Installation | Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera
Installation View of Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera at Frick Madison, 2023
(Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.)
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From the press release for the installation:
Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera
The Frick Madison, New York, 1 June 2023 — 3 March 2024
Organized by Xavier F. Salomon
The Frick Collection has unveiled a large pastel mural commissioned from the Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party at the museum’s temporary home, Frick Madison. This site-specific work was created in response to Rosalba Carriera’s Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume—one of two eighteenth-century pastels by Rosalba bequeathed to the Frick by Alexis Gregory in 2020. The installation features Rosalba’s superb portrait at the center of a three-wall mural designed by Party, as well as two new related works specially created by Party for this presentation.
On view from 1 June 2023 through the remainder of the Frick’s residency at the Breuer building (until 3 March 2024), this installation will inspire the Frick’s summer and early fall programming as well as a new publication.
Rosalba Carriera, Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume, ca. 1730. pastel on paper, glued to canvas, 59 × 48 cm (New York: The Frick Collection, Gift of Alexis Gregory, 2020.3.01).
The project, which also marks the 350th anniversary of Rosalba’s birth, is organized by Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator. Salomon comments, “It has been a particular pleasure to work with Nicolas Party. I met Nicolas in April 2021 and since then have enjoyed an ongoing and enlightening conversation on pastels. Nicolas’s installation at Frick Madison is the result of our exchanges, and I am delighted with the result.”
Party adds, “When I first fell in love with pastels, some ten years ago, my research quickly led me to the queen of pastel, Rosalba. Her practice and love for the powdery sticks increased the popularity of the medium and were crucial to the development of the art form. I felt a powerful attraction to her pastels. Today, I like to think our approaches might not be all that different.”
Born in Venice, Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757) was celebrated throughout Europe during her lifetime for her portraiture. She was the preeminent portraitist in Venice in the mid-eighteenth century, at the same time the Venetian Carnival reached its zenith. During this period, foreign travelers flocked to Venice for the masked revelries that became synonymous with the city, and Rosalba’s studio was a popular stop for visiting foreigners, who often posed for her in their elegant Carnival costumes. Portrait of a Man in Pilgrim’s Costume (ca. 1730) is most likely one such work. The sitter is possibly French, British, or German, but his identity remains unknown. With his black cape, staff, and jaunty tricorn hat, he is depicted as a pilgrim.
Installation View of Nicolas Party and Rosalba Carriera at Frick Madison, 2023 (Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.)
Party’s mural includes elaborate draperies that highlight the Rosalba portrait along with two additional pastel portraits he created in response to it. These ornate draperies evoke the work of two other towering figures in European pastels—Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788)—echoing the function of Venetian Carnival masks, designed to conceal and reveal the features of their wearers. Party’s installation engages devices of disguise and disclosure, from masks to draperies to makeup (often produced with the same chemical components used to make pastel sticks).
The large-scale murals created by Party, whose primary medium since 2013 has been pastel, are ephemeral, lasting only for the duration of a specific exhibition at a unique location. The historical nature of his practice aligns perfectly with the installation at Frick Madison, which has given the museum a unique opportunity to re-imagine its permanent collection display, presented for the first time outside the domestic setting of the Gilded Age mansion at 1 East 70th Street.
This project is part of a series of initiatives in recent years that invite contemporary responses to the Frick’s holdings. Party’s installation not only offers a fresh perspective on an important recent acquisition, but furthers Frick Madison’s prompting of visitors to question the impact of site and setting on their perception of historic objects in the collection.
Born in Lausanne in 1980, Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, which allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect.
Over the years, Party has created work in response to that of European painters including Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845), Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), and René Magritte (1898–1967). In 2019, Party organized the pastel exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, where he created large—and ephemeral—pastel murals inspired by French eighteenth-century artists including François Boucher (1703–1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), both of whom are represented in the Frick’s permanent collection.
Nicolas Party and Xavier Salomon, Rosalba Carriera’s Man in Pilgrim’s Costume (London: Giles, 2023), 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1913875510, £20 / $25.
Funding for the installation is generously provided by The Christian Humann Foundation and the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation, with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
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Note (added 25 August 2023) — The posting was updated with details on the publication.
Cultural Heritage Magazine, May 2023
Cultural Heritage Magazine is published twice each year, in May and October by the National Trust:
Cultural Heritage Magazine, issue 2 (May 2023)
4 Welcome — Tarnya Cooper, the National Trust’s Curatorial and Conservation Director introduces the spring issue
6 Briefing: News, Events, and Publications, Plus Research and Conservation Round-ups
A la Ronde Interiors: The major project to conserve and repair this unique 18th-century property has now begun in earnest, with specialists working to secure the fragile and intricate decorative features. A la Ronde is a 16-sided house designed to catch the natural daylight through its unusual diamond-shaped windows as the sun moves around the building. The creation of Jane and Mary Parminter, two dynamic and well-travelled cousins who commissioned the house following their travels across Europe, it originally sat within a wider estate containing almshouses, gardens, a chapel and orchards.
14 In Conversation — John Orna-Ornstein talks to Tristram Hunt about design, creativity and the heritage sector today
24 Treasured Connections, Treasured Possessions: The Formation of Margaret Greville’s Collection — Richard Ashbourne, James Rothwell, and Alice Strickland
Treasured Possessions: Riches of Polesden Lacey — A major exhibition marking 80 years since Dame Margaret Greville left Polesden Lacey and her collection to the National Trust (1 March — 29 October 2023).
