Exhibition | Disegno Disegni
This exhibition of over 100 Italian drawings closed on Sunday, though there is a catalogue:
Disegno Disegni
Musée Jenish, Vevey, Switzerland, 8 December 2023 — 14 April 2024
Curated by Emmanuelle Neukomm et Pamella Guerdat
Pietro Palmieri, Trompe-l’oeil with eight copied engravings and study drawings stacked on top of each other, 1783, pen, black and brown inks, brown wash, and blue watercolor on paper, 45 × 60 cm (Vevey: Musée Jenish; photo by David Quattrocchi).
Avec Guerchin, Novelli, Piola, Tiepolo ou encore Zuccari, le dessin italien ancien et moderne est au coeur de l’exposition Disegno disegni.
Dans le sillage du legs de René de Cérenville en 1968, qui faisait la part belle à la création graphique de la Péninsule, les fonds italiens du Musée Jenisch Vevey n’ont cessé de s’enrichir au fil des années, constituant aujourd’hui l’un des noyaux essentiels du patrimoine veveysan. Plus de 100 feuilles issues d’une collection particulière déposée au musée depuis 2003 sont mises en lumière pour l’occasion, dans un dialogue fécond avec les propres fonds de l’institution. Les pièces ainsi réunies invitent à voyager à travers les grands centres artistiques d’Italie, de Venise à Rome, en passant par Bologne et Florence. Autant d’écoles à l’origine d’une production dessinée placée sous le signe de la diversité technique et matérielle. Sujets religieux et profanes, pages d’études et dessins autonomes célèbrent la pluralité qui caractérise le médium et ses multiples fonctions, entre la fin du XVe siècle et les premières décennies du XIXe siècle.
Une exposition sous le commissariat de Emmanuelle Neukomm et Pamella Guerdat, conservatrice et conservatrice adjointe Beaux-Arts, assistées de Leïla Thomas, collaboratrice scientifique.
Marcantonio Franceschini, Allegory of Fame, before 1696 (Private Collection).
Pamella Guerdat et Emmanuelle Neukomm, eds., Disegno disegni: Dessins italiens de la Renaissance au XIXe siècle (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), 340 pages, ISBN: 978-8836654727, €45.
Préface — Nathalie Chaix
Le dédale des provenances — Ètienne Dumont
Connoisseurship et marché de l’art — Frédéric Elsig
Avertissement
Catalogue: Dessins italiens de la Renaissance au XIX siècle
Du dessin, la part maudite — Jérémie Koering
Index
Bibliographie sélective
Remerciements
Impressum
On Display | Quapaw Treaty of 1818
From the press release:
Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations — Quapaw Treaty of 1818
National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, April–October 2024
Quapaw Treaty, 24 August 1818 (Washington, DC: National Archives). Transcript originally published in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler, 1904; digitized by Oklahoma State University.
The National Museum of the American Indian, in partnership with the National Archives and Records Administration, is displaying the Quapaw Treaty of 1818 as part of the exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations (2014–28). The Quapaw Treaty will be on view until October 2024.
When the U.S. negotiated the Treaty of 1818, the Quapaw lived in four towns along the lower Arkansas River, although their hunting territories extended broadly to the west. The U.S. wished to acquire rights to these territories, which they considered excess Quapaw land, with the idea that those lands might be used for the resettlement of eastern tribes dispossessed by removal. The U.S. offered a lump-sum payment, promises of more payments annually for perpetuity, and a reservation composed of the territories occupied by the Quapaw towns. Just six years after the treaty was ratified, U.S. negotiators returned in 1824 at the behest of white settlers who desired the prime agricultural land of the lower Arkansas. The Quapaw were forced to abandon the 1818 reservation and move further west. Quapaw leader Heckaton, who felt compelled to agree to removal, said, “Since you have expressed a desire for us to remove, the tears have flowed copiously from my aged eyes.”
Displaying original treaties in Nation to Nation is made possible by the National Archives and Records Administration, an exhibition partner. Several of the treaties required extensive conservation treatment by the National Archives’ conservator prior to loan. Treaties can only be displayed for a short amount of time in order to conserve them for the future. There are a total of more than 370 ratified Indian treaties in the National Archives; more information about these treaties is available through its website.
