New Book | The Art of Naval Portraiture
From Royal Museums Greenwich:
Katherine Gazzard, The Art of Naval Portraiture (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1739154202, £30 / $45.
From elite officers to ordinary sailors, the portrayal of naval personnel has been a significant branch of British art for over 500 years. The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich holds the largest collection of naval portraits in the world, including over 600 paintings and many more prints and drawings, spanning from the sixteenth century to the present day. These portraits reveal how the Royal Navy was viewed at different moments in history and grant us access to individual stories, revealing the concerns and aspirations of people and families caught up in naval affairs. Many are also innovative and important works of art. For centuries, naval portraits have forged, reinforced, and challenged ideas of gender, heroism, and loyalty. They have functioned as icons of empire, demonstrations of professionalism, and personal mementos for loved ones. While charting the historical evolution of the Royal Navy’s image and explaining the meaning of common naval symbols—from anchors, cannons, and swords to uniforms, medals, and badges—this book also tells the stories of specific artists, sitters, and collectors, and of the places where portraits were made and displayed, from private homes to public exhibitions, and ultimately the museum itself.
Katherine Gazzard is the Curator of Art (post-1800) at Royal Museums Greenwich. She has taught courses on art history and museum studies for the University of East Anglia and Yale University. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British art, especially portraiture and the cultural history of the Royal Navy.
New Book | Tracks on the Ocean
Coming this fall, from The University of Chicago Press:
Sara Caputo, Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps, and Maritime Travel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0226837925, $38.
An engaging look at ocean routes’ complicated beginnings and elusive impact.
Sara Caputo’s Tracks on the Ocean is a sweeping history of how we have understood routes of travel over the ocean and how we came to represent that movement as a cartographical line. Focusing on the representation of sea journeys in the Western world from the early sixteenth century to the present, Caputo deftly argues that the depiction of these lines is inextricable from European imperialism, the rise of modernity, and attempts at mastery over nature. Caputo recounts the history of ocean tracks through an array of lively stories and characters, from the expeditions of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century to tracks depicted in Moby Dick and popular culture of the nineteenth century to the use of navigational techniques by the British navy. She discusses how tracks evolved from tools of surveying into tools of surveillance and, eventually, into paths of environmental calamity. The impulse to record tracks on the ocean is, Caputo argues, reflective of an ongoing desire for order, schematization, and personal visibility, as well as occupation and permanent ownership—in this case over something that is unoccupiable and impossible to truly possess. Both beautifully written and deeply researched, Tracks on the Ocean shares how the lines drawn on maps tell the audacious and often tragic and violent stories of ocean voyages.
Sara Caputo is a senior research fellow and director of studies in history at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Lecture | Louis Nelson on Global Houses of the Efik
Upcoming at the Mellon Centre:
Louis Nelson | Global Houses of the Efik, with Shaheen Alikhan as respondent
Online and in-person, Paul Mellon Centre, London, 5 June 2024, 5pm
Carl Wadström, Design for a House in a Tropical Climate, from An Essay on Colonization (London, 1794).
Much of the scholarship on the globalised house of the early modern period privileges colonisers creating a false impression that globalisation was unidirectional. A more responsible examination explores the ways colonised communities also engaged in acts of collection, reinscription, and identity construction. Unlike many African communities, the Efik in Old Calabar (now modern Nigeria) never gave Europeans land rights to build the trading forts that slowly became the huge slave castles now dotting the West African coast. Forbidding European development allowed Africans far greater control over the landscapes of exchange along the waterline, where British ships’ captains would purchase enslaved Africans from Efik traders. Visitors’ descriptions include lavish accounts of the ways wealthy Efik traders donned British costume, swords, cocked hats, and umbrellas. But even more surprising for many were the traders’ houses. These took the common form of a raised two-storey house with a gallery on all sides. Over generations, some of these trading families stockpiled extraordinary collections of English material goods including gilt pier glasses, sofas, marble sideboards, engravings, clocks, and handsome dining tables. Years of negotiations while dining onboard with ships’ captains also meant that these traders could easily navigate both African and British dining practices. It was common practice for Efik traders to order not just objects but whole houses. This paper explores this practice and offers preliminary frames for interpretation.