34 Dynamic and Resonant: The Sculpture of Anthony Twentyman at Dudmaston — Brendan Flynn
Old Staircase of Dyrham Hall, in 2019 after restoration, with old paint removed and completed graining (Photo: National Trust/David Evans).
40 Dyrham Transformed: Revealing Hidden Schemes and Re-examining Historic Narratives — Eilidh Auckland, Amy Knight-Archer and Claire Reed
Crossing the threshold back in 2015, there was a sense that something had been lost. Rooms and staircases had been painted white, decorative surfaces had deteriorated and spaces that had once glittered in candlelight seemed dimly lit and uninspiring. The National Trust’s project to transform the house, recently completed, has attempted to recapture something of its original vibrancy and dynamism and to enable visitors to step inside the world of the late 17th century. Historic schemes and historic narratives have been uncovered and unpicked, and the project concluded with the installation of new interpretation in January 2023. . . Senior National Curator Rupert Goulding’s research of the Blathwayt archives, which are scattered around the world, fuelled the core narrative.
Following this extensive research and preparation, those schemes that were anachronistic or failing were selected for re-presentation, with the aim of recreating the interiors of 1692–1710. This was the period in which the current house was built and furnished by William Blathwayt, then at the peak of his career.
As work to the main body of the house progressed, the stories it had to tell came into sharper focus. The building of the house at Dyrham Park took place in the early years of the transatlantic slave trade and William Blathwayt was one of the key colonial figures of that time. As Surveyor and Auditor General of Plantations, Blathwayt accounted for income due to the Crown from different royal colonies. He received part of his salary from colonies that were economically reliant on slavery—Barbados and Virginia each contributed £150 per year (the equivalent of around £18,000 today). Blathwayt’s house reflected his colonial connections. . .
From Melchisédech Thévenot, The Art of Swimming (1699) (National Trust Images/ Leah Band).
50 Sink or Swim: An Intriguing Manual from Kedleston’s Library — Nicola Thwaite
Melchisédech Thévenot (c.1620–92), a French diplomat fluent in several languages, was appointed Royal Librarian to Louis XIV in 1684. . . . Thévenot’s L’art de Nager—published posthumously in 1696—was largely based on De Arte Natandi by the English clergyman Everard Digby (d.1605), although there is only a brief acknowledgement of this in Thévenot’s preface. An English translation—The Art of Swimming—was published only three years later in two issues and both French and English editions were reissued over the next century, indicating a contemporary demand for instruction on the subject.
54 Shaped by Love and Loss: A Collection of Ancient Greek Vases at Nostell Priory — Abigail Allan
Nostell is full of treasures. Among the less well-known items is a group of painted Greek vases made in Athens and South Italy c.500–300BC, which were collected by John Winn (c.1794–1817) and his younger brother Charles (1795–1874). Mistakenly called ‘Etruscan’ until the mid-19th century, these 12 vases once belonged to a collection of over 130 at Nostell, sold at Christie’s in 1975 and 1998, before some were repurchased by the National Trust.
62 Loans: Selected Highlights, 2023
68 Meet the Expert: Lottie Allen, Head Gardener at Hidcote Manor, Gloucestershire
Display | The Wildmans in Bedford Square and Newstead Abbey
Now on view at the Mellon Centre:
A Harpy and His Brothers: The Wildmans in Bedford Square and Newstead Abbey
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 30 May — 15 September 2023
Curated by Martin Myrone
George Romney, Portrait of Thomas Wildman MP, detail, oil on canvas, 78 × 64 cm (Private Collection).
This Drawing Room display shows some of the ways that the architectural and cultural histories of Bedford Square and Newstead Abbey have been addressed in the past and the ways in which those stories might be revised and complicated. The inclusion of the film project Blood Sugar, developed by volunteers at Newstead Abbey, offers further perspectives on these historical stories.
Bedford Square has always been esteemed as one of London’s most prestigious addresses. Built in 1775–82, it is widely considered to be the finest surviving example in London of a Georgian town square, embodying in its orderly architecture appearance the favoured self-image of the British social elite. This display explores the history and reputation of Bedford Square by focusing on two brothers who were among its first inhabitants: the successful lawyer Thomas Wildman (1740–1795) and his younger brother James Wildman (1747–1816). Together with a third brother, the merchant Henry Wildman (1746–1816), they made a fortune through their connections with the fabulously wealthy William Beckford, managing his legal affairs and his extensive plantations in the West Indies. Thomas Wildman’s wealth allowed his son, also Thomas (1787–1859), to purchase Newstead Abbey, a historic property in Nottinghamshire previously owned by the poet Lord Byron.
A digital version of the accompanying 36-page booklet is available here»
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More information about “Blood Sugar: The Slavery History of Newstead Abbey” can be found here, with the 5-minute 2018 film itself available on YouTube.
Exhibition | A Very Strong Likeness of Her: Portraiture and Identity
Opening this month at the Milwaukee Art Museum:
A Very Strong Likeness of Her: Portraiture and Identity in the British Colonial World
Milwaukee Art Museum, 23 June — 22 October 2023
Francis Cotes, Portrait of Miss Frances Lee, 1769, oil on canvas. 36 × 28 inches (Milwaukee Art Museum: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William D. Vogel, M1964.5; photo by Larry Sanders).
