Exhibition | Berthe Morisot and the Art of the 18th Century
Now on view at the Musée Marmottan Monet:
Berthe Morisot et l’art du XVIIIe siècle: Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Perronneau
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 31 March — 10 September 2023
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, 18 October 2023 — 3 March 2024
Curated by Marianne Mathieu and Dominique d’Arnoult, with Claire Gooden
From 18 October 2023 to 3 March 2024, the Musée Marmottan Monet will present a very special exhibition, entitled Berthe Morisot and the Art of the 18th Century: Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Perronneau. The exhibition is curated by art historians Marianne Mathieu and Dominique d’Arnoult, with the participation of Claire Gooden, Head of Conservation at the Musée Marmottan Monet. Sixty-five art works from French and international museums, as well as private collections are brought together here for the first time to highlight the links between the work of the first female Impressionist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) and the art of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), François Boucher (1703–1770), Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715–1783). Based on an analysis of mainly unpublished sources (letters, press clippings, and notebooks belonging to Berthe Morisot and her husband Eugène Manet and their entourage) and an in-depth genealogical study, this exhibition and the corresponding catalogue shed new light on a subject often mentioned by historians yet never having been the focus of dedicated and exhaustive research. While it has been demonstrated that Berthe Morisot is not Fragonard’s great-grand-niece and had no family ties to him, the exhibition nevertheless emphasizes the veritable foundations of their artistic affinities, retracing the chronology of their development, as well as their main characteristics.
Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2023), 210 pages, ISBN: 978-1898519485, $40.
New Book | Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England
The volume focuses on materials produced before 1700, though the final essay addresses 18th-century trade cards. From Routledge:
Callan Davies, Hannah Lilley, and Catherine Richardson, eds., Practices of Ephemera in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2023), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-0367528362 (hardback), $160 / ISBN: 978-1003058588 (ebook), $40.
This collection is the first to historicise the term ephemera and its meanings for early modern England and considers its relationship to time, matter, and place. It asks: how do we conceive of ephemera in a period before it was routinely employed (from the eighteenth century) to describe ostensibly disposable print? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when objects and texts were rapidly proliferating—the term began to acquire its modern association with transitoriness. But contributors to this volume show how ephemera was also integrally related to wider social and cultural ecosystems. Chapters explore those ecosystems and think about the papers and artefacts that shaped homes, streets, and cities or towns and their attendant preservation, loss, or transformation. The studies here therefore look beyond static records to think about moments of process and transmutation and accordingly get closer to early modern experiences, identities, and practices.
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Biographies
1 Introduction: Spawning
Concepts/ Emerging
2 Megan Heffernan — Expired Time: Archiving Waste Manuscripts
3 Anna Reynolds — What Do Texts and Insects Have in Common?; or, Ephemerality before Ephemera
3 Bruce Boehrer — Time’s Flies: Ephemerality in the Early Modern Insect World
4 Robert Bearman — What Is an ‘Ephemeral Archive’? Stratford-upon-Avon, 1550–1650: A Case Study
5 Alison Wiggins — Paper and Elite Ephemerality
Matter / Metamorphosing
6 Elaine Leong — Recipes and Paper Knowledge
7 Katherine Hunt — More Lasting than Bronze: Statues, Writing, and the Materials of Ephemera in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall
8 Hannah Lilley — Uncovering Ephemeral Practice: Itineraries of Black Ink and the Experiments of Thomas Davis
9 Helen Smith — Things That Last: Ephemerality and Endurance in Early Modern England
Environments / Buzzing
10 Michael Lewis — Toy Coach from London
11 Jemima Matthews — Maritime Ephemera in Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary
12 Callan Davies — Playing Apples and the Playhouse Archive
13 William Tullet — Extensive Ephemera: Perfumer’s Trade Cards in Eighteenth-Century England
Enfilade 
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