Louis P. Nelson, Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia, is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean, and West Africa, and is a leading advocate for the reconstruction of place-based public history. Louis is an accomplished scholar, with two book-length monographs published by University of North Carolina Press and Yale University Press, three edited collections of essays, two terms as senior co-editor of Buildings and Landscapes—the leading English language venue for scholarship on vernacular architecture—and numerous other articles. His work focuses on the early American South, the Greater Caribbean, and the Atlantic rim. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (Yale, 2016) won three major book awards and was very positively reviewed in twelve different venues ranging from the popular Times Literary Supplement to the scholarly William and Mary Quarterly, The Art Bulletin, and Architectural History, many calling it a tour de force.
Shaheen Alikhan’s dissertation work, continuing from her MA thesis in architectural history on the construction of eighteenth-century slaving vessels, focuses on the reshaping and creation of waterfront spaces to facilitate the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. These liminal spaces, essential but unique within the larger landscape of chattel slavery, represented concentrated areas in which enslaved and legally free Africans and members of the African diaspora took opportunities to learn, communicate, earn wages, and build relationships and they have been largely overlooked. As an architectural historian, Shaheen has contributed to anthologies pertaining to the Caribbean world and reparative justice, and worked as a digital documentation specialist. She is currently in discussion with a publisher about her book Building a Floating Prison: Slave Ships throughout the Long Eighteenth Century.
Conference | Enslavement and Art: Forced Labor
From ArtHist.net:
Enslavement and Art: Forced Labor in the History of Art
Online and in-person, Humboldt Labor at the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, 17–18 June 2024
Organized by Eva Ehninger and Ittai Weinryb
Registration due by 15 June 2024
Forced labor is a broad category all too often taken to comprise a human condition whose only shared feature is broadly defined as the control over another human, especially in regards to their labor and reproductive capacities (categories of ‘slavery’, ‘forced labor’ as well as ‘unfree’, ‘enslaved’, and ‘indentured human condition’ are still poorly defined in this context). Forced labor was and continues to play a central role in the intimate entanglement of aesthetics and commerce. Art production and patronage were part of networks that unfree humans aided in financing. These networks continue to echo in the collections, libraries, and museums, many built through the profit of unfree humans, that hold premodern and modern art today. This conference seeks to expand our current understanding of the role forced labor played in the world of art making and consumption. It challenges concepts of heritage and their corresponding attributions of identity, representation, and ownership, and looks at transformations of value, from the perspective of forced labor. Hopefully, this conference will therefore prompt comparative thinking to uncover the foundations, the structures, the practices, as well as the sustained consequences and current realities of forced labor in relations to art.