Focusing on a singular work from the Museum’s collection, A Very Strong Likeness of Her explores the challenging and sometimes conflicting histories that an artwork can represent. On its surface, the English artist Francis Cotes’s (1726–1770) portrait of Miss Frances Lee is a charming image of a young girl and her napkin-turned-rabbit companion. The exhibition’s close study of the painting, however, reveals a complex story of identity, family dynamics, and British colonialism in Jamaica. A Very Strong Likeness of Her employs a range of materials to bring to life the underlying narratives in this deceptively simple painting.
Lecture by Mia L. Bagneris
Thursday, 27 July, 6.15pm
Learn about race and class status in colonial Jamaica through the story behind the portrait of Miss Frances Lee. Mia L. Bagneris, associate professor of art history and Africana studies and director of the Africana Studies Program at Tulane University, details this complex history.
Gallery Talk with Tanya Paul
Thursday, 10 August, noon–1pm
Tanya Paul is the Museum’s Isabel and Alfred Bader Curator of European Art.
Exhibition | Reframing Reynolds
Left: Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Lady Anne Bonfoy, née Eliot (1729–1810), oil on canvas, 125 × 100 cm (Acquired from the Trustees of Port Eliot Estate through the acceptance in lieu scheme, 2007). Right: Joshua Reynolds, Self Portrait, 1746, oil on canvas, 104 × 90 cm (Plymouth: The Box, 2014.71, purchased with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, V&A Purchase Grant Fund, and the Art Fund, with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation).
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Opening this month at The Box:
Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration
The Box, Plymouth, 24 June 2023 — 29 October 2023
This major new exhibition celebrates the 300th anniversary of the birth of famous portrait painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was born in nearby Plympton St Maurice.
Joshua Reynolds (1723–1794) was known for capturing his clients’ personalities, being one of the founding members and first president of the prestigious Royal Academy in London, as well as one of the most influential painters of the 1700s. Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration explores the career of this famous 18th-century portrait artist within a global context, highlighting themes such as image, identity, his studio practice, his early career in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport), and his use of pigment, colour, and light.
Important works from The Box’s permanent collection are shown alongside loans from national and private collections including Tate, The Woburn Abbey Collection, National Trust, National Maritime Museum, and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. The loans are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund. Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections.
Reynolds’ enduring legacy and his ongoing relevance for artists today are highlighted through an exciting collaboration with Royal Academician Rana Begum, who has created new works inspired by three of his portraits. Begum’s internationally touring Dappled Light exhibition will also be on display at The Box this summer.
Keen to discover more about Sir Joshua Reynolds?
• Learn about the National Trust’s Reynolds 300 programme.
• Find out more about what’s happening at Saltram House.
• Book for one of the Royal Academy’s Artists on Art talks, which have been programmed to coincide with the 300th anniversary of Reynolds’ birth.
• Book a ticket for a special Sir Joshua Reynolds at 300 talk and panel discussion at Plympton St Maurice Guildhall on 14 July.
New Book | A Biographical Dictionary of RA Students, 1769–1830
Thomas Rowlandson, Auguste Charles Pugin, and John Bluck, Drawing from Life at the Royal Academy, (detail), 1808, hand-coloured etching and aquatint, sheet: 28 × 34 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Elisha Whittlesey Collection, 59.533.2084).
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Recently published by The Walpole Society:
Martin Myrone, “A Biographical Dictionary of Royal Academy Students, 1769–1830,” The Walpole Society 84 (2022).
An essential new reference work for students of 18th- and 19th-century British art, Martin Myrone’s A Biographical Dictionary of Royal Academy Students 1769–1830 records every student known to have attended the RA schools in London during its first six decades. The book contains 1,800 biographical entries and draws on extensive new archival research, offering a comprehensive account of the extraordinarily diverse life stories of former RA students and an unprecedented overview of British art during the Romantic period. It provides a revealing new context for such familiar figures as John Constable, William Blake, and J.M.W. Turner, and a wealth of fresh information about three generations of obscure, forgotten, or previously unknown British painters, sculptors, engravers, and architects. As the first national art school, enjoying Royal patronage, prestige, and prominence, the Royal Academy has a pivotal role in British art history, with almost every notable figure of the era passing through its walls.
Martin Myrone is Head of Grants, Fellowships, and Networks at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London.
A Biographical Dictionary of Royal Academy Students 1769–1830 is for sale to the general public exclusively through Thomas Heneage Art Books, London. It is also available free online and to download for members of the Walpole Society via their newly launched website, where a growing number of volumes can be found in a dedicated member’s area. Members of the Walpole Society support the research and publication of British art history; membership subscriptions—starting at only £20 annually for a student membership—contribute to the cost of producing new volumes, and, in return, members receive a free copy of the current year’s volume, either as a digital file or a hardback book.
The Walpole Society was formed in 1911 chiefly through the efforts of Alexander Finberg (1866—1939), who had been employed to arrange the paintings in the bequest of J.M.W. Turner. In the course of his work, Finberg saw that many artists of the 18th century lay unrecognised, and established the Society to address this lack of knowledge and to shine a light on earlier periods which were then entirely neglected. The Society was named after Horace Walpole (1717—1797), who published the first history of art in Britain, basing his work on the manuscript notebooks of George Vertue (1684—1756), which he had acquired. One of the first goals of the Walpole Society was to publish the notebooks in their original form, which included much material that Walpole omitted. This took up six volumes as well as an index volume, and was finally completed in 1950. This publication is the single most important source of information concerning art collections, artists, architects, and craftsmen working in Britain before the mid-18th century. They form part of more than 80 volumes that the Society has so far published containing articles, catalogues, and editions of original documents.
