Symposium | Everyday Rococo
From the FPS:
Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and the Arts
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1–2 July 2022
Organised by Mia Jackson and Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth
The French Porcelain Society is pleased to announce the rescheduling of the symposium Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and the Arts to be held at the Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, on the 1st and 2nd July 2022. With two days of papers, this will be the first reassessment of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson’s artistic patronage since the landmark exhibition, Madame de Pompadour et les Arts of 2002. Commemorating the tercentenary of her birth and marking the publication of Rosalind Savill’s book Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain, this conference will welcome international experts discussing her interests in the fine and decorative arts. Speakers’ biographies and paper abstracts are available here. The symposium is organised by Dr Mia Jackson (Waddesdon Manor) and Dr Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (DAS Department, V&A Museum).
To book tickets, please visit the French Porcelain Society’s website»
F R I D A Y , 1 J U L Y 2 0 2 2
10.20 Welcome and Introduction by Dame Rosalind Savill (moderator of Day One)
10.35 Morning Session
• John Whitehead (Independent Scholar), The Crisis of 1745: New Thoughts on Madame de Pompadour, the Orry Brothers, and the Vincennes Porcelain Factory
• Kristel Smentek (Associate Professor of Art History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Asia at Home: Madame de Pompadour’s Mounted Chinese Porcelain
• Susan Wager (Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, University of New Hampshire), Pompadour Sculpsit: Gems, Prints, and Authorship
13.20 Lunch Break
14.20 Afternoon Session
• Aileen Ribeiro (Professor Emeritus, Courtauld Institute of Art), Madame de Pompadour and the Goddess of Appearances
• Joana Mylek (PhD Candidate, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich), Madame de Pompadour’s Collection of Meissen Porcelain
• Bertrand Rondot (Conservateur en chef, Château de Versailles), A Rococo Rupture: Or Madame de Pompadour’s Taste in Furniture
16.30 Discussion
18.00 Drinks at the Savile Club (generously sponsored by Christie’s and Bonhams)
19.30 Dinner at the Savile Club (reservation only)
S A T U R D A Y , 2 J U L Y 2 0 2 2
10.20 Opening Remarks by Helen Jacobsen (moderator of Day Two)
10.25 Morning Session
• Rosalind Savill (Former Director of the Wallace Collection), Madame de Pompadour’s Sèvres Porcelain for Everyday Use
• Mia Jackson (Curator of Decorative Arts, Waddesdon Manor), Pampered and Adored: Madame de Pompadour’s Pets
• Alexandre Gady (Professor of the History of Art, Sorbonne Université), Madame de Pompadour as a Patron of Architecture: Some Reflections
13.00 Lunch Break
14.00 Afternoon Session
• Rachel Jacobs (Curator of Books and Manuscripts, Waddesdon Manor), Madame de Pompadour’s Library
• Alden Gordon (Professor of Fine Arts, Trinity College, Hartford), The Language of Gifts: Madame de Pompadour’s Hierarchy of Giving and Receiving
15.15 Discussion
15.45 Closing Remarks
New Book | Madame de Pompadour: Painted Pink
Forthcoming from Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale UP:
A. Cassandra Albinson, ed., Madame de Pompadour: Painted Pink (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2022), 88 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263817, $25.
A fresh take on a beloved masterpiece of portraiture, focusing on the complex significance of the color pink in 18th-century France
François Boucher’s 1750 half-length portrait of Madame de Pompadour—influential court figure and mistress to King Louis XV—has been the subject of much art historical attention, particularly with regard to gender and representation. Building on that foundation, this volume turns toward an underappreciated aspect of the portrait: the use and significance of the color pink. Four scholarly essays, including one by noted Boucher expert Mark Ledbury, establish a framework that connects Pompadour’s fondness and promotion of the color, Boucher’s artistic association with the color, and developments in the material basis of the color, including its application in other media such as porcelain. This engaging close look offers new ways to understand the portrait, revealing its links to motherhood and sentiment, race and the transatlantic slave trade, and the crosscurrents of natural history and scientific discovery.
A. Cassandra Albinson is the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of European Art and Head of the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. With additional contributions by Mark Ledbury, Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney; Gabriella Szalay, PhD candidate, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and 2018–20 Renke B. and Pamela M. Thye Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums; and Oliver Wunsch, Assistant Professor of Art History at Boston College and 2018–19 Maher Curatorial Fellow of American Art at the Harvard Art Museums.
New Book | Clothing the New World Church
From the University of Notre Dame Press:
Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Clothing the New World Church: Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-0268108052, $50.
The first broad survey of church textiles of Spanish America, demonstrating that, while overlooked, textiles were a vital part of visual culture in the Catholic Church.
When Catholic churches were built in the New World in the sixteenth century, they were furnished with rich textiles known in Spanish as ‘church clothing’. These textile ornaments covered churches’ altars, stairs, floors, and walls. Vestments clothed priests and church attendants, and garments clothed statues of saints. The value attached to these textiles, their constant use, and their stunning visual qualities suggest that they played a much greater role in the creation of the Latin American Church than has been previously recognized. In Clothing the New World Church, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi provides the first comprehensive survey of church adornment with textiles, addressing how these works helped establish Christianity in Spanish America and expand it over four centuries. Including more than 180 photos, this book examines both imported and indigenous textiles used in the church, compiling works that are now scattered around the world and reconstructing their original contexts. Stanfield-Mazzi delves into the hybrid or mestizo qualities of these cloths and argues that when local weavers or embroiderers in the Americas created church textiles they did so consciously, with the understanding that they were creating a new church through their work.
The chapters are divided by textile type, including embroidery, featherwork, tapestry, painted cotton, and cotton lace. In the first chapter, on woven silk, we see how a ‘silk standard’ was established on the basis of priestly preferences for this imported cloth. The second chapter explains how Spanish-style embroidery was introduced in the New World and mastered by local artisans. The following chapters show that, in select times and places, spectacular local textile types were adapted for the church, reflecting ancestral aesthetic and ideological patterns. Clothing the New World Church makes a significant contribution to the fields of textile studies, art history, Church history, and Latin American studies, and to interdisciplinary scholarship on material culture and indigenous agency in the New World.
Maya Stanfield-Mazzi is an associate professor of art history at the University of Florida. She is the author of Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes.
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