Admission is by registration only. To participate on-site or via Zoom, please register here»
m o n d a y , 1 7 j u n e
9.00 Coffee
9.30 Introduction by Eva Ehninger (Berlin) and Ittai Weinryb (New York)
10.00 Space
Moderation and Response: Elisaveta Dvorakk (Berlin)
• Valika Smeulders (Amsterdam) — ‘… Placing a Moor Next to Young Girls’: The Colonial World Order in Dutch Art
• Meredith Martin (New York) — Neoclassicism and Pro-Slavery Ideology in Paris and Saint-Domingue
• Burcu Dogramaci (Munich) — Remembering Forced Labor: DP Artist Exhibitions in Munich in 1947 and 1948
12.15 Lunch Break
14.15 Capital
Moderation and Response: Johanna Függer-Vagts (Berlin)
• Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton) — Mobile Enclosures: Cultivating Plantation Life across the British Empire
• Carrie Pilto (Amsterdam) — Someone Is Getting Rich
18.00 Other Women Stopped Work and Joined Us: Filmic Re-imagination of Work in Yugantar‘s Molkarin
Film Screening and Conversation with Pallavi Paul (New Delhi) and Nicole Wolf (London)
Organization and Moderation: Aisha Allakhverdieva, Franziska Blume, Justine Ney, and Hanna Steinert (Berlin)
Kino Central (Rosenthaler Str. 39, 10178 Berlin)
t u e s d a y , 1 8 j u n e
10.00 Materiality
Moderation and Response: Juliette Calvarin (Berlin)
• Jennifer Chuong (Cambridge, MA) — An Unforced Production: Dox Thrash and the Invention of Carborundum Engraving
• Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Washington, DC) — Concealing / Revealing: Depictions of the Enslaved in Late Antique Furnishing Textiles
• Matthew Rampley (Brno) — Modern Architecture and Global Material Extraction
12.15 Lunch Break
13.45 Body
Moderation and Response: Katja Müller-Helle (Berlin)
• Ana Lucia Araujo (Washington, DC) — Iron: The World Enslaved Blacksmiths Made in the Americas
• Mahalakshmi Rakesh (New Delhi) and Sneha Ganguly (New Delhi) — Artisanal Production and Agency: Regulations and Control in Early India
• David Joselit (Cambridge, MA) — Disfiguration and Survivance
16.00 Closing Remarks
New Book | Denmark Vesey’s Bible
Having first appeared from Princeton UP in 2022, the book was released in paperback this spring (the hardcover edition is included in the press’s 50% off sale, which ends May 31).
Jeremy Schipper, Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 216 pages, ISBN: 978-0691192864 (hardcover), $27 / ISBN: 978-0691259314 (paperback), $19.
On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man, was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina. He was convicted of plotting what might have been the largest insurrection against slaveholders in US history. Witnesses claimed that Vesey appealed to numerous biblical texts to promote and justify the revolt. While sentencing Vesey to death, Lionel Henry Kennedy, a magistrate at the trial, accused Vesey not only of treason but also of “attempting to pervert the sacred words of God into a sanction for crimes of the blackest hue.” Denmark Vesey’s Bible tells the story of this momentous trial, examining the role of scriptural interpretation in the deadly struggle against American white supremacy and its brutal enforcement.
Jeremy Schipper brings the trial and its aftermath vividly to life, drawing on court documents, personal letters, sermons, speeches, and editorials. He shows how Vesey compared people of African descent with enslaved Israelites in the Bible, while his accusers portrayed plantation owners as benevolent biblical patriarchs responsible for providing religious instruction to the enslaved. What emerges is an explosive portrait of an antebellum city in the grips of racial terror, violence, and contending visions of biblical truth. Shedding light on the uses of scripture in America’s troubled racial history, Denmark Vesey’s Bible draws vital lessons from a terrible moment in the nation’s past, enabling us to confront racism and religious discord today with renewed urgency and understanding.
Jeremy Schipper is professor in the Departments for the Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the coauthor, with Nyasha Junior, of Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon and the author of Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant and Parables and Conflict in the Hebrew Bible. He lives in Toronto.
Call for Papers | Puritan Picture
Unidentified painter (British School), Allegorical Painting of Two Ladies Wearing Beauty Patches, detail, ca. 1650s, oil on canvas, 64 × 75 cm. The painting sold at Trevanion, Fine Art and Antiques sale on 23 June 2021 (lot 564).