New Book | Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World
From Penn Press:
Summer Reading Sale! 40% off all Penn Press books, plus free U.S. shipping with discount code SUMMER23-FM, until June 9 (excluding pre-order sales).
Stephen Whiteman, ed., Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-1512823585, $80.
Courts and societies across the early modern Eurasian world were fundamentally transformed by the physical, technological, and conceptual developments of their era. Evolving forms of communication, greatly expanded mobility, the spread of scientific knowledge, and the emergence of an increasingly integrated global economy all affected how states articulated and projected visions of authority into societies that, in turn, perceived and responded to these visions in often contrasting terms. Landscape both reflected and served as a vehicle for these transformations, as the relationship between the land and its imagination and consumption became a fruitful site for the negotiation of imperial identities within and beyond the precincts of the court.
In Landscape and Authority in the Early Modern World, contributors explore the role of landscape in the articulation and expression of imperial identity and the mediation of relationships between the court and its many audiences in the early modern world. Nine studies focused on the geographical areas of East and South Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe illuminate how early modern courts and societies shaped, and were shaped by, the landscape, including both physical sites, such as gardens, palaces, cities, and hunting parks, and conceptual ones, such as those of frontiers, idealized polities, and the cosmos. The collected essays expand the meaning and potential of landscape as a communicative medium in this period by putting an array of forms and subjects in dialogue with one another, including not only unique expressions, such as gardens, paintings, and manuscripts, but also the products of rapidly developing commercial technologies of reproduction, especially print. The volume invites a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complexity with which early modern states constructed and deployed different modes of landscape for different audiences and environments.
Stephen H. Whiteman is Reader in the Art and Architecture of China, The Courtauld, University of London.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
1 Connective Landscapes: Mobilizing Space in the Transcultural Early Modern — Stephen Whiteman
Part I | Circulating Discourses
2 From Imperial to Confessional Landscapes: Engelbert Kaempfer and the Disenchantment of Nature in Safavid and Tokugawa Cities — Robert Batchelor
3 Constructing an Authentic China: Henri Bertin and Chinese Architecture in Eighteenth-Century France — John Finlay
Part II | Constructing Identities
4 Landscape and the Articulation of the Imperium: Safavid Isfahan — Seyed Mohammad Ali Emrani
5 Bridge into Metaphorical Space: Hideyoshi’s Imperial Landscapes at Osaka — Anton Schweizer
Part III | Defining Margins
6 Views of Victory: The Landscapes of the Battle of the Boyne — Finola O’Kane
7 Delineating the Sea: Maritime Law and Painting in Willem van de Velde the Elder’s Sea-Drafts — Caroline Fowler
8 Dutch Representations of Southeast Asia — Larry Silver
Part IV | Imagining Spaces
9 Landscape and Emperorship in the Connected Qing: Leng Mei’s View of Rehe — Stephen Whiteman
10 The Princely Landscape as Stage: Early Modern Courts in Enchanted Gardens — Katrina Grant
Contributors
Index
Exhibition | The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors of Oceania
A portion of The Met’s Oceanic Collection, now on view in Shanghai at the Museum of Art Pudong:
The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors of Oceania
Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, 1 June — 20 August 2023
National Museum of Qatar, Doha, 16 October 2023 — 15 January 2024
Accompanies the reopening of The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Spring 2025
Maori Weaving Peg (Turuturu), late 18th–early 19th century, wood, 14 inches high (NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979.206.1600. ‘Ko te taura whiri, he whiri i te tangata’ (‘The woven cord is like the cord that connects people’). –Māori proverb
The exhibition The Shape of Time: Art and Ancestors of Oceania from The Metropolitan Museum of Art is produced by the Lujiazui (Group) Co., Ltd., and co-organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) and the Museum of Art Pudong (MAP). The exhibition marks the first time that MAP collaborates with The Met, a world-renowned art institution. Meanwhile, it is also the first time ever that an exhibition taken entirely from The Met’s collection has come to Shanghai, China, adding extraordinary historical significance to the event.
The Shape of Time centers around The Met’s Oceanic art collection, showing the exuberant and diverse culture of Oceania. Divided into three main sections— Voyaging, Ancestors, and Time—the exhibition displays more than 110 valuable artworks from the past four centuries. Encompassing the arts and cultures of the Pacific Islands, The Met’s collection of Oceanic art comprises over 2,800 works that reflect the rich history of creative expression and innovation that is emblematic of the region. Since joining in The Met’s permanent collection, these treasures of Oceania have never left New York. The exhibition The Shape of Time therefore is the first time after about half a century that these works will travel out of the United States, and MAP is honoured to be the first stop of this historic voyage.