Treaty Exhibition Schedule
September 2014–February 2015 — Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794
March–August 2015 — Muscogee Treaty, 1790
September 2015–February 2016 — Horse Creek (Fort Laramie) Treaty, 1851
March–August 2016 — Treaty with the Potawatomi, 1836
September 2016–February 2017 — Unratified California Treaty K, 1852
March–August 2017 — Medicine Creek Treaty, 1854
September 2017–January 2018 — Treaty of Fort Wayne, 1809
February–April 2018 — Navajo Treaty, 1868
May–October 2018 — Treaty with the Delawares, 1778
November 2018–March 2019 — Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868
April–September 2019 — Treaty of New Echota, 1835
October 2019–March 2020 — Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 1784
October 2020–March 2021 — Treaty of Fort Jackson, 1814
November 2021–May 2022 — Treaty of Fort Harmar with the Six Nations, 1789
May–November 2022 — Treaty with the Nez Perce, 1868
November 2022–April 2023 — Prairie du Chien Treaty, 1829
May–October 2023 — Treaty with Cheyenne and Arapaho, 1865
October 2023–April 2024 — Medicine Lodge Creek Treaty, 1867
April–October 2024 — Treaty with the Quapaw, 1818
Museum of the American Revolution Acquires Continental Army Drawing
Press release (26 March) from the Museum of the American Revolution, with coverage appearing in The Washington Post over the weekend (14 April 2024) . . .
Attributed to Pierre Eugène du Simitière, Soldiers and Camp Followers of the Continental Army’s North Carolina Brigade Marching through Philadelphia on 25 August 1777, pen and ink on paper (Philadelphia: Museum of the American Revolution).
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An eyewitness pen-and-ink sketch depicting Continental Army soldiers and camp followers marching through Philadelphia on 25 August 1777, which has never been documented or published by historians, has been donated to the Museum of the American Revolution. This sketch is the first wartime depiction of North Carolina troops known to exist, and only the second-known depiction of female camp followers of the Continental Army drawn by an eyewitness.
“This sketch is extremely important to our understanding of the daily operations of the Continental Army,” said Matthew Skic, Curator of Exhibitions at the Museum, who worked to authenticate the sketch and identify its creator after discovering it in a private collection. “It helps us visualize the everyday lives of these troops—the joyous, the difficult, and the mundane.”
This discovery brings to light a lively scene that newspaper accounts confirm occurred the morning of 25 August 1777, as the North Carolina Brigade and its commander, Brigadier General Francis Nash, marched to join the rest of General George Washington’s army before seeing action in both the Battle of Brandywine (11 September 1777) and the Battle of Germantown (4 October 1777).
The drawing shows two soldiers marching alongside an open-sided wagon, as well as a commissioned officer and a wagon driver mounted on horseback. Inside the wagon sit two women, one holding an infant, amongst various equipment and baggage of the brigade. Two men are also depicted riding on the back of the wagon. The inclusion of female camp followers—who shared life on campaign with enlisted husbands and fathers and supported the troops by sewing, doing laundry, and selling food—exemplifies a direct defiance of known regulations at the time about how women following the army could use wagons. Earlier in August, before the march depicted in the sketch took place, Washington himself brought up issues of women and children slowing down his troops, calling them “a clog upon every movement.”
Reverse side of the sketch of the North Carolina Brigade showing five male figure studies.
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On the reverse of the North Carolina Brigade sketch are five studies of two male figures, one brandishing a sword and the other engaged in a fist fight. Artists frequently sketched studies like these when they were working on larger works, as it allowed them to try out different poses or details and to get a sense of the scale of the larger drawing or painting.
The sketch was acquired by Judith Hernstadt, a Manhattan-based urban and regional planner and former television executive, in the late 1970s from a New York City antiques dealer. Hernstadt donated the sketch to the Museum in 2023, but at the time, the identity of the artist who drew it was still unknown. An ink inscription below the vignette of the North Carolina Brigade reads, “an exact representation of a waggon belonging to the north carolina brigade of continental troops which passed thro Philadelphia august done by …” with the rest of the lettering cut away due to an old paper repair.