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This extraordinary painting predates even the long 18th century, but I imagine many Enfilade readers are as intrigued with it as I am. –CH. From ArtHist.net:
Puritan Picture: Vanity, Morality, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Britain
Yale University, New Haven, 27–28 September 2024
Proposals due by 17 June 2024
The middle decades of the seventeenth century in Britain were characterized by radical political, religious, and social change. In this period, an unknown artist created a remarkable painting that spoke to fears and anxieties crystallizing around a perceived increase in moral laxity, gender transgression, and the insidious influence of foreigners. The painting depicts two women side by side, each wearing a conspicuous array of beauty patches. The woman on the left reprimands her companion with the words “I black with white bespott: y[o]u white w[i]th blacke this Evill / proceeds from thy proud hart, then take her: Devill.” Text and image combine to inveigh against the sins of pride, vanity, and worldly excess. The painting reminds the viewer that sinful behavior leads to the devil and exhorts them to seek salvation.
Purchased by the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) at auction in June 2021, the painting was recognized as a work of outstanding significance to the study of early modern race and gender. After an export stop, it was acquired by Compton Verney, an art gallery in Warwickshire that is housed in a Grade I–listed eighteenth-century manor surrounded by 120 acres of parkland, landscaped by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Compton Verney has loaned the painting to the YCBA for inclusion in the museum’s ongoing technical study of the theory and practice of painting skin tones. It will go on view at Compton Verney in November 2024. This enigmatic painting has never been subject to sustained research, and much about it remains uncertain. We do not know the identity of the artist or patron, or the original location of the painting, and it is not clear whether the two women are real or imagined figures.
The YCBA, in partnership with Compton Verney, will host a two-day symposium to increase understanding of this significant object in the history of British art and culture. We welcome proposals from established and emerging scholars and encourage participants to be imaginative in their approach. Themes for consideration include but are not limited to:
• artist circles and modes of production
• color symbolism and its connection to racial formation
• contemporary attitudes to piety and morality
• cosmetics, clothing, and accessories
• female sexuality and gender roles
• pigments and processes used by early modern artists for painting skin tones
• religious and ethnic minorities in early modern Britain
• the role of print culture and prescriptive literature
The symposium will be held at Hastings Hall, Yale School of Architecture on September 27 and 28, 2024. Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biography to Sarah Leonard (sarah.leonard@yale.edu) by Monday, 17 June 2024. Final presentations should not exceed twenty minutes in length. The YCBA will provide travel and accommodations for successful applicants.
Call for Papers | Baroque Times: The Table’s Scenography
From ArtHist.net:
Baroque Times: The Table’s Scenography
Vila Nova de Foz Côa, Portugal, 14–16 November 2024
Proposals due by 15 July 2024
When discussing the table or the act of being at the table, our immediate thoughts go to the act of eating, the company present, and the food to be shared. However, the table transcends its practical function to become a richly layered symbol, both materially and conceptually, embodying sociability in myriad ways throughout history. During the modern era (17th–18th centuries), the table’s significance unfolded across diverse contexts and environments, from the opulent settings of palaces to the humble abodes of common citizens. Regardless of setting, the table served as a focal point, drawing together a spectrum of personalities and activities, thus assuming a central role in daily life. In palatial settings, the table symbolized power and sophistication, showcasing culinary refinement and adherence to social etiquette. The table epitomizes socialization, serving as a nexus for fundamental human experiences—the nourishment of the body and the establishment of communal identity within society. As such, it acts as a microcosm of cultural norms and interpersonal dynamics, revealing insights into societal values and individuals’ relationships with one another and with themselves.
Inspired by Christian traditions, the Western table echoes the teachings of Christ, who in the Gospels elevated the table to a sacred space for gatherings, sharing, inclusion and teaching. Depicted in various biblical scenes, such as the Wedding at Cana, the home of Martha, the Emmaus supper, and the Last Supper, the table emerges as a locus of truth and reverence, where communal sharing imbues food with deeper meaning.
At the table, physical proximity, and eye contact foster connections, yet may also give rise to discord. It is a space where alliances are forged, love and friendship blossom, and adversaries may surface. In its multifaceted nature, the table serves as a catalyst for a myriad of human activities, offering profound insights into the essence of human existence, whether amidst moments of serenity or the complexities of social interaction.
