• In what ways is digitization a challenge or a potential to the museum?
• Where should small and medium sized museums seek professional advice? What professional skills are needed for these museums? Is there a preferred work methodology?
• What links to established research can museums initiate and set in place, precisely because of their specificities? What has already been initiated?
• The situation of some of some small local museums with collections including dress, textiles, and their related industries is now so perilous that some have been, and are being, closed. What positive proposals have been set in place that have already addressed this problem or are currently dealing with it?
We are interested in receiving discussion papers from colleagues working with collections, be they curators, collectors, researchers, managers, museographers, etc. The languages of the conference will be French, German, and English. In view of the trans-European character of this conference, we ask you to submit your abstract in two languages—in any combination of French, German, and English (i.e. French and German, French and English, or English and German). Your submission should be 300 words long, with the translation bringing it to a total of 600 words. Abstracts must be relevant to the issues detailed in this Call for Papers and should clearly highlight the specific themes your paper will address. You will be informed in January on the status of your submission.
Abstracts should be submitted to
• Lou Taylor, Prof. Emerita (lt73@brighton.ac.uk); Dr. Charlotte Nicklas (c.nicklas@brighton.ac.uk). School of Humanities, University of Brighton, 10/11, Pavilion Parade, Brighton, BN 2 1RA, UK.
• Jean-Pierre Lethuillier (jean-pierre.lethuillier@univ-rennes2.fr). Université Rennes 2, Département d’Histoire, Place du recteur Henri Le Moal, CS 24307, 35043 Rennes cedex, France.
Call for Papers | Things Left Behind
From the University of Missouri-Columbia:
Things Left Behind: Material Culture, Disaster, and the Human Experience
University of Missouri Art History and Archaeology Graduate Student Association Symposium
University of Missouri-Columbia, 9–10 March 2018
Proposals due by 20 January 2018
The Art History and Archaeology Graduate Student Association at the University of Missouri-Columbia invites submissions from graduate students that investigate topics that research the material culture of disaster and abandonment and discuss how such topics inform the human experience. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
• Disasters of personal, man-made, or natural character
• War and conflict
• Forced migrations
• Plague, illness, and other pandemics
• Abandonment
• Recovery and revitalization
We are seeking papers that explore various approaches to these topics, such as representations of disasters, artists influenced by war and disaster, art or crafts produced by displaced populations, the archaeological record of destruction and rebuilding, or archaeologically based narratives of disasters. Topics from any historical period of Art History, Archaeology, Classics, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Religious Studies, and other fields related to visual and material culture will be considered for twenty-minute presentations. The keynote lecture by Dr. Steven L. Tuck, Professor of Classics at Miami University, will take place on Friday evening, March 9, and student presentations will be held on Saturday, March 10. Proposals should consist of a 250–500 word abstract and a CV. Please submit proposals electronically to mu.ahagrads@gmail.com no later than January 20, 2018.
New Book | Edward the Black Prince in Georgian and Victorian England
From Boydell & Brewer:
Barbara Gribling, The Image of Edward the Black Prince in Georgian and Victorian England: Negotiating the Late Medieval Past (London: Royal Historical Society, 2017), 189 pages, ISBN: 9780861933426, $90.
