Enfilade

The 2020 issue of the Metropolitan Museum Journal is now available at The University of Chicago Press website and The Met Store. PDF’s are available for free on MetPublications. Of particular note for dix-huitièmistes:

Metropolitan Museum Journal 55 (2020)

R E S E A R C H  N O T E S

Carmontelle, Portrait of Jean-Pierre de Bougainville, ca. 1760, watercolor over graphite and black and red chalk, 30 × 19 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2004.475.6).

Margot Bernstein, “Carmontelle’s Telltale Marks and Materials,” pp. 135–44.

Bernstein addresses three portraits heretofore described as autograph works by the French amateur draftsman Louis Carrogis, called Carmontelle (1717–1806). She confirms the attribution of the Portrait of Jean-Pierre de Bougainville but cast doubts on the other two. As she notes in the conclusion, “The discoveries outlined here have enabled the present author to identify additional inauthentic Carmontelle portraits in public and private collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.²⁴ In fact, the majority of purported autograph replicas of Carmontelle portraits in international collections are not authentic. Most of these problematic works display technical issues that are consistent with those found in the Robert Lehman Collection drawings. . .” (142).

Daniel Wheeldon, “The Met’s German Keyed Guitar,” pp. 145–56.

In providing context, Wheeldon addresses the eighteenth century, too. As he writes in the introduction, “The keyed guitar at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, made in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century [89.4.3145], was part of the collection of musical instruments originally established by Mary Elizabeth Adams Brown in 1889. This guitar has long been worthy of greater attention, despite its being neither the most ornate example of nineteenth-century guitar making nor an object that fits into a clear tradition of guitar playing. The ingenuity of its design has been overshadowed by the instrument’s peculiarity, current state of deterioration, and plainness, and consequently it has entirely avoided academic coverage. As the only such instrument in a public collection, and one that bears two labels inside—’Matteo Sprenger / fece à Carlsruhe1 1843′, and ‘F. Fiala’—the Museum’s keyed guitar is essential to identifying and contextualizing (145) the sparse body of nineteenth-century literature on the topic. This article examines the history of the nineteenth-century keyed guitar using the Metropolitan Museum’s instrument as the basis for understanding the provenance of other instruments and establishing them within an historical narrative” (147).

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Note (added 6 January 2020) — Submissions for next year’s volume are due by 15 September 2021; more information is available from the 2020 issue, immediately after the table of contents.