After detailed research, handwriting analysis, and comparison to similar sketches, Skic identified the sketch’s creator as Switzerland-born artist and collector Pierre Eugène du Simitière (1737–1784), who settled in Philadelphia in about 1774 and is now known for documenting the rising American Revolution as it happened. Du Simitière went on to create from-life profile portraits of prominent Revolutionary leaders including Washington and he suggested the motto “E Pluribus Unum” through his rejected design for the Great Seal of the United States in 1776. In 1782, he founded the first museum in the United States that was open to the public.
Many of Du Simitière’s significant manuscripts and drawings still exist and are available for researchers to study at both The Library Company of Philadelphia and the Library of Congress. It is yet to be determined if either sketch relates to another work by du Simitière, but research is ongoing.
We were thrilled to piece together the many illuminating and significant parts of this sketch’s history through our unparalleled scholarship here at the Museum of the American Revolution,” said Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, President and CEO of the Museum. “As we round out our celebration of Women’s History Month, we revel in the discovery of this new depiction of female camp followers as highlighting the lesser-known stories and critical roles of women throughout the American Revolution are at the heart of the Museum’s offerings.”
The sketch was conserved due to generous contributions from the North Carolina Society of the Cincinnati, which is comprised of descendants of officers of the North Carolina Continental Line.
“The North Carolina Society of Cincinnati is proud to support the conservation and framing of this important discovery, which serves as an important reminder that the intricate history of both our state and our nation is still unfolding,” said Society President George Lennon.
New Installation | The Calculated Curve: 18th-C. American Furniture
Now open at The Met:
The Calculated Curve: Eighteenth-Century American Furniture
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 5 April 2024 — ongoing
The 2024 reinstallation of the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Galleries of Eighteenth-Century American Art of The Met’s American Wing elevates a pivotal moment in American furniture design between 1720 and 1770. This fresh installation encourages us to look closer at the materials and sculptural expression of this period, as well as the sensuality and ergonomics embedded in furniture design. The reinstalled galleries will feature iconic American furniture from the H. Eugene Bolles and Natalie Knowlton Blair collections, in addition to more recent gifts from premier collectors such as the Wangs as well as Erving and Joy Wolf. This striking display offers a counterpoint to the contextual installations of eighteenth-century furniture in the American Wing’s period rooms.
Major support for The Calculated Curve: Eighteenth-Century American Furniture is provided by The Edward John and Patricia Rosenwald Foundation.
Image: High chest of drawers (detail), 1730–50, American (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Cecile L. Mayer, 1962).
Exhibition | Pocket Luxuries
Now on view at the Cognacq-Jay:
Pocket Luxuries: Small Precious Objects in the Age of Enlightenment
Luxe de poche: Petits objets précieux au siècle des Lumières
Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, 28 March — 29 September 2024
Curated by Sixtine de Saint Léger and Gabrielle Baraud
L’exposition Luxe de poche au musée Cognacq-Jay présente une collection exceptionnelle de petits objets précieux et sophistiqués, en or, enrichis de pierres dures ou de pierres précieuses, couverts de nacre, de porcelaine ou d’émaux translucides, parfois ornés de miniatures. Les usages de ces objets varient, mais ils ressortent tous des us et coutumes d’un quotidien raffiné, signe de richesse, souvenir intime. Au siècle des Lumières comme aux suivants, ils suscitent un véritable engouement en France d’abord puis dans toute l’Europe. Luxe de poche a pour ambition de renouveler le regard que l’on porte sur ces objets, en adoptant une approche plurielle, qui convoque à la fois l’histoire de l’art et l’histoire de la mode, l’histoire des techniques, l’histoire culturelle et l’anthropologie en faisant résonner ces objets avec d’autres œuvres : des accessoires de mode, mais aussi les vêtements qu’ils viennent compléter, le mobilier où ils sont rangés ou présentés et enfin des tableaux, dessins et gravures où ces objets sont mis en scène. Ce dialogue permet d’envisager ces objets dans le contexte plus large du luxe et de la mode au XVIIIe et au début du XIXe siècle.