During the Georgian and Victorian periods, the fourteenth-century hero Edward the Black Prince became an object of cultural fascination and celebration: he and his battles played an important part in a wider reimagining of the British as a martial people, reinforced by an interest in chivalric character and a burgeoning nationalism. Drawing on a wealth of literature, histories, drama, art, and material culture, this book explores the uses of Edward’s image in debates about politics, character, war, and empire, assessing the contradictory meanings ascribed to the late Middle Ages by groups ranging from royals to radicals. It makes a special claim for the importance of the fourteenth century as a time of heroic virtues, chivalric escapades, royal power, and parliamentary development, adding to a growing literature on Georgian uses of the past by exposing an active royal and popular investment in the medieval. Disputing current assumptions that the Middle Ages represented a romanticized and unproblematic past, it shows how this investment was increasingly contested in the Victorian era.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
Royal Associations: Heroic Character and Chivalric Ceremony at the Court of George III
Prince George Reclaims the Heroic? Transition, Ambition, and Domesticity
Chivalry and Politics in Victoria’s Early Reign: Art, Exhibitions and Palace Renditions
Politics, Parliament, and the People’s Prince
Emulating Edward? Redefining Chivalry and Character
Warrior for Nation and Empire
Conclusion
The Launch of the King’s Friends Network
From the Georgian Papers Programme:
10 November 2017 saw an important milestone in the evolution of the Georgian Papers Programme with the public launch of The King’s Friends network. The King’s Friends is a free-to-join international community of those whose work stands to benefit from the digitization of the Georgian papers in the Royal Archives, and who in turn can help make the project a success. We hope that a very wide range of researchers working on eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century themes will join the King’s Friends network, and find it of use and interest in research not only on themes closely related to the history of the British monarchy and its jurisdictions, but to a whole range of topics from the histories of science, agriculture and medicine to the histories of gender and interpersonal relations, and the histories of art, collections, consumption, food and fashion, to mention just a few!
Click here to learn more and join the King’s Friends Network.
Tim Knox Named as New Director of the Royal Collection Trust
From The Fitzwilliam (November 2017) . . .
Her Majesty The Queen has appointed Mr Tim Knox as the new Director of the Royal Collection Trust. As Director, Mr Knox will be responsible for the care of the Royal Collection, its presentation to the public, and for the management of the public opening of the official residences of The Queen.
Tim Knox has been Director of the Fitzwilliam since April 2013. An eminent architectural historian and curator of country houses, he was previously Director of the Sir John Soane’s Museum and Head Curator at the National Trust. A graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Tim’s early career was spent at the Royal Institute of British Architects, before he joined the National Trust in 1995. He will leave the Fitzwilliam Museum and take up the Royal Collection directorship in the new year.
Note (added 24 January 2018) — The press release from The Royal Collection Trust is available here.
New Book | Exiles in a Global City: The Irish and Early Modern Rome
From Brill:
Clare Lois Carroll, Exiles in a Global City: The Irish and Early Modern Rome, 1609–1783 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 342 pages, ISBN: 978 900433 5165, €149 / $172.
In Exiles in a Global City, Clare Carroll explores Irish migrants’ experiences in early modern Rome and interprets representations of their cultural identities in relation to their interaction with world-wide Spanish and Roman institutions. This study focuses on some sources in Roman archives not previously considered by Irish historians. The book examines a wide array of cultural productions—Ó Cianáin’s account of O’Neill’s progress from Ireland to Rome, Luke Wadding’s history of the Franciscan order, the portraits at S. Isidoro, the first printed Irish grammar, the letters of Oliver Plunkett, the records of a hospice for converts, Charles Wogan’s memoir, and reports on the national college—for how they transformed emerging senses of an Irish nation.
Clare Carroll (Professor of Comparative Literature, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY) is the author of Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Ireland (Cork UP, 2001) and editor of Ireland and Postcolonial Theory (Cork, 2003).
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 The ‘Nation’ in Rome: Ó Cianáin’s “Pilgrimage of the Earls” (1609)
2 The Exile as Historian: Luke Wadding’s Annales Minorum (1625–54) between Global and Local Affiliations
3 The Transculturation of Exile: Visual Style and Identity in the Frescoes of the Aula Maxima at St. Isidore’s (1672)
4 A Poetic Anthology for Exiles: Irish Cultural Memory in the First Printed Gaelic Grammar (1677)
5 The Return of the Exile: Oliver Plunkett between Rome and Ireland
6 Irish Protestants in the Theater of the World: The Apostolic Hospice for the Converting, Rome, 1677–1745
7 The Romance and Disillusionment of Exile: Charles Wogan and his Memoir of Clementina Sobieska
8 ‘The Spiritual Government of the Entire World’: A Memorial for the Irish College Rome, January 1783
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Comparison of GLH with manuscript Grammars
Appendix 2: Index of first lines in Grammatica Latino-Hibernica
Appendix 3: List of Irish Guests at the Ospizio Apostolico dei Convertendi
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Napoleon: The Imperial Household
On this day, 2 December, in 1804, Napoleon became emperor of the French. This exhibition exploring the imperial household opens in February in Montreal:
Napoleon: The Imperial Household / Napoléon: La maison de l’empereur
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 3 February — 6 May 2018
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 9 June — 3 September 2018
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 4 October 2018 — 13 January 2019
Musée National du Château de Fontainebleau, 13 April — 15 July 2019
Joseph Franque, Empress Marie-Louise Watching over the Sleeping King of Rome, 1811 (Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon).