From The Met’s catalogue entry for the weaving peg (at right):
This weaving peg incorporates a distinctively carved male figure with elaborate designs that accentuate his tattooed skin (moko). Carved in the round, intricate low-relief carvings cover the entire surface of the figure’s body except for the back of his head, which is the seat of an individual’s mana or personal sanctity. With elbows resting on each knee, the arms extend up towards the chin, which is supported by five-fingered hands. The face is dynamic—serial notching accentuates the pronounced arch of each brow, giving way to more fluid grooves, lengthened lines that delineate elongated eyes and the contours of the lips and mouth. The nostrils flare, the mouth is wide open and gaping, as if to consume this flow of energy. Spiral designs on each knee spill over onto the top section of the polished shaft and create a characteristic double spiral motif. This feature frames the face of a further face which faces the other direction, drawing the eye around to the back, creating an energy and dynamism much admired in Māori figural sculpture. . . . The process of twining began when the weaver drove two pegs into the ground and stretched between them a single cord from which the strands of flax were hung. The left-hand peg was always left plain, while the right-hand one was carved and dedicated to the female deity associated with the moon, Hine-te-iwaiwa. The more complex form of carved weaving pegs, such as this one, were designed to incorporate the spiritual potency associated with the goddess whose efficacy was believed to become integrated into the bound texture of the cloak, thus enhancing the spiritual armature of the wearer. . .
The catalogue is published by Yale UP:
Maia Nuku, Oceania: The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1588397669, $50.
The visual arts of Oceania tell a wealth of dynamic stories about origins, ancestral power, performance, and initiation. This publication explores the deeply rooted connections between Austronesian-speaking peoples, whose ancestral homelands span Island Southeast Asia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the island archipelagoes of the northern and eastern Pacific. Unlike previous books, it foregrounds Indigenous perspectives, alongside multidisciplinary research in art history, ethnography, and archaeology, to provide an intimate look at Oceania, its art, and its culture. Stunning new photography highlights more than 130 magnificent objects, ranging from elaborately carved ancestral figures in ceremonial houses, towering slit drums, and dazzling turtle-shell masks to polished whale ivory breastplates. Underscoring the powerful interplay between the ocean and its islands, and the ongoing connection with spiritual and ancestral realms, Oceania: The Shape of Time presents an art-focused approach to life and culture while guiding readers through the artistic achievements of Islanders across millennia.
Maia Nuku is Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Conference | HECAA@30
Registration is now open! It’s an extraardinary programme with terrific small session offerings. If you’ve not (yet) been part of HECAA, please know that you would be very welcome—whether you’re an academic, a museum or heritage professional, or simply someone interested in the eighteenth century. –CH
From the conference website:
HECAA@30: Environments, Materials, and Futures in the Eighteenth Century
Boston, Cambridge, and Providence, 12–14 October 2023
On the land of the Massachusett and neighboring Wampanoag and Nipmuc peoples, Boston developed in the eighteenth century as a major colonized and colonizing site. Its status today as a cultural and intellectual hub is shaped by that context, making it a critical location to trace the cultural legacies of racism and social injustice between the eighteenth century and today. For whom is ‘eighteenth-century art and architecture’ a useful category? What eighteenth-century materials, spaces, and images offer tools or concepts for shaping our collective futures? This conference marks HECAA’s 30th year as a scholarly society dedicated to facilitating communication and collaboration among scholars of eighteenth-century art to expand and promote knowledge of all aspects of the period’s visual culture.
The standard registration fee is $125; the discounted fee is $30. HECAA membership is required of all conference attendees. And please consider making a contribution to help cover travel costs for unfunded colleagues. Register here.
T H U R S D A Y , 1 2 O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3
Morning Panels at Bartos Auditorium, List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge
8.00 Registration
9.00 Introduction
9.15 Panel: Timing Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Time
Chairs: Megan Baker (University of Delaware) and Joseph Litts (Princeton University)
• Carole Nataf (Courtauld Institute of Art), Shell Grottos and the Aesthetics of Deep Time in Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s Theories of the Earth
• Elizabeth Bacon Eager (Southern Methodist University), Peter Hill’s Regulator: Considering the Materiality of Time in the Context of American Slavery
• Daniella Berman (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Mismatched and Out of Time: Aesthetics of Contingency in 1800
• Lea C. Stephenson (University of Delaware), Reviving the Alabaster Portrait: J.P. Morgan’s Eighteenth-Century Collection and Whiteness
10.30 Coffee
11.00 Roundtable Panel: What’s Race Got To Do With It? Part I
Chair: Karen Lipsedge (University of Kingston)
Respondent: Victoria Barnett-Woods (Loyola University, Maryland)
• Stephen Hague (Rowan University), A Long S-Shaped Shadow from in the Long Eighteenth Century
• Lisa Vandenbossche (University of Michigan), Oceans of (In)stability: Race and Gender from Shore to Sea
• Chloe Wigston Smith (University of York), Race, Material Culture, and Women’s Work
• Adrienne L. Childs (Independent Scholar), Ornamental Blackness: What, Why, So What?
• Laura Keim (Stenton Historic House), Granting Her Requests: Dinah’s Freedom, Dinah’s Family, Dinah’s Place
12.30 Lunch
2.30 Afternoon Small Group Sessions in and around Cambridge
Sign up during conference registration.
