Exhibition | Lines from Life: French Drawings
From The Clark—and please note next Thursday’s conversation with Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Anne Leonard, the details of which are included below:
Lines from Life: French Drawings from the Diamond Collection
The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 12 July — 13 December 2020
Curated by Kristie Couser
Nineteenth-century French figure drawings embody a conceptual tension between academic methods of drawing the human form and freer approaches that challenged those conventions. The curriculum of the state-sponsored École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris and the esteemed Académie de France (French Academy) in Rome long considered drawings of the nude, studied and sketched live in the classroom, to be the ultimate measure of an artist’s skill. Modeled after ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and Renaissance examples, the predominantly white and male figure centered in works exploring historical, mythological, and religious themes was a physique that was not reflective of the diversity of human bodies. By midcentury many French artists—including those who originally trained in academic studios—signaled their creative independence with portraits and genre scenes representing ordinary and working people in natural poses. This exhibition traces transformations in figure drawing during a period in which these developing interests in Realism and contemporary life diverged from the idealism championed by public institutions.
François Louis Joseph Watteau (1758–1823), Sheet of Studies for ‘The Battle of Alexander’, ca. 1795; black chalk on off-white paper (The Clark Art Institute, Gift of Herbert and Carol Diamond, 2018.11.13).
The works on view span the nineteenth century and reveal the varied uses of figure drawing. Detailed studies addressing a model’s features and form commingle with swiftly drawn sketches that explore gesture and movement. Sheets bearing grid lines and handwritten annotations demonstrate the relationships between drawing and other media, including painting and printmaking. Many of these works illuminate the versatility of graphite, the primary instructional medium before the middle of the century. Compositions by artists associated with Realism, Impressionism, and other late nineteenth-century art currents evoke how the infusion of diverse media—chalk, charcoal, Conté crayon, and color pastel—often bolstered experimentation as artists increasingly depicted the people around them.
In celebration of the generous, ongoing gift of Herbert and Carol Diamond, this exhibition highlights works from the couple’s remarkable collection of more than 160 French drawings and sculptures, which they have assembled since 1964. The Diamonds’ particular fascination with the preparatory role of drawing broadens the Clark’s presentation of nineteenth-century French art—the cornerstone of the museum’s founding gift—and introduces works by artists not previously represented in the collection. Select figure studies from the Clark’s collection, which has continued to expand, join this display in the spirit of inviting a new look.
Lines from Life: French Drawings from the Diamond Collection is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Kristie Couser, curatorial assistant for works on paper.
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Clark Connects with Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
(Online) Thursday, 6:00–7:00pm, 3 December 2020
Join Ewa Lajer-Burcharth for a conversation on nineteenth-century drawing and the role of the body image. Professor Lajer-Burcharth, whose research spans from eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art to contemporary art, as well as feminist and critical theory, will be in dialogue with Manton Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Anne Leonard.
Registration (required to receive Zoom log-in details) is available here.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University. She specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art and has written extensively on contemporary art.
New Book | Scenes and Traces of the English Civil War
From Reaktion Books:
Stephen Bann, Scenes and Traces of the English Civil War (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1789142280, £40 / $60.
The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited, and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history. Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible today, from ornate tombs and statues to surviving sites of vandalism and iconoclasm, public signage, and historical paintings of subjects, events, and places. Through these important scenes and sometimes barely perceptible traces, Bann shows how the British view of the War has been influenced and transformed by visual imagery.
Stephen Bann is Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of Bristol. He is author of many books including Romanticism and the Rise of History (1995); Paul Delaroche: History Painted (Reaktion, 1997); and Jannis Kounellis (Reaktion, 2003).
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Speaking Stones: Inscriptions of Identity from Civil War Monuments
2 A Kentish Family in Wartime: The Bargraves of Bifrons
3 Kings on Horseback: Charles I’s Statue at Charing Cross and Its Afterlife
4 Whig Views of the Past: Horace Walpole and Co.
5 Illustrating History: Visual Narratives from the Restoration to Hume’s History of England
6 Boots and All: Cromwell Evoked by James Ward and Paul Delaroche
7 French Genre for English Patrons: Paul Delaroche’s Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers of Cromwell
8 A Sense of an Ending: Problems of English History Painting in the Nineteenth Century
Chronology
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index
Exhibition | Alexander von Humboldt and the United States
Now on view at SAAM:
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, 18 September 2020 — 3 January 2021
Organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey
Renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. He lived for 90 years, published more than 36 books, traveled across four continents, and wrote well over 25,000 letters to an international network of colleagues and admirers. In 1804, after traveling four years in South America and Mexico, Humboldt spent exactly six weeks in the United States. In these six weeks, Humboldt—through a series of lively exchanges of ideas about the arts, science, politics, and exploration with influential figures such as President Thomas Jefferson and artist Charles Willson Peale—shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment.
