Research Lunch | Rebecca Tropp on the Picturesque and Country Houses
This talk was slated for last March; it’s been rescheduled as an online event, sponsored by the Mellon Centre:
Rebecca Tropp, Accommodating the Picturesque: The Country Houses of James Wyatt, John Nash, and Sir John Soane, 1793–1815
(Zoom) Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 29 January 2021
James Wyatt, Ashridge House, commissioned by the 7th Earl of Bridgewater.
Whilst much has been written about the development of Picturesque theory at the end of the eighteenth century, regarding both the landscape itself and prescriptions for the sitting of buildings within it, these discussions have generally been limited to two-dimensional snapshots, such as those represented in Humphry Repton’s Red Books. This paper, based upon ongoing research for a doctoral dissertation, seeks to push beyond the visual to investigate some of the physical implications and repercussions of the Picturesque ideal – the intersection between the visual two-dimensional picture-plane and the practical three-dimensional architectural response – on the design and construction of country houses at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Focusing on the work of James Wyatt (1746–1813), John Nash (1752–1835), and Sir John Soane (1753–1837), and limiting investigation to those country houses designed during the pivotal period from 1793 to 1815, the paper investigates two specific implications related to the lowering of the principal floor from piano nobile to ground level, as part of a general repositioning of the house within the landscape. First is the use of level changes within the ground floor—the inclusion of a few steps up or down in entrance halls or between rooms, as distinct from staircases between floors—considering some possible reasons for their incorporation and the purposes they served. Second, and sometimes connected to these level changes, is an increase in permeability between interior and exterior, through the use of full-length windows, loggias and attached conservatories—social/botanical spaces that were first incorporated into the design of the house during this period. Taken together, these developments furthered the evolving relationship between house and landscape and, as a result, the experience of moving through and between those spaces.
Rebecca Tropp is currently finishing her PhD in History of Art at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, working under the supervision of Dr Frank Salmon. She completed her MPhil in History of Art and Architecture at Cambridge in 2015, investigating recurring spatial arrangements and patterns of movement in the country houses of John Nash. Prior to commencing postgraduate studies in the UK, she received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York, where she majored in the History and Theory of Architecture.
Call for Papers | Reproductive Prints in the 18th and 19th Centuries
From the Call for Papers:
La Storie dell’Arte Illustrata e la Stampa di Traduzione, 18 e 19 Secolo
(Online, via MS Teams) Università di Chieti Gabriele d’Annunzio, Chieti, 10–11 June 2021
Proposals due by 25 January 2021 (for papers in Italian or English)
“E per le Arti poi l’incisione è quel che la stampa è per le scienze”
–Francesco Milizia, Dizionario di Belle Arti del Disegno (Bassano: Giuseppe Remondini, 1797)
La Cattedra di Storia della Critica d’arte del Dipartimento di Lettere Arti e Scienze Sociali, Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio” di Chieti – Pescara terrà una giornata di studi dedicata alla stampa di traduzione e storia dell’arte. Se gli studi sugli artisti incisori e lo sviluppo di un mercato di stampe europeo vivace e ben delineato hanno visto un crescente interesse negli ultimi anni per i secoli XVII– XVIII e XIX, l’indagine rimane ancora aperta per la stampa di traduzione utilizzata a corredo della storiografia artistica di quei secoli.
Partendo dall’affermazione dell’incisione di traduzione a contorno semplice nel Dizionario di Belle Arti del Disegno di Francesco Milizia (1797), la giornata di studi si propone di presentare nuove ricerche sull’utilizzo delle incisioni e delle stampe per lo studio della storia dell’arte, esplorando le tematiche seguenti pur non limitandosi solo ad esse, anzi auspicandone un ampliamento sia in termini geografici che cronologici:
• singoli contributi su artisti, disegnatori e incisori
• singoli contributi su album o raccolte di stampe ed incisioni
• il mercato delle stampe di traduzione e dei libri d’arte illustrati: stamperie, librai, mercanti e collezionisti
• stampa di traduzione e studio dell’arte: trattati, cataloghi, recueils, quotidiani a stampa, riviste d’arte, descrizioni, letteratura periegetica illustrata
• illustrare per promuovere: i cataloghi di vendita delle collezioni
• nascita e sviluppo delle monografie d’artista illustrate
• stampa di traduzione per la storia della letteratura
Le proposte di partecipazione alla giornata di studi dovranno pervenire all’indirizzo valentina.fraticelli@unich.it in forma di abstract (350–500 parole, con titolo e parole chiave), ed essere accompagnate da CV e affiliazione accademica o breve profilo biografico (300 parole) entro il 25/01/2021. Le giornate di studio si svolgeranno sulla piattaforma Microsoft Teams; gli interventi selezionati, di cui è prevista la pubblicazione, avranno una durata di circa 20-30 minuti e verranno presentati online. Lingue: italiano, inglese. Per ulteriori informazioni contattare la dott.ssa Valentina Fraticelli all’indirizzo email valentina.fraticelli@unich.it.
Comitato scientifico: Ilaria Miarelli Mariani, Valentina Fraticelli, Tiziano Casola, Vanda Lisanti
Segreteria organizzativa: Laura Palombaro
Metropolitan Museum Journal 2020
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.