House Tour and Roundtable Session | What’s Race Got to Do with It? Part II
Royall House and Slave Quarters (15 George Street, Medford)
Chair: Karen Lipsedge (University of Kingston)
Respondent: Kyera Singleton (Royall House and Slave Quarters)
• Nuno Grancho (Centre for Privacy Studies, Copenhagen), Domestic Space, Race and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Danish Colonial Home
• Laura Engel (Duquesne University), The Paradox of Pearls: Gender, Race, Embodiment, and Domestic Space
• Caroline Fowler (Williams College, The Clark Art Institute), Privacy
• Sarah Lund (Harvard University), Republican Motherhood and Republican Equality: Female Engravers and the ‘Ideals’ of the French Revolution
• Tori Champion (University of St. Andrews), Race, Liminality, and the Floral Garland in French Portraiture
Object Session and Panel | For a Better Future: Networks of Pastel Painting
Art Study Center, Harvard Art Museums (32 Quincy Street, Cambridge)
Chairs: Valérie Kobi (Université de Neuchâtel) and Iris Brahms (Universität Hamburg)
• Alexa McCarthy (University of Southern Maine), Blue on Blue: The Tonality of Skin and Eighteenth-Century Pastel
• Heather McPherson (University of Alabama at Birmingham), ‘Pastel Crayons as Paintbrushes’: Chardin’s Portrait of a Man (1773)
• Isabelle Masse (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec), Chardin’s Pastel Materials: A Hypothesis
Gallery Tour | Islamic and South Asian Painting
Harvard Art Museums (32 Quincy Street)
Led by Ayşin Yoltar-Yildirim (Harvard Art Museums)
Gallery Tour | Eighteenth-Century European and American Art
Harvard Art Museums
Led by Maher Fellow TBA (Harvard Art Museums)
Object Session | Legacies of the Enlightenment
Houghton Library (Harvard Yard, near Quincy and Harvard Streets)
Led by John Overholt (Houghton Library), Elizabeth Rudy (Harvard Art Museums), and Kristel Smentek (MIT)
Gallery Tour | Time, Life, and Matter: Colonial Science
Historical Scientific Instruments Collection, Harvard University Science Center (1 Oxford Street)
Led by Sara J. Schechner (Harvard University)
Suggestions for Self-Guided Visits
• Harvard Art Museums permanent collection galleries and exhibits including Disrupt the View: Arlene Schechet. Present your HECAA@30 conference badge for free admission to the HAM on Thursday afternoon.
• Resetting the Table: Food and Our Changing Tastes, and Glass Flowers: The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (11 Divinity Avenue), $15 general admission.
• MIT Special Collections Library, Self-guided viewing of volumes of a first-edition folio of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
5.30 Reception and Viewing Session at the Boston Athenaeum
Wine and cheese reception generously co-sponsored by the Boston Athenaeum for all conference attendees. Eighteenth-century highlights from the Atheneum’s rare books and prints collection will be on view in the Study Room, and significant 18th- and 19th-century American paintings are hung throughout the building.
F R I D A Y , 1 3 O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3
Morning Panels at Bartos Auditorium, List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge
9.00 Introduction
9.15 Rethinking the Material Afterlives of Animals
Chairs: Sarah Grandin (Clark Art Institute) and Catherine Girard (St. Francis Xavier University)
• Dani Ezor (Southern Methodist University), Tortoiseshell: From Sea Turtle to Snuffbox
• Kaitlin Grimes (Auburn University), The Elephant and the Lathe: The Intimate Materiality of Monarchical Ivory Portraits in Early Modern Denmark-Norway
• Sylvia Houghteling (Bryn Mawr), The Silk and the Worm: Writing Sericulture into the History of South Asian Textiles
• Cynthia Kok (Yale University), Thinking into Early Modern Mother-of-Pearl, Materiality and Liveliness
10.30 Coffee
11.00 Workshop: Quilt! Inclusivity in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Chairs: HECAA DEI Committee
12.30 Lunch
2.30 Afternoon Small Group Sessions at MFA Boston, Part I
Sign up during conference registration.
Object Session and Panel | Mining for Mica at the MFA, 90-minute session
Morse Study Room, MFA Prints and Drawings
Chair: Ruth Ezra (University of St. Andrews)
• Margaret Masselli (Brown University), A Glittering Ghagra: Women’s Clothing, Shisha Embroidery, and Mica Mining in Eighteenth-Century India
• Katherine A. P. Iselin (Emporia State University), Materiality and Image on Folding Fans
• Ruth Ezra (University of St Andrews), Brilliant Boxes
Object Session and Panel | Paying Attention: Materials, Materiality, and the Definitions of Technical Art History, 90-minute session
Voss Seminar Room, MFA Conservation Center
Chair: Daniella Berman (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU)
• Josephina de Fouw (Rijksmuseum), The Whole is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: Research into the Rijksmuseum Collection of Dutch Eighteenth-Century Decorative Interior Paintings
• Courtney Books and Amy Torbert (St Louis Art Museum), Bridging the Apparent Divide: Thoughts from the Field on ‘Responsible Art History’ and ‘Technical Art History’
• Heidi Strobel (University of North Texas), Picking at Threads: A Material Analysis of an Embroidered Picture
• Andy Schulz (University of Arizona), The Collaborative Creation of Meaning in a Hand-Colored Set of Goya’s Caprichos
Object Session and Panel | Ivory: Animal Body and Artistic Material, 90-minute session
MFA Center for Netherlandish Art Seminar Room
Chairs: Katherine Fein (Columbia University) and Deepthi Murali (George Mason University)
• Erika Riccobon (Leiden University), Folding Fans in Translation: Ivory as Painting Medium and Site of Crosscultural Design in the Early Phase of the Canton Trade
• Maggie Keenan (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), Disembodied Eyes: The Fragility of Flesh and Ivory Appeal
• Marina Wells (Boston University), Incisions into the Gendered History of American Marine Ivory
• Kristine Korzow Richter (Harvard University), Ivory as a Biomineral: Relationships between Biomechanical Structure, Interspecies Life Histories, and Tool Functionality
Gallery Session | Art of the Americas
MFA Art of the Americas Wing, Ground Floor Galleries
Chair: Ethan Lasser (MFA Boston)
• Michele Navakas (Miami University of Ohio), Coral, Women, Labor: Joseph Blackburn’s Isaac Winslow and His Family (1755)
• Wendy Bellion (University of Delaware), Benjamin West’s King Lear
• Matthew Gin (University of North Carolina, Charlotte), Uncanny Encounters in Cindy Sherman’s Madame de Pompadour (née Poisson) Tea Service (1990)
Gallery Session | European Porcelain and Decorative Arts
MFA Gallery 142
Chair: Michael Yonan (University of California, Davis)
• Amy Freund (Southern Methodist University), Sinceny Manufactory, France, Tray with Chinoiserie (?) Hunting Scene, c. 1750
• Maura Gleeson (Independent Scholar), Meissen Manufactory, Germany, Modeled by Johann Joachim Kändler, Macaw, c. 1732
• Thomas Michie (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Alcora Manufactory, Spain, Console Table, c. 1761–63
• Sarah Williams (Millsaps College), Nicolas Lancret, Le Déjeuner de jambon, 1735
• Michael Yonan (University of California, Davis), Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, A Hypochondriac, c. 1775–80
Gallery Tour | Jewish Ritual Silver in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America
MFA Galleries
Led by Simona Di Nepi (MFA Boston)
3.30 Afternoon Small Group Sessions at MFA Boston, Part II
Sign up during conference registration.