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about Humboldt’s lasting influence on the way we think about our relationship to the natural world. Humboldt’s quest to understand the universe—his concern for climate change, his taxonomic curiosity centered on New World species of flora and fauna, and his belief that the arts were as important as the sciences for conveying the resultant sense of wonder in the interlocking aspects of our planet—make this a project evocative of how art illuminates some of the issues central to our relationship with nature and our stewardship of this planet.
Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait with Mastodon Bone, 1824, oil on canvas, 26 × 22 inches (New-York Historical Society, Purchase, James B. Wilbur Fund).
This exhibition will be the first to examine Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903. It centers on the fine arts as a lens through which to understand how deeply intertwined Humboldt’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity. The exhibition includes more than 100 paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts as well as a video introduction to Humboldt and his connections to the Smithsonian through an array of current projects and initiatives.
Artworks by Albert Bierstadt, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Church, Eastman Johnson, Samuel F.B. Morse, Charles Willson Peale, John Rogers, William James Stillman, and John Quincy Adams Ward, among others, will be on display. The installation features a digital exploration of Frederic Church’s famous landscape, Heart of the Andes (1859), enabling visitors to engage with the painting’s details in new ways. The wealth of detail is a painterly extrapolation of Humboldt’s plant geography map. The mountain at the center of the work, Chimborazo, was referred to as ‘Humboldt’s Mountain’. The narrated, 2.5D animated projection enables visitors to appreciate the connections between Church’s painting and Humboldt’s ideas.
The exhibition also includes the original ‘Peale Mastodon’ skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, with ties to Humboldt, Peale and an emerging American national identity in the early nineteenth century. Its inclusion in the exhibition represents a homecoming for this important fossil that has been in Europe since 1847, and emphasizes that natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States.
Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture is organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A major catalogue, written by Harvey, accompanies the exhibition. The book shows how Humboldt inspired a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans and extol America’s wilderness as a signature component of the nation’s sense of self. Harvey traces how Humboldt’s ideas influenced the transcendentalists and the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, and laid the foundations for the Smithsonian, the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service.
Eleanor Jones Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0691200804, £62 / $75.
New Book | Tokyo Before Tokyo
From Reaktion Books:
Timon Screech, Tokyo Before Tokyo: Power and Magic in the Shogun’s City of Edo (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 240 pages, ISBN: 9781789142334, £25 / $40.
Tokyo today is one of the world’s mega-cities, and the centre of a scintillating, hyper-modern culture—but not everyone is aware of its past. Founded in 1590 as the seat of the warlord Tokugawa family, Tokyo, then called ‘Edo’, was the locus of Japanese trade, economics and urban civilization until 1868, when it mutated into Tokyo and became Japan’s modern capital.
This beautifully illustrated book presents important sites and features from the rich history of Edo, drawn from contemporary sources such as diaries, guidebooks and woodblock prints. These include the huge bridge on which the city was centred, the vast castle of the shogun, sumptuous Buddhist temples, bars, kabuki theatres and the Yoshiwara, Edo’s famous red-light district.
Timon Screech is Professor in the History of Art at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of many books, including Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700–1820 (2nd edn, Reaktion, 2009).
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 The Ideal City
2 The Centre of the Shogun’s Realm
3 Edo as Sacred Space
4 Reading Edo Castle
5 The City’s Poetic Presence
6 A Trip to the Yoshiwara
Epilogue: From Edo to Tokyo
References
Selected Sources and Further Reading
General Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Grinling Gibbons Society Looks to Tercentenary in 2021
The joys of thinking about next year! This announcement from the Grinling Gibbons Society:
Grinling Gibbons Society: Carving a Place in History
The Grinling Gibbons Society is a newly-formed membership organisation and charity at the centre of planning the celebration of Grinling Gibbons’ tercentenary in 2021.
The Gibbons 300 festival is a collaborative venture involving a wide network of museums, houses and collections, supported by the Mercers’ and Drapers’ Companies, architects, present-day carvers, designers, practitioners and individuals with an interest in Gibbons and his remarkable legacy. The festival will combine a programme of public events, creative projects, education, research, and collaborative scholarship between museums, collections, and institutions. A key part of the programme will be an important loan exhibition of Gibbons’ work from August 2021, which will also consider sculptors, carvers, and artists who have been inspired by his innovative genius across the passage of three hundred years, right up to the present day. Exploring the living legacy of Gibbons is a vital part of the exhibition’s purpose, as is engagement with contemporary practice, in furthering the Society’s objectives of outreach, education, and making links across the UK.
