Enfilade

Opening at the end of the month at both The Hunterian and Mount Stuart:

The Art of Power: Treasures from the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart
Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow, 31 March 2017 — 14 January 2018
Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, 31 March 2017 — 14 January 2018

Curated by Caitlin Blackwell and Peter Black

Sir Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, 1773 (The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart).

This new exhibition offers a unique opportunity to see major paintings from the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. Merging art, biography and cultural history, Art of Power uncovers the fascinating Enlightenment figure, John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute, and his collection of rarely-seen masterpieces.

The exhibition is split across two venues—The Hunterian and Mount Stuart—offering visitors the chance to experience two world-class collections. Art of Power: Treasures from Mount Stuart marks the tercentenary of Mount Stuart, an architectural jewel on the Isle of Bute which houses the Bute Collection, one of the foremost private collections of artworks and artefacts in the UK.

The exhibition reveals a selection of rarely-seen masterpieces collected by the fascinating Enlightenment figure, John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute (1713–1792), the first Scottish-born Prime Minister and ‘favourite’ of George III. After retiring from politics, Bute amassed a great art collection, which was particularly renowned for its Dutch and Flemish paintings. This major exhibition brings a selection of European and British masterpieces from the Bute Collection to the Hunterian Art Gallery, many of which have not been on public display in over a century.

Highlights include works by Dutch Golden Age masters like Jan Steen and Jacob van Ruisdael, Grand Manner portraits by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Joshua Reynolds and Allan Ramsay, and Italianate landscapes and history subjects by Claude Lorrain and Veronese. A portion of these works will be displayed at the Hunterian, along with works on paper, including botanical illustrations and satirical engravings from the collection. The remainder of the paintings will be displayed at Mount Stuart, where they will be accompanied by historical artefacts, such as costume, letters, and rare books.

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Caitlin Blackwell, Peter Black, and Oliver Cox, Art of Power: Masterpieces from the Bute Collection at Mount Stuart (New York: Prestel, 2017), 144 pages, ISBN: 978  37913  56631, $50.

John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was one of history’s most enthusiastic art collectors. As tutor to Prince George, Bute became indispensable to the royal household. Soon after his accession to the throne, the King made Bute Prime Minister―a career that was cut short after the Peace of Paris in 1763.

Forced out of London by an angry mob, Bute retired to an estate at Luton, where he spent the rest of his years in private study and amassing a collection of 500 paintings, including major works by Venetian painters such as Tintoretto, Bordone, and Veronese. Bute had a special interest in Dutch and Flemish pictures, building the greatest collection of its kind in Britain. This book features over thirty masterpieces, mainly genre paintings and landscapes, and including jewel-like landscapes by Brueghel and Savery. The collection is housed at the Bute family’s Scottish seat, Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute. Essays by leading scholars delve into the history of Bute’s collection, focusing on his relationship with King George III, and his wide ranging passions, which resulted in rooms filled floor to ceiling with works of art.

Caitlin Blackwell is the inaugural Bute Fellow at Mount Stuart, which is located on the Isle of Bute off the coast of Scotland. Peter Black is curator at the Hunterian and has published widely on Dutch and Flemish art. Oliver Cox is Heritage Engagement Fellow at the University of Oxford.

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From CODART, with text from Peter Black, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Paintings and Prints, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery (12 December 2016). . .

The Bute Collection is housed at Mount Stuart (1880–1912), the Gothic Revival Palace by Robert Rowand Anderson on the Isle of Bute. It contains, besides a truly great collection of 18th-century portraits, important Dutch and Flemish works that were collected in the 1760s and 1770s by John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute (1713–1792). Bute was tutor to King George III when he was Prince of Wales, advising him, among other things, on acquisitions for the royal collection. Soon after the coronation in 1760, Bute was given power by his former pupil, becoming Prime Minister in 1762. His main business was to negotiate the Peace of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War. Within one year, however, Bute resigned and was forced to leave London to escape the London mob. He bought a country house at Luton, which he had remodeled by Adam, and landscaped by Capability Brown. There he settled down to become the most important British collector of Dutch paintings, assembling for the purpose a library and collection of prints and drawings (dispersed 1794–1809). At the time of his death, there were 500 works in the house. Bute had more than a penchant for Venetian art and the grand rooms on the ground floor were hung with works by Tintoretto, Veronese and Bordone, as well as some of the finest examples of the work of Francesco Zuccarelli. Masterpieces by Dutch artists in the library included a magnificent Windy Autumn Day landscape by Berchem (Mount Stuart), and Cuyp’s River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants (now in the National Gallery, London). That painting is said to have started the craze for Cuyp among British collectors when Bute acquired it in the early 1760s. The smaller Dutch paintings were accommodated on the upper floor, clustered in dense thematic hangs in the bedrooms and dressing rooms.