Exhibition | Women Painters, 1780–1830
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Lebrun, Peace Bringing Back Abundance, detail, 1780
(Paris: Musée du Louvre)
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From the Musée du Luxembourg:
Peintres femmes, 1780–1830: Naissance d’un combat
Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 3 March — 4 July 2021
Curated by Martine Lacas
Le Musée du Luxembourg met les femmes à l’honneur à l’occasion d’une exposition ambitieuse consacrée à celles qui ont ouvert la voie aux artistes féminines au XIXe siècle. L’exposition se concentre sur une période unique d’effervescence historique et culturelle, de 1780 à 1830, où les salons de peinture se multiplient et où les femmes gagnent progressivement en visibilité sur la scène artistique.
De grands noms d’artistes de l’époque viennent à l’esprit, à l’instar d’Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Grande portraitiste de l’Ancien Régime, elle fut peintre de la cour de France, de Marie-Antoinette et de Louis XVI. Mais l’exposition met aussi en avant des artistes moins connues, qui profitèrent des basculements politiques pour se faire une place dans le milieu artistique. En outre, cette mise en lumière est l’occasion d’en apprendre davantage sur les conditions sociales de l’époque et de voir comment ces femmes se sont aussi battues pour le droit de se former aux arts ou d’exposer leurs toiles. Les artistes présentées font ainsi figure d’actrices des mutations de l’art mais aussi des évolutions de la société du XIXe siècle.
Martine Lacas, ed., Peintres femmes, 1780–1830: Naissance d’un combat (Paris: Gallimard, 2021), ISBN: 978-2072906640. Details forthcoming
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An interview from December 2020 with curator Martine Lacas is available at Femmes d’Art Magazine.
AWA’s Conservation of Ferroni’s Pair of Hospital Paintings
An aerial view of conservators in their studio with Saint John of God Heals Plague Victims (1756) by Violante Ferroni; its pendant Saint John of God Feeds the Poor is also being conserved. Photo by Francesco Cacchiani / Advancing Women Artists.
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On Saturday, Sylvia Poggioli reported for NPR on the work of AWA (Advancing Women Artists), including the conservation now in progress of Violante Ferroni’s two large oval canvases, painted for Florence’s San Giovanni di Dio, a former hospital founded in the fourteenth century: “‘Where Are The Women?’: Uncovering The Lost Works of Female Renaissance Artists,” NPR Weekend Edition (2 January 2021). Last month, Alexandra Kiely wrote on Ferroni’s pictures for Daily Art Magazine: “Healing Violante Ferroni’s Paintings at San Giovanni di Dio Hospital.” And the latest issue of the AWA newsletter includes an interview with conservator Elizabeth Wicks, who in the May issue shared these thoughts:
Elizabeth Wicks, “‘The Art of Healing’ Becomes Literal” Inside AWA (May 2020): 54–59.
In October 2019, we began conservation work on the first painting of our project ‘The Art of Healing’, Violante Ferroni’s large oval canvas painted in 1756 and entitled St. John of God Heals Victims of the Plague. . . When we learned that the monumental atrium of the former hospital where the painting is situated had been used as a place of triage for plague victims, it seemed like a calamity from a faraway era, disconnected from our more fortunate present-day lives. Now that we are fighting a global war against a virus, defined as a ‘modern-day plague’, my connection to the figures in the painting has become a deeply emotional one. I have never been surer about the power of art to connect and heal us all (54).
A conversation with AWA director Linda Falcone and Elisabeth Wicks is available on YouTube: “Restoration Conversations: Art Rescue in Progress” The Florentine (13 November 2020).
Conservator Elisabeth Wicks at work in her studio in Florence. Photo by Francesco Cacchiani / AWA
Xavier Salomon on Clodion’s Dance of Time
The Dance of Time, Three Nymphs Supporting a Clock, movement by Jean-Baptiste Lepaute, sculpture by Claude Michel Clodion, 1788, terracotta, gilt brass, and glass, H.: 41 inches (New York: The Frick Collection, bequest of Winthrop Kellogg Edey) Photo: Michael Bodycomb.
A very Happy New Year to all of you! I should have posted news of this brief talk earlier, but it will be available on YouTube whenever you might have the time and inclination to watch. I also point out the series more generally for those of you always looking for teaching resources. Past installments (typically 20 minutes) address paintings by Gainsborough, Stubbs, Romney, Tiepolo, Boucher, and Chardin, along with extraordinary decorative arts objects (and plenty of works beyond the eighteenth century). –CH
Xavier Salomon on Clodion’s Dance of Time
YouTube, 1 January 2021, 5pm (EST)
This week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator toasts the new year with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon as he examines a masterpiece of both sculpture and clockmaking: The Dance of Time, by Clodion (Claude Michel) and Jean-Baptiste Lepaute. In this 18th-century timepiece, three terracotta nymphs or Hours dance in a circle around an exquisite mechanism enclosed in a glass globe. The Frick has one of the country’s most important collections of clocks, many of which came to the museum through a gift from Winthrop Kellogg Edey. Welcome 2021 by raising a Metropolitan cocktail—Happy New Year!
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