Gallery Session | New Approaches to Silver
MFA Firestone Gallery, 141A
Chair, Dani Ezor (Southern Methodist University)
• Agnieszka A. Ficek (CUNY Graduate Center)
• Brittany Luberda (Baltimore Museum of Art)
• Ben Miller (S.J. Shrubsole)
Gallery Session | Tiny Treasures: The Magic of Miniatures
MFA Rabb Gallery
Chair: Courtney Harris (MFA Boston)
• Gerri Strickler (MFA Boston), Nevers Glass
• Lauren DiSalvo (Utah Tech), Miniaturizing the Picturesque Landscape through Micromosaic Souvenirs
• Damiet Schneeweisz (Courtauld Institute of Art), Rethinking the Potency of the Early Modern Miniature in the Americas
Gallery Tour | Porcelain, Painting, and Scholar Rocks of the Qing Dynasty
MFA Chinese Art Galleries
Led by Nancy Berliner (MFA Boston) and Dawn Odell (Lewis and Clark College)
4.30 Roundtable: The Politics of Materiality
Alfond Auditorium, MFA Boston
Chairs: Jennifer Chuong (Universität zu Berlin) and Elizabeth Bacon Eager (Southern Methodist University)
• Sarah Cohen (University at Albany, SUNY)
• Edward S. Cooke, Jr. (Yale University)
• Kathryn Desplanque (UNC Chapel Hill)
• Kailani Polzak (UC Santa Cruz)
• Jennifer Van Horn (University of Delaware)
S A T U R D A Y , 1 4 O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3
Morning Panels at Brown University
8.30 Bus departs from the Marriott Cambridge to Providence, Rhode Island
Please sign up during registration for a seat on the bus.
10.00 Global Sacred Garden Encounters
Chair: Emily Everhart (Art Academy of Cincinnati)
• Lelaine Bangilan Little (Misericordia University), Firstfruits of the Land: Vegetal Motifs in Art and Architecture of the Spanish Philippines
• Susan Taylor-Leduc (Independent Scholar), Mesdames at Bellevue: Collecting Plants, Sacralizing the French Picturesque, 1775–92
• Emily Thompson (Washington University, St Louis), Sacred Translations: Giambologna’s Samson and Its European Encounters
11.30 Lunch
12.30 Panel: Indigenous Imprints
Chair: Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia)
• Monica Anke Hahn (Community College of Philadelphia), Reproducing ᎤᏍᏔᎾᏆ (Otacite Ostenaco), 1762–2023
• Eleanore Neumann (University of Virginia), Living Proof: Retrospective Agency in Judy Watson’s experimental beds (2012)
• Laura M. Golobish (Ball State University), James Lavadour’s Lithographic Geologies and Stewardship of the Land
• Kimberly Toney and Pedro Germano Leal (John Carter Brown Library and John Hay Library, Brown University), The John Carter Brown’s Americana Platform: A Digital Tool for Researching the History and Culture of the Early Americas
2.30 Afternoon Small Group Session in Providence, RI
Sign up during conference registration.