The Imperial Household was a key institution during the reign of Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821). It was responsible for the daily lives of the Imperial family and the day-to-day existence of former general Bonaparte, who became Emperor Napoleon in 1804. Napoleon: The Imperial Household aims to re-create the ambience and capture the spirit that prevailed in the French court during the Empire. A selection of works and objets d’art, most of which have never before been exhibited in North America, will reveal the Imperial Household’s role in fashioning a monarchic identity for the new emperor who ruled France following the Revolution, as well as his family and loyal entourage.
The Imperial Household consisted of six departments, each headed by a grand officer, a high-ranking dignitary of the Empire: the grand chaplain, grand master of ceremonies, grand marshal of the Palace, grand master of the hunt, grand chamberlain and grand equerry were each involved in orchestrating every minute of the pageantry in the Court. This is another aspect of the Napoleonic saga that will be presented here, with more than 250 works in which the fine arts and decorative arts were used for purposes of ideology and official propaganda.
Sylvain Cordier, Napoleon: The Imperial Household (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 350 pages, ISBN: 978 030023 3469, $50 / £40.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Note (added 17 August 2018) — The posting was updated to include dates for venues other than Montreal. It’s also worth noting that the exhibition title varies according to location; in Richmond and Kansas City it’s called Napoleon: Power and Splendor.
Student Workshop | Questions of Technique in Art History
From H-ArtHist:
Questions of Technique in Art History
International Student Workshop of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris and the École du Louvre in Paris, 18–24 March 2018
Applications due by 8 January 2018
For some time now and with few exceptions, instruction in artistic materials and techniques has ceased to be an integral part of an art historian’s education. Nevertheless, throughout one’s research in this discipline, one is constantly confronted with the assumption that one has already acquired knowledge on everything from painting materials to reproductive processes, drawing practices, paper, pigment, and bronze casting, to cite only some of the most familiar examples.
In response to this lack, the Deutsche Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris (DFK), in partnership with the École du Louvre, is offering a week-long workshop for art history students that focuses on artisanal, technical, and restorative techniques, and on how these issues relate to the history of artistic education in France. Study days presided over by international specialists will be punctuated by student presentations, and by site visits to artists’ ateliers at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris (ENSBA), to the Musée Bourdelle, and to the Centre de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF), among other locations. There will also by hands-on opportunities for exploring this subject, including an etching and lithography workshop, and a drawing session with an artist, a professor of the ENSBA.
Participation will be limited to ten master’s and doctoral students from an international pool of applicants. All participants are required to have a professional proficiency in the French language and will be asked to give a presentation whose theme will be assigned in advance.
Travel and lodging expenses for students residing outside of Paris will be covered with a grant of up to 300 Euros with the presentation of receipts. Participants will need to cover their meal expenses. Arrival is expected on March 18th, departure day will be Saturday March 24th.
Application documents must include a letter of motivation (not to exceed 2 pages), a recommendation letter from a professor, and a CV indicating prior academic achievements. There is no guarantee of admission. To be considered, please send your documents to Dr. Julia Drost and Prof. Dr. François-René Martin (ateliersderecherche@dfk-paris.org) with the subject line “Questions de techniques en histoire de l’art / Techniken und Materialien in der Kunstgeschichte” by January 8th, 2018.
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