To this end, the Society is developing two education projects: a Traineeship in stone and wood-carving, enabling the exchange of skills and expertise from master carvers to emerging artists; and a National Award (linked to the exhibition) for emerging craftspeople and carvers, providing a prestigious platform for showcasing their work, with exposure to public and professional recognition and expert feedback.
The vision for the Society now goes well beyond 2021–22 and its aim is that it will provide an ongoing platform and focus for continued scholarship, education, and enjoyment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century carving and sculpture, and the figures and associates around Gibbons who remain obscure in the field of study.
If you are interested in becoming a member of the Grinling Gibbons Society, being involved in the tercentenary programme, or in supporting us financially, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please email grinlinggibbonssociety@gmail.com for more information and a membership form.
We are also looking for a Membership Secretary and Treasurer. Both posts offer exciting opportunities for those with an interest in Gibbons and in furthering his legacy, or with a broader interest in the history of carving and sculpture, to be part of a new and ambitious Society. For more information please email grinlinggibbonssociety@gmail.com.
Hannah Phillip
Programme Director
Grinling Gibbons Tercentenary 2021
REGISTERED CHARITY 1190987
New Book | The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands
From Princeton UP:
Dipti Khera, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 232 pages, ISBN , $65 / £54.
In the long eighteenth century, artists from Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, specialized in depicting the vivid sensory ambience of its historic palaces, reservoirs, temples, bazaars, and durbars. As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. The Place of Many Moods explores how Udaipur’s artworks—monumental court paintings, royal portraits, Jain letter scrolls, devotional manuscripts, cartographic artifacts, and architectural drawings—represent the period’s major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts. Dipti Khera shows that these immersive objects powerfully convey the bhava—the feel, emotion, and mood—of specific places, revealing visions of pleasure, plenitude, and praise. These memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence, shaping how a culture and time are perceived.
Illuminating the close relationship between painting and poetry, and the ties among art, architecture, literature, politics, ecology, trade, and religion, Khera examines how Udaipur’s painters aesthetically enticed audiences of courtly connoisseurs, itinerant monks, and mercantile collectives to forge bonds of belonging to real locales in the present and to long for idealized futures. Their pioneering pictures sought to stir such emotions as love, awe, abundance, and wonder, emphasizing the senses, spaces, and sociability essential to the efficacy of objects and expressions of territoriality.
The Place of Many Moods uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.
Dipti Khera is associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
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Celebrating Dipti Khera’s The Place of Many Moods
Friday, 4 December 2020, live-streamed at 11:00am ET
Please join the Institute of Fine Arts in conversation with Dipti Khera about her new book The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century. Responding to the book will be Vittoria Di Palma, Associate Professor of Architectural History and Art History at the University of Southern California, and Kavita Singh, Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University. RSVP to receive the webinar link for this live-streamed event.
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Note (added 23 November 2020) — The original posting did not include information on the live-streamed event.
New Book | Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain
From Bloomsbury:
Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith, eds., Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1501349614, $135.
The eighteenth century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to eighteenth-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This edited collection gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature, and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring, and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms, and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and tacit knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories.
This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted, and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering, and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, these essays document the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain’s consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice, and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.
Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University. She has taught at the University of Warwick and the University of Hertfordshire, and was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She was previously Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. She has published on albums, wallpaper, consumer culture, and childhood in the eighteenth century. Her book, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury.
Chloe Wigston Smith is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as well as articles on women in literature, material culture studies and fashion culture. Her current British Academy funded project looks at domestic crafts in the Atlantic world.