Object Session | Fashion, Race, and Power in the Eighteenth Century
RISD Musuem, Textile Study Center (20 North Main Street)
Chair: Amelia Rauser (Franklin and Marshall College)
• Priscilla Sonnier (University College, Dublin), Flax, Fashion, and Free-Trade: Manufacturing Gendered Patriotism in Ascendancy Ireland
• Emma Pearce (University of Edinburgh), Plaided Products: Checked Cloth in Caribbean Textile Markets
• Marina Kliger (Harvard Art Museums), “Cut into Pieces”: The Politics of the “Robe de Cachemire” and the Fashions of the Franco-Persian Alliance in Paris, 1808–15
Gallery Session | Indulging the Self, Stimulating the Globe: Chocolate, Sugar, Empire, Enslavement
RISD Museum, Trading Earth: Ceramics, Commodities, and Commerce exhibition
Chairs: Tara Zanardi (Hunter College) and Elizabeth Williams (RISD Museum)
• Alicia Caticha (Northwestern University), Rethinking a Wedgwood Creamware Basket or, the Secret History of Sugar Sculpture
• Nina Dubin (University of Illinois Chicago) and Meredith Martin (New York University), Gods of the Indies
• Katherine Calvin (Kenyon College), The Cape Coast Castle Platter: Currency and Consumption across the Atlantic
Gallery Tour | East and South Asian Works on Paper
RISD Museum Print Study Room
Led by Wai Yee Chiong (RISD Museum)
Object Session | The Visual Culture of War in the Global Eighteenth Century
Hay Library Special Collections
Chair: Dominic Bate (Brown University)
• Chloe Northrop (Tarrant County College), “Rodney Triumphant”: James Gillray and 1782 Satirical Prints of the American War for Independence
• Remi Poindexter (The Graduate Center, CUNY), Cooper Willyams’ “A Scene at St. Pierre” and the French Revolution in Martinique
• Rebecca Szantyr (The New York Public Library), Keeping Tabs on the British Empire
• Heather Belnap (Brigham Young University), “Les Amours Prussiens” and Other Narratives of Sexual Politics in Allied-Occupied Paris
• Enrique Ramirez (Taubman College, University of Michigan), Airs Apparent: Chemistry and Aeronautics on the Brink of War
Object Session | How To Teach with Collections
Hay Library Special Collections
Led by Heather Cole (Brown University Library)
Object Session | Native American Collections
Special Collections, John Carter Brown Library
Led by Kimberly Toney (John Carter Brown Library)
House Tour | Mahogany at the John Brown House
John Brown House (52 Power Street)
Led by John Brown House docents
Architecture Walking Tour | Colonial Providence
Benefit Street
4.00 Roundtable | The Interstitial Eighteenth Century: Objects, Actors, and Ideas ‘In-Between’
Chairs: Emily Casey (University of Kansas) and Matthew Gin (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
• Bart Pushaw (University of Copenhagen), A Queer Qulleq and Inuit Art History between Rhetoric and Reality
• Joseph D. Litts (Princeton University), Capsized Aesthetics: Risk Management, Shipwrecks, and Vernet
• Lauren Cannady (University of Maryland, College Park), Green Infrastructure: An Extramural Garden as Case Study
• Caitlin Meehye Beach (Fordham University), Yamqua, In Between
5.30 Wine and Cheese Reception
6.45 Bus departs from Providence to the Marriott Cambridge
Please sign up during registration for a seat on the bus.
Workshop | Across the Seas: Denmark and the World
From ArtHist.net:
Across the Seas: Denmark and the World in Art and Visual Culture in the Early Modern Period
Kunsthistorisches Institut, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 9–10 June 2023
Organised by Caecilie Weissert, Johannes von Müller, and Benjamin Asmussen
In cooperation with the Maritime Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen
Registration due by 8 June 2023
The workshop Across the Seas: Denmark and the World in Art and Visual Culture in the Early Modern Period takes an interdisciplinary perspective combining art historical questions with those of the histories of politics and economics. The sea serves as a common denominator allowing for bridging such disparate standpoints. Furthermore, it presents itself as a backdrop against which early modern Denmark keeps oscillating between centre and periphery.
With this framework, the workshop seeks to dislodge the presented objects from a conventional frame of reference. They will be addressed as ‘nodes’, making interrelations and itineraries visible and mapping them out, finally revealing themselves as factors that contribute to constituting the very structures they disclose. Next to a series of case studies dedicated to the material and artistic cultures of exchange between Denmark and non-European regions, notably China, and investigating the circulation of both art and artistic materials via the sea, the workshop will engage with both the challenges and methodological potential of an ‘oceanic turn’.
Please register before 8 June 2023 by email, vonmueller@kunstgeschichte.uni-kiel.de.
Workshop Organizers
Prof. Dr. Caecilie Weissert (Christian-Abrechts-Universität zu Kiel)
Dr. Johannes von Müller (Christian-Abrechts-Universität zu Kiel)
Dr. Benjamin Asmussen (Maritime Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen)
Friday, 9 June | Denmark and the World
14.00 Arrival
14.30 Welcome and Opening Remarks — Caecilie Weissert (Kiel)
14.50 Benjamin Asmussen (Copenhagen) — Chinese Export Paintings as Sources of Danish Early Modern Trade and the Industrialisation of Art
15.40 Kee Il Choi Jr. (Zurich) — Models and Marketing in Canton: Two Chinese Export Porcelain Punch-bowls Made for the Danish Market
16.30 Coffee Break
17.00 Winnie Wong (Berkeley) — The Clay Portraits of the Danish Kunstkammer: Chinese Sources on a European Demand
Saturday, 10 June | Maritime Art History
9.15 Arrival
9.30 Opening Remarks — Johannes von Müller (Kiel)
9.50 Michèle Seehafer (Amsterdam) — Immersion in Foreign Worlds: Lacquer at the Danish Court
10.40 Margit Thøfner (Milton Keynes) — ‘Through Various Tracts of Sea’: Anna of Denmark-Norway and the Trinity Panels
11.30 Coffee Break
12.00 Anne Haack Christensen (Copenhagen) — Materials at Sea: Trading Painters’ Supplies in 17th-Century Denmark
12.50 Closing Discussion
Enfilade 
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