Point de départ de cette nouvelle exposition, la remarquable collection d’Ernest Cognacq est enrichie de prêts importants—d’institutions prestigieuses comme le musée du Louvre, le musée des Arts décoratifs de Paris, le Château de Versailles, le Palais Galliera, les Collections royales anglaises ou le Victoria and Albert Museum à Londres—afin d’offrir une nouvelle lecture de ces accessoires indispensables du luxe.
Commissariat scientifique
• Vincent Bastien, collaborateur scientifique au Château de Versailles
• Ariane Fennetaux, professeure des universités, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
• Pascal Faracci, conservateur en chef du patrimoine
Sixtine de Saint-Léger, ed., Luxe de poche: Petits objets précieux au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Musée Cognacq-Jay, 2024), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-2759605798, €19. With contributions by Gabrielle Baraud, Vincent Bastien, Ariane Fennetaux, and Alice Minter.
Exhibition | Silver Treasures from Norway
Bridal Crown, 1590–1610, silver and silver- gilt
(Christen Sveaas Collection)
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From the press release (8 January 2024) for the exhibition . . .
Crowning the North: Silver Treasures from Bergen, Norway
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 11 February — 5 May 2024
Spanning the 16th to the early 20th century, this exhibition of some 200 objects reveals the evolution of a uniquely Norwegian approach to silversmithing over centuries of global change.
For centuries, Bergen, one of the largest port cities in Scandinavia, was a thriving hub of global commerce, with a burgeoning export of fish, timber, and fur. That trade in turn spurred the development of a uniquely Norwegian approach to a timeless craft: gold and silver smithing. Crowning the North: Silver Treasures from Bergen, Norway explores the art of the Bergen silversmiths from the 16th to early 20th century and examines the evolution of the craft against the backdrop of greater political, social, and economic change in Norway and other parts of the world. Some 200 objects—from spoons, tankards, sugar bowls, and salt cellars, to elaborate ceremonial wedding crowns and fantastical vessels—are on exclusive loan to the U.S. from three public and private Norwegian collections: Kode Bergen Art Museum, the Bergen University Museum, and the private collection of Christen Sveaas.
“This presentation of objects from three prestigious Norwegian collections of art, craft, and design is an exceptional opportunity to discover Nordic history and aesthetics across centuries and across the intersecting forces of global trade, taste, and fashion,” commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “We are pleased to collaborate with the Kode Bergen Art Museum in bringing these remarkable objects to Houston, where they will be seen by U.S. audiences for the first time.”
Johan Helmich Hoff, Silver Maiden Beaker, 1782, silver and silver-gilt (Kode Bergen Art Museum).
By the 16th century, Bergen had become a critically important global economic center in the trade of grain and salts for lumber and stock fish from the North. At the time ruled by Denmark, Bergen and its commerce operated under the jurisdiction of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of merchant guilds and market towns across central and northern Europe established by German traders in the 13th century. The league’s dominant global exchange network brought together two factors that fostered what would become a unique artistic heritage in Bergen: the availability of enormous quantities of silver mined from the Spanish Americas, and an influx of immigrants and their craft traditions from Germany and other European countries.
Bergen goldsmiths formed their own Goldsmith’s Guild in 1568. The goldsmith tradition that evolved in the city allowed artisans, both men and women, to craft a range of decorative and functional objects of extraordinary quality. Bergen goldsmiths’ sensibilities in the 16th century reflected the Renaissance and, later, Baroque styles of the time. Over the course of the 18th century, the influx of global commodities like tobacco and coffee from European colonies inspired goldsmiths to craft elegant objects for daily use to meet consumer demand. By the 19th century, with the excavations of three Viking ships and agitation for independence from Sweden, a growing sense of revivalism in art, literature, and popular culture inspired Norway’s goldsmiths to create fantastical objects harkening back to the Viking and medieval era. For centuries, with no banking system in place until 1816 following Norway’s union with Sweden in 1814, these silver and gold items—spoons, tankards, sugar bowls, and salt cellars, along with ceremonial objects such as brides’ wedding crowns—also functioned as a means of building personal wealth.
Crowning the North: Silver Treasures from Bergen, Norway is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with the Kode Bergen Art Museum.