C O N T E N T S
List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Serena Dyer (De Montfort University) and Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), Introduction
2 Ariane Fennetaux (University of Paris), ‘Work’d pockets to my entire satisfaction’: Women and the Multiple Literacies of Making
3 Crystal B. Lake (Wright State University), Needlework Verse
4 Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), Domestic Crafts at the School of Arts
5 Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University), ‘To Embroider what is Wanting’: Making, Consuming and Mending Textiles in the Lives of the Bluestockings
6 Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan University), Material Literacies of Home Comfort in Georgian England
7 Serena Dyer (De Montfort University), Stitching and Shopping: The Material Literacy of the Consumer
8 Alicia Kerfoot (SUNY Brockport), Stitching the It-Narrative in The History and Adventures of a Lady’s Slippers and Shoes
9 Sarah Howard (Independent Scholar, UK), Making, Measuring and Selling in Hampshire: The Provincial Tailor’s Accounts of George and Benjamin Ferrey
10 Emily Taylor (National Museums Scotland), Gendered Making and Material Knowledge: Tailors and Mantua-Makers, c. 1760–1820
11 Hilary Davidson (University of Sydney), Dress and Dressmaking: Material Evolution in Regency Dress Construction
12 Elisabeth Gernerd (Historic Royal Palaces), Fancy Feathers: The Feather Trade in Britain and the Atlantic World
13 Robbie Richardson (University of Kent), Tomahawks and Scalping Knives: Manufacturing Savagery in Britain
14 Laura Engel (Duquesne University), The Lady Vanishes: Madame Tussaud’s Self Portrait and Material Legacies
15 Beth Fowkes Tobin (University of Georgia), Learning to Craft
Select Bibliography
Index
Michael Yonan—Alan Templeton Professor of European Art, UC Davis
Michael Yonan has been named the inaugural Alan Templeton Endowed Professor of European Art, 1600–1830, at the University of California, Davis. Professor Yonan received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taught previously at the University of Missouri. In 2019 he was visiting guest professor in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden.
Yonan is the author of Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (Penn State, 2011) and Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History (Routledge, 2018). With Stacey Sloboda he co-edited the volume Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art (Bloomsbury, 2019). His most recent articles are “Martin van Meytens’s Portrait of Johann Michael von Grosser (c. 1700–1784): The Business of Nobility,” which appeared in Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm (2019); and “Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints,” in Organic Supplements: Bodies, Objects, and the Natural World, 1580–1750, ed. Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park (University of Virginia Press, 2020). From 2012 to 2016 he was president of HECAA and now serves on the ASECS Executive Board.
Currently he is researching a book-length study of south German rococo design and with colleagues in Stockholm is planning a collection of essays on global material culture in early modern Sweden. He welcomes undergraduates interested in eighteenth-century art to apply to the MA program at UC Davis.
Walpole Library Pauses Visiting Fellowship and Travel Grant Program
The Lewis Walpole Library announces the temporary suspension of its Visiting Fellowship and Travel Grant program due to the pandemic.
The program has been postponed indefinitely, and we will not be accepting applications this year. We hope to be able to put out a call in the autumn of 2021 for applications with a deadline in January 2022 for Fellowships to be taken up between July 2022 and June 2023.
The Library is committed to ensuring that this postponement is temporary, and 2019–20 and 2020–21 Fellowship and Travel Grant award recipients who have not been able to come to the Library to take up their research know they will be accommodated when we are finally able to resume welcoming in-person residential non-Yale researchers.
Details of the Visiting Fellowship and Travel Grant program and information about application requirements are still on our website where we will post updates as we have them. Be sure to check the page from time to time to get the most current information.
We look forward to brighter days when we can restart our active Fellowship program. Please contact us at walpole@yale.edu with any questions.
New Book | Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things
From the University of Virginia Press:
Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park, eds., Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 296 pages, ISBN 978-0813944937 (hardback) / ISBN 978-0813944944 (paperback) / ISBN 978-0813944951 (Ebook), $35.
From the hair of a famous dead poet to botanical ornaments and meat pies, the subjects of this book are dynamic, organic artifacts. A cross-disciplinary collection of essays, Organic Supplements examines the interlaced relationships between natural things and human beings in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. The material qualities of things as living organisms–and things that originate from living organisms– enabled a range of critical actions and experiences to take place for the people who wore, used, consumed, or perceived them.
Miriam Jacobson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia and author of Barbarous Antiquity: Reorienting the Past in the Poetry of Early Modern England.
Julie Park is Assistant Curator and Faculty Fellow at the Special Collections Center of Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University, and author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Process and Connection
Part 1. Inscription and Incorporation
• Julie Park, Feather, Flourish, and Flow: The Organic Technology of Early Modern Handwriting
• Rebecca Laroche, The Flower of Ointments and Early Modern Transcorporeality
• Kevin Lambert, The Paris Opéra as a Vibrating Body: Feeling Pygmalion’s Kiss
Part II. Interface and Merger
• Jessica Wolfe, Gorgonick Spirits: Myth, Figuration, and Mineral Vivency in the Writings of Thomas Browne
• Lynn Festa, Things with Kid Gloves
• Miriam Jacobson, Vegetable Loves: Botanical Enthrallment in Early Modern Poetry
Part III. Vitality and Decay
• Michael Yonan, Knowing the World through Rococo Ornamental Prints
• Diane Purkiss, Fingers in the Pie: Baked Meats, Adultery, and Adulteration
• Jayne Lewis, Milton’s Hair
• Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterword: Virtuous Properties of the Organic Supplement
Notes on Contributors
Index
Enfilade 
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