The exhibition of 26 pictures in Glasgow University provides a window onto the riches of Mount Stuart, which can be visited in a day-trip by train and ferry from Glasgow. They are generally smaller works, including jewel-like landscapes by Savery, De Momper/Brueghel, Jan van der Heyden, Cuyp, Berchem, and Ruisdael, as well as genre scenes by Steen, Teniers, Verelst, Metsu and Bega. Visitors to Mount Stuart will see the extraordinary collection of family portraits by Batoni, Ramsay and Reynolds as well as works by Hobbema, Steen, Willem van Herp and Pieter van Slingelandt.

Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute (Wikimedia Commons, July 2006).

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From CODART regarding the exhibition now on view at the Dordrechts Museum:

A Royal Paradise: Aert Schouman and the Imagination of Nature
Een Koninklijk Paradijs: Aert Schouman en de verbeelding van de natuur
Dordrechts Museum, 19 February — 17 September 2017

The Dordrechts Museum dedicates an exhibition to the Dordrecht painter Aert Schouman (1710–1792). On view will be a wall decoration of the Il Pastor Fido series. The paintings, only rediscovered in 2016, are an example of Schouman’s early work. The recently restored wall paintings of the Huis ten Bosch Palace will also be display. Due to the renovation work taking place at the palace, the series depicting the menagerie of Willem V may be exhibited in Dordrecht exclusively.

Het mooiste werk van dierenschilder Aert Schouman (1710–1792) komt samen in een feestelijke tentoonstelling voor kunst- en natuurliefhebbers. Absoluut hoogtepunt vormt de complete kamerbeschildering van Willem V uit Huis ten Bosch met daarop zijn bijzondere dierenverzameling. Deze ‘kamer in het rond’ is onlangs gerestaureerd en straks in het Dordrechts Museum nog één keer te bewonderen, voordat ze weer binnen de muren van het toekomstige woonpaleis van koning Willem-Alexander en koningin Máxima verdwijnt.

Met stukken uit musea en particuliere collecties in binnen- en buitenland laat de tentoonstelling het paradijs van Schouman zien vol inheemse en exotische dieren. Vooral zijn werken met schitterende vogels spreken tot de verbeelding. Schouman tekende bovendien de buitenplaatsen en tuinen die zijn rijke opdrachtgevers als aardse paradijzen lieten aanleggen.

Emile Havers, ed., Een Koninklijk Paradijs: Aert Schouman en de verbeelding van de natuur (Zwolle, W Books, 2017), 360 pages, ISBN: 978  94625  81852, 30€.

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Suriname map, 1718. Nieuwe Kaart van Suriname vertonende de stromen en land-streken van Suriname, Comowini, Cottica, en Marawini; Amsterdam, 1718 (Collection of Leonard L. Milberg).

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Closing on Sunday at the New-York Historical Society (the exhibition was shown at Princeton in 2016 under the title By Dawn’s Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War); from the press release:

The First Jewish Americans: Freedom and Culture in the New World
Princeton University Art Museum, 13 February — 12 June 2016
New-York Historical Society, 28 October 2016 — 12 March 2017

How did Jewish settlers come to inhabit—and change—the New World? Jews in colonial America and the young United States, while only a tiny fraction of the population, significantly negotiated the freedoms offered by the new nation and contributed to the flowering of American culture. The First Jewish Americans: Freedom and Culture in the New World follows the trajectory of a people forced from their ancestral lands in Europe, as well as their homes in South America and the Caribbean, to their controversial arrival in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the unprecedented political freedoms they gained in early 19th-century New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In this ground-breaking exhibition, rare portraits, drawings, maps, documents, and ritual objects illuminate how 18th- and 19th-century artists, writers, activists, and more adopted American ideals while struggling to remain distinct and socially cohesive amidst the birth of a new Jewish American tradition.

Gerardus Duyckinck I, Portrait of Jacob Franks (1688–1769), oil on canvas (Bentonville, Arkansas: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art).