Kode Bergen Art Museum is one of the largest museums for art, crafts, design, and music in the Nordic region. Kode offers a unique combination of art museums and composers’ homes, showcasing contemporary art, historical collections, concerts, and parklands. The museum stewards over 50,000 objects, including paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, videos, musical instruments, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, and metal. These objects can be experienced in four different neighboring art museums in the heart of Bergen and the three beautifully located homes of the composers Ole Bull, Harald Sæverud, and Edvard Grieg.
Call for Papers | Securities of Art: The History of Authentication
From the ArtHist.net announcement, which includes the German:
Securities of Art: On the History of Authentication between Work, Text, and Context
Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, 5–7 December 2024
Organized by Tobias Vogt and Lukas Töpfer
Proposals due by 15 June 2024
Workshop as part of the DFG project Wertpapiere der Kunst. Authentifizierung als künstlerisches Konzept in Zeiten von Finanzkrisen, 1720–2020 (Securities of art. Authentication as an artistic concept in times of financial crises, 1720–2020), Prof. Dr. Tobias Vogt and Lukas Töpfer M.A., Institute for Art and Visual Culture, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg.
The workshop Securities of Art: On the History of Authentication between Work, Text, and Context (Wertpapiere der Kunst: Zur Geschichte künstlerischer Authentifizierung zwischen Werk, Text und Kontext) will examine artistically conceived authentications that have become constitutive for the status and value of artworks since the early 18th century. The guiding assumption is that artists in particular interrogate specific methods of authentication—such as signatures and titles, but also certificates, contracts, and other securities in the broadest sense—and integrate them into the structure of their works. Examples range from specially designed subscription tickets for the purchase of prints in the early 18th century to images of real and fake paper money dating from the French Revolution, from designs and caricatures of bonds since 1900 to certificates and contracts in works of contemporary art that comment on or criticize the changing financial system.
The focus is on exploring an art history of authentication in overarching social, economic, and legal-historical contexts on the one hand, and on the other, delineating the theoretical contours of the relationship between the authenticating and the authenticated, between work and parergon, and between text, paratext, and context. We will engage in a historical and theoretical analysis of the shift from the authentication of art to authentication as art and how this led to a corresponding blurring or reorganization of the relationships between ergon and parergon. Another important question is the extent to which authentications are particularly likely to emerge as artistically conceived in the face of radical changes to a prevailing value structure: in times of financial crises.
The presentations should last approximately 25 minutes in English or German and preferably focus on individual case studies of artistically designed authentications. We are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in the following questions:
• What are the pictorial and textual characteristics of a specific artistically conceived authentication?
• What procedures and constellations (of works and parerga) is it integrated into?
• How does authentication generate value not only as an element of economic practice, but also and especially within its own syntax and semantics, materiality, and mediality as determined by visual artistic practice?
• How does it respond in terms of form and function to the contemporary financial world? How does it perhaps even operate inside it?
• How does it specifically place the authenticating and the authenticated in relation to each other?
• What qualifies as an authentic work of art? How is it created—parergonally? How do artists themselves address this question, whether directly or indirectly?
• How does the question of the work relate to the creation, formation and preservation of value in general, where the intersection between art and finance is particularly relevant?
Please send an abstract of approximately 200 words, together with a short biographical note, to tobias.vogt@uni-oldenburg.de and lukas.mathis.toepfer@uni-oldenburg.de by 15 June 2024. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered within reason.
Exhibition | Timeless Beauty: A History of Still Life
From the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden:
Timeless Beauty: A History of Still Life / Zeitlose Schönheit: Eine Geschichte des Stilllebens
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Zwinger, Dresden, 17 November 2023 — 1 September 2024
Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), Floral Still Life, 1690, oil on canvas on oak panel, 35 × 27 cm (Dresden: Museum Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, 3149).
In the Winckelmann Forum of the Semper Building, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister presents around 80 works from its own collection in the exhibition Timeless Beauty: A History of Still Life. The wide-ranging presentation—with masterpieces by painters such as Frans Snyders, Balthasar van der Ast, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Adriaen van Utrecht, Willem Claesz. Heda, Abraham Mignon, and Rachel Ruysch—comprehensively illuminates the genre ‘still life’. Since when has it existed? What exactly constitutes a still life? What meaning, what content and what function did they have and still have today? What allegories and symbols are hidden in these motifs?