The following themes are proposed, although other related topics may also be accepted:
• The Table as Object: consideration of the table as a piece of furniture, in its various functions, such as dining, campaign, gaming.
• The Everyday Table: a space for daily gatherings, where routines and eating habits intertwine.
• Table and Power: dynamics of power and social hierarchy that manifest through table arrangement and associated rituals.
• Dressing the Table: the importance of porcelain, glassware, cutlery, textiles, and other elements in the aesthetic and functional composition of the table.
• Etiquette: the norms and social conventions that govern behavior at the table across different cultures and historical contexts.
• Food: the relationship between the table and the culinary space, including kitchens and food preparation areas.
• Celebration: how the table becomes the centrepiece of festive celebrations (attire, theatre, dance, fireworks, music, and ephemeral art in general).
• The Table in Literature: representations and symbolism associated with the table in literary works.
• Cross-Cultural Perspectives: Investigating intercultural practices related to the table and their mutual influences.
• Representations in the Visual Arts: how artists depict the table in painting, sculpture, tiles, textiles, and other decorative arts.
• Virtualizations of the Table: how the table is reinterpreted and recreated in virtual and digital environments.
• The Table in Cinema: representation and role of the table in neo-baroque movies of different genres.
• The Neo-Baroque Table: How the aesthetic and cultural principles of the Baroque continue to influence contemporary representations of the table.
To submit a proposal, send an abstract (a maximum of 300 words) addressing the objectives, methodology, and relevance of the work to the themes of the congress, along with a biographical note (maximum of 150 words) to temposdobarroco@gmail.com by 15 July 2024.
Scientific Committee
Carla Sofia Ferreira Queirós (ESEPP; CITCEM/FLUP)
Margarida Rebocho (ARS LUMINAE)
Maria João Pereira Coutinho (IHA – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Rui De Luna (Associação Cultural Castilho e Távora)
Sílvia Ferreira (IHA – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Scientific Committee
Ana Isabel Buescu (CHAM – NOVA FCSH)
Caroline Heering (Université catholique de Louvain)
Fátima Eusébio (Secretariado Nacional para os Bens Culturais da Igreja)
Fernando Quiles García (Universidad Pablo Olavide)
Gonçalo Vasconcelos e Sousa (Universidade Católica Portuguesa-Porto)
Inês de Ornelas e Castro (IELT – NOVA FCSH)
Isabel Drumond Braga (FLUL, CIDEHUS-UÉ; CH-UL)
Jaromir Olsovsky (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic)
Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández (Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México)
Ricardo Bernardes (Fundação Casa de Mateus)
Call for Articles | Anachronisms in Art History
From the Call for Papers / Appel à contributions:
Anachronisms in Art History / Anachronismes en histoire de l’art
Special issue of Perspective: Actualité en histoire de l’art
Edited by Thomas Golsenne, Hélène Leroy, and Hélène Valance
Proposals due by 17 June 2024, with finished articles due by 1 December 2024
Perspective will explore, in its 2025.2 issue—co-edited by Thomas Golsenne (INHA), Hélène Leroy (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris), and Hélène Valance (université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté/InVisu)—the question of anachronisms in art history.
Since at least the 1960s, a number of critical approaches have emerged with regard to sweeping Western approaches that classified artworks and artists in successive stylistic periods, and even based the discipline on these temporal and formal categories. They made it possible to call into question the 19th-century ‘historism’ that confused the scholars’ temporal categories with the historical phenomena themselves, just as they have redefined periods as designations of time, objects of history. In practice, however, it is clear that the period remains more than ever the temporal unit within which we conceive art history and study it. Even if the subject of anachronism in art history emerged much earlier, for reasons that merit further consideration, it genuinely became worthy of interest for the epistemology of the historical sciences at the turn of the 21st century. What about art history?