The exhibition explores the origins of the Jewish diaspora and paths to the New World, Jewish life in American port cities, and the birth of American Judaism in the 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as profile prominent Jewish Americans who made an impact on early American life.

European Jews fleeing persecution and seeking ports of refuge were propelled westward to the distant shores of New World colonies, which offered hope for a new beginning until the infamous Holy Inquisition followed them across the ocean. The exhibition powerfully illustrates this experience through the 1595 autobiography of Luis de Carvajal, a ‘converso’ Jew in Mexico and the nephew of a prominent governor, who was tried by the Inquisition and denounced more than 120 other secretly practicing Jews before he was burned at the stake in 1596. The recently rediscovered documents, which had gone missing from the National Archives of Mexico more than 75 years ago, will be on view at New-York Historical by special arrangement with the Mexican government before returning to Mexico.

The Jewish community in the New World dispersed throughout the colonies in the Caribbean, creating a network built on trade, family, and religious connections. Examples of these island communities and influences featured in the exhibition include a 1718 map of the Jewish settlement in Suriname, 18th-century texts of religious services for the circumcision of slaves, and Jamaican legal documents from 1823 that argued for Jewish voting rights.

During the colonial period, Jews clustered in the cosmopolitan and commercially minded port cities of New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, and within each city, an elaborate communal infrastructure grew that supported all aspects of Jewish life. Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation in colonial North America, built its home in Lower Manhattan in 1730. The congregation has loaned significant objects to the exhibition, such as a Torah scroll that was burned by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War and a rare set of Torah bells (or rimonim) designed by Myer Myers—one of colonial America’s preeminent silversmiths and an active congregation member. Also on view are six oil paintings circa 1735 of the prominent Levy-Franks family of New York, also members of the congregation. On loan from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, they emulate paintings of the British aristocracy.

The Philadelphia Jewish community grew during and after the Revolutionary War, with the city serving as a refuge for patriots fleeing British-occupied New York. Some Philadelphia Jews opposed Britain’s harsh restrictions on American trade by signing the Resolution of Non-Importation made by the Citizens of Philadelphia in 1765—one of the first official protests against British mercantile policy, which is on view in the exhibit. Also featured are portrait paintings of Philadelphia merchant Barnard Gratz, a signer of the resolution who supplied American militias; and of his niece Rebecca Gratz, who in 1819 established the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, the first Jewish lay charity in the country.

In the first decades of the 19th century, Charleston was home to more Jews than any other place in North America and became a site of cultural and religious ferment. Congregation K.K. Beth Elohim—whose elegant synagogue is depicted in an 1838 oil painting on view—was the birthplace of the Reform movement in 1824, when a group of 47 members petitioned to make worship more accessible by introducing innovations that included prayers in English. The leadership refused, so the petitioners seceded and established the Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting True Principles of Judaism According to Its Purity and Spirit. The exhibition features the group’s 1825 prayer book and speeches promoting their initially radical position, which soon became main stream. Also on view are earlier examples of revolutions in American Judaism, such as an English translation of a Hebrew prayer book from 1766, Samuel Johnson’s English and Hebrew Grammar book from 1771, and a lunar calendar of Jewish festivals and Sabbath observance from 1806.

The exhibition also features profiles of prominent Jewish Americans of the 18th and early 19th centuries, whose writing, activism, and artistic achievements provide a window into an era of cultural vitality and change in the new Republic. Among the highlighted figures are renown artist Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), a Caribbean Jew born in St. Thomas whose 1856 landscape paintings on view capture waterfront scenes of his island home; and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1860), a New Orleans-born piano prodigy and composer who became the first classically trained American pianist to achieve international fame. Science and medicine were remarkably open to Jewish men during the 19th century. On display are books written by Jewish Americans that made major contributions to American science and medicine as those fields were developing during this period. The exhibition concludes with views of newly flourishing cities, including Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and San Francisco that became home to American Jews as they ventured westward.

The exhibit is based primarily upon loans from the Princeton University Jewish American Collection, gift of Mr. Leonard L. Milberg, Class of 1953, and Mr. Leonard L. Milberg’s personal collection.

Adam Mendelsohn, By Dawn’s Early: Light Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 2016), 352 pages, ISBN: 978  08781  10593.

Terrific installation photographs are available at Arts Summary.

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