Still lifes were not only showpieces of decorative room furnishings, in which the overall effect was in the foreground. They also bear witness to natural scientific interests: the depicted object is regarded as a scientifically object and ‘document’—today as in the Age of Enlightenment. At the same time, however, still lifes are also an illusion, a game with the eye (trompe-l’œuil), in which the optical effect of the entire motif takes center stage. Through the bravura of painting, the ephemeral is immortalized. Many of the works on display, some of them recently restored, allow visitors to rediscover this fascinating genre, as only a few of the more than 100 still lifes in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister are on permanent display.
Konstanze Krüger, ed., Stillleben: Zeitlose Schönheit (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-3775751131, $50.
Konstanze Krüger, ed., Still Life: Timeless Beauty (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2024), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-3775751148, $40.
Exhibition | Two Masterpieces by Jan Van Huysum
From the press release for the exhibition:
Look Closely, Can You Spot the Butterfly? Two Masterpieces by Jan Van Huysum
Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, 16 May — 8 September 2024
Jan van Huysum, Flowers in a Vase with Crown Imperial and Apple Blossom at the Top and a Statue of Flora, 1731–32 (Private Collection).
Strawberry Hill House continues its acclaimed In-Focus series in 2024–25 with displays of extraordinary objects and artworks that have a connection with its original owner, Horace Walpole (1717–1797). Featuring paintings by Jan Van Huysum, a bronze bust of Caligula, and three mysterious daggers, each of the three exhibitions will tease out the fascinating facts and hidden histories connecting these artworks to this remarkable writer, connoisseur, and collector.
Evocatively demonstrating Jan Van Huysum’s (1682–1749) gift for creating sophisticated still life compositions depicting flowers and fruits, Strawberry Hill House is delighted to present the Dutch 18th-century master’s Flowers in a Vase with Crown Imperial and Apple Blossom at the top and a Statue of Flora and Fruit and Flowers in front of a Garden Vase with an Opium Poppy and a Row of Cypresses, both from 1731–32. On loan from a private collection, the paintings will be on public display for the first time in 10 years.
Art historian Andrew Graham Dixon has described the pair as “the two most brilliant and perfectly preserved paintings by the painter,” and they have remained together ever since leaving Van Huysum’s studio. It is believed that they were conceived as pendants from the outset, one showing mostly fruits, the other flowers. The pictures are in exceptional preservation and vividly showcase Van Huysum’s desired freshness of colour and transparency. They were originally owned by the painter Jeanne Etienne Liotard (1702–1789).
Van Huysum’s work was greatly appreciated during his lifetime, and for half a century afterwards his pictures sold for unprecedented sums and were only collected by the richest collectors in Europe, among which was Horace’s father, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). Although Horace Walpole did not keep any Jan Van Huysums at Strawberry Hill himself—due to their rarity, expense, and difficulty in procurement—he did possess a painting by Jacob Van Huysum, Van Huysum’s brother, who resided at Sir Robert Walpole’s house in Chelsea, as well as numerous pictures by Jean Baptiste Monnoyer (1636–1699), a French-Flemish painter who relocated to Britain in the late 17th century, and works by his son Antoine Monnoyer, (1670–1747) whose compositions were similar to Van Huysum’s but less soft and finished.
Liotard was forced to sell his pair of Van Huysums, and afterwards they were bought by the Landgraf Friedrich II of Hesse-Cassel (1720–1785), only to be appropriated by Napoleon during the wars before remerging in England, in private collections. Strawberry Hill House’s In-Focus exhibition will provide visitors with an immersive experience, inviting them to delve into the intricate details and pictorial brilliance and to celebrate Walpole’s fascination with flowers and his garden at the villa, through Van Huysum’s beautiful paintings.
Rediscovered: The Lost Bronze of Roman Emperor Caligula
6 June — 8 September 2024
Is This a Dagger I See before Me? The Collector, the Actor, and the Mystery of the Ottoman Jewelled Dagger
3 October 2024 — 10 January 2025
More information on these two exhibitions is available here»
New Book | The Garden Against Time
From Pan Macmillan:
Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (London: Picador, 2024), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1529066678, £20 / $28.
“A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .”
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an 18th-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. She lives in Suffolk.
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