To this end, three main topics emerge for proposed articles:
1 Disciplinary Anachronisms
2 Methodological Anachronisms
3 Historical Anachronisms
Additional information (including a bibliography) is available from the full Call for Papers»
Taking care to ground reflections in a historiographic, methodological, or epistemological perspective, please send your proposals (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters/350 to 500 words, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography limited to a few lines) to the editorial email address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) no later than 17 June 2024.
Perspective handles translations; projects will be considered by the committee regardless of language. Authors whose proposals are accepted will be informed of the decision by the editorial committee in July 2024, while articles will be due on 1 December 2024. Submitted texts (between 25,000 and 45,000 characters/ 4,500 or 7,500 words, depending on the intended project) will be formally accepted following an anonymous peer review process.
Published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) since 2006, Perspective is a biannual journal which aims to bring out the diversity of current research in art history, highly situated and explicitly aware of its own historicity.
Conference | Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages
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Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages
The British Library, London, 28 June 2024
p r o g r a m m e
11.00 Registration and coffee
11.30 Juan Gomis (Valencia) — Visual Recognition Tools for the Study of Spanish Chapbooks, 18th and 19th Centuries
12.25 Lunch break
1.30 Karima Gaci (Leeds) — French Grammar Textbooks Published in England, 18th and 19th Centuries
2.15 Yuri Cerqueira dos Anjos (Wellington) — French Writing Manuals in the 19th Century
3.00 Tea
3.30 Alexandra Wingate (Indiana) — Reviewing the Systems Approach: A General Model for Book and Information Circulation
4.15 Sarah Pipkin (London) — Two Works by Kepler in University College London, De stella nova (1606) and De cometis libri tres (1619), and Their Provenance
The seminar will end at 5.00pm. Attendance is free, but please pre-register by sending your full name to Barry Taylor at barry.taylor@bl.uk and Susan Reed at susan.reed@bl.uk.
Exhibition | The Craft of Tea, 1660–2024
Now on view at the The Goldsmiths’ Centre:
The Craft of Tea, 1660–2024
The Goldsmiths’ Centre, London, 1 May — 27 June 2024
The Craft of Tea, 1660–2024 explores the material history of tea, stylistically and thematically, from 1660 to the present day. It presents remarkable silver objects from the Chitra Collection, an extraordinary private museum of historic teawares, alongside examples by modern and contemporary makers. Over forty notable pieces from the collection will be displayed, spanning the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. They will be exhibited together with loans from the Pearson Silver Collection, the Goldsmiths’ Company Collection, and individual makers. The Chitra Collection team has been a long-term contributor to the Goldsmiths’ Centre’s public and training programmes. The co-curated exhibition is a unique chance for members of the jewellery and silversmithing industry, Londoners and visitors to the Goldsmiths’ Centre to view examples from this incredible collection.
The exhibition is divided into eight themes that take you on a journey from the early beginnings of the tea trade in Europe, through tea taking as ritual, power, and rebellion, to the boundary-pushing teapots of the modern and contemporary period. The exhibits are global in scope, whilst also questioning the preoccupations of UK silversmiths today. Amongst the historical examples in each thematic display, you will find a contemporary counterpart that responds to or extends the ideas under consideration. Whatever your interest—visual, historical, or practical—we hope that you will enjoy this celebration of the craft of making tea.
The Chitra Collection is an unsurpassed private museum of historic teawares. With objects from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the collection celebrates the global significance of tea and teaware design, from ancient China, through to the present day. In 2011 Nirmal Sethia, philanthropist and chairman of the luxury tea company Newby London, set himself the task of acquiring the world’s greatest collection of teawares to record and preserve tea cultures of the past. Today, the collection, named in honour of his late wife, Chitra, totals almost 3000 objects and is already the world’s finest and most comprehensive of its kind.
Charlotte Dew, Evelyn Earl, Grace Fannon, and Gregory Parsons, eds., The Craft of Tea, 1660–2024 (London: The Goldsmiths’ Centre, 2024), 70 pages, ISBN: 978-0907814450, $16.
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