Exhibition | Place and Identity in Early American ‘Schoolgirl’ Art
Attributed to Faith Trumbull (1743–1775), Needlework Picture, Boston and Lebanon, Connecticut, 1754, silk, mica, and gouache on silk, 23 × 54 inches (Hartford: Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, 1974.99.0).
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Opening soon at the American Folk Art Museum:
Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American ‘Schoolgirl’ Art
American Folk Art Museum, New York, 9 October 2026 — 28 February 2027
Curated by Emelie Gevalt and Caroline Culp
Featuring spectacular examples of needlework and other ornamental arts made by American girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American ‘Schoolgirl’ Art sheds new light on a rich but understudied genre, offering one of the most significant presentations on the subject in recent memory. This major loan exhibition brings together approximately 100 exceptional objects from over 35 museums and private collections nationwide, uniting celebrated masterpieces with remarkable lesser-known gems rarely seen by the public.
Unlike many earlier exhibitions, Locating Girlhood explores girlhood artworks from an explicitly art historical perspective, reframing these objects through the lens of place. Though the story of landscape art in the United States has traditionally centered on male academic painters, American girls and young women were laboring over a variety of landscape scenes long before the Hudson River School. From the eighteenth century onwards, representations of landscape were a common visual thread in samplers, needlework pictures, watercolors, and other artworks commonly united under the umbrella term ‘schoolgirl art’, extending from country scenes and cityscapes to maps and other cartographic compositions. By considering these works as deeply resonant expressions of place, the exhibition expands the story of the American landscape and situates women at its heart.
Timed to coincide with the US’s semiquincentennial, Locating Girlhood both celebrates the creativity of early American girls and women and critically examines the colonial and early federal ideologies that structured their worldview. The exhibition is curated by Emelie Gevalt (Deborah Davenport and Stewart Stender Deputy Director & Chief Curatorial and Program Officer) and Caroline Culp (Warren Family Assistant Curator).
Emelie Gevalt and Caroline Culp, eds., Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American ‘Schoolgirl’ Art (Milan: Skira, 2026), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-8857255170, $60. Foreword by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, with additional texts by Elizabeth Bacon Eager and William Huntting Howell, along with an afterword by Andrea Pappas.
New Book | Transpacific Crossings
Emerging from a symposium held at the Denver Art Museum in November 2024, this publication is also available free of charge online with a PDF available for download.
Jorge Rivas Pérez, Karina Corrigan, and Kathryn Santner, Transpacific Crossings: Art, Trade, and the Manila Galleon (Denver: Mayer Center for Ancient and Latin American Art at the Denver Art Museum, 2026), 198 pages, ISBN: 978-1945483202, $30.
For 250 years (1565–1815), the Manila Galleon transported Asian goods from the Philippines to the Americas under the rule of the Spanish Crown. Stopping in Acapulco, Mexico, the silk, fans, lacquered goods, clothes, and porcelain brought by the galleon rapidly circulated through the Americas, introducing a new visual culture that influenced objects, consumers, makers, and merchants alike. Conversely, products imported from the Americas, such as silver, indigo dye, cochineal red, chili peppers, and corn, had an enormous impact on Asia. Eleven scholars from the United States, Mexico, and Singapore present current research on how the vast exchange of materials, techniques, and ideas between continents impacted the trajectory of art and material culture across the Pacific.
c o n t e n t s
Director’s Foreword — Christoph Heinrich
Introduction — Kathryn Santner, Karina H. Corrigan, and Jorge F. Rivas Pérez
The Manila Galleon: An Historical Primer — Diego Javier Luis
Inventories of Luxury and Wealth: Asian Trade and Material Culture in Spanish America — Jorge F. Rivas Pérez
‘Brocades of Gold and Silver upon Silk’: A Microhistory of a Set of Chinese Church Vestments for the Spanish Market — Karina H. Corrigan
Cut from the World: Philippine Piña Fabric in the East India Marine Society Collection — Abi Lua
An Ocean of Blue and White: Archaeological Excavations at the Port of Acapulco — Roberto Junco
Name that Pot! Viceregal Potters and Workshops of Puebla de los Ángeles — Margaret E. Connors McQuade
For the Consolation of Manila: A Case Study of a New Spanish Image of Christ — Ronda Kasl
The Other Silver Flow: Liturgical Objects in the Philippines — Kathryn Santner
A Cabinet of Many Cultures — Clement Onn
‘Graceful, Rich, and Pleasing to the Eye’: Seamless Facture across the Pacific — Samuel Frédéric Luterbacher
Biombos in Modern Mexican Interiors — Aldo Solano Rojas
Contributors
New Book | Art in the Americas
From the MFA Boston:
Ethan Lasser and Erica Hirshler, eds., Art in the Americas: Conflict, Culture, and Exchange in the Eighteenth Century (Boston: MFA Publications, 2026), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0878469116, $50.
Traditionally, the story of 18th-century art from the Americas has been a narrative of exceptionalism and independence, but the reality is a far more nuanced story of encounter and inter-dependence across North, South, and Central America as well as the Caribbean. Drawn from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the iconic paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts featured in this volume illustrate cultures coming together through the exchange of ideas, materials, styles, and techniques. Authored by some twenty-seven writers, including curators, historians, and contemporary artists engaged with the work of their eighteenth-century predecessors, Art in the Americas reflects the range of voices studying and presenting historical American art today. Readers can explore the interconnectedness of the Americas, how local knowledge and materials could influence a faraway market, and the role artists played in shaping ideas and myths of nationhood and identity that are still central to cultures across the Americas today.
Ethan Lasser is Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Conservation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Erica E. Hirshler is Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
c o n t e n t s
Director’s Foreword
From Independence to Interdependence
Boston’s World
Asian Styles in the Americas
History and Mythmaking
Power and Resistance
John Singleton Copley
Communities of Makers
Tea, Coffee, Chocolate and Mate
Homes and Families
Further Reading
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
Exhibition | John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined
Now on view at the YCBA:
John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 3 September 2026 — 25 July 2027
John Constable, East Bergholt Church, 1809, oil on paper mounted to panel, 20 × 16 cm (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B2001.2.237).
John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined explores Constable’s bold, innovative open-air paintings, which radically transformed the trajectory of European landscape painting. Working against the ‘picturesque’ tradition, in which long-established conventions governed what landscape painting should look like, Constable made the skies, light, seasons, and atmosphere the central subjects of his art. Created outdoors and rooted in the direct observation of nature, his iconic pictures of the English landscape have shaped the image of Britain in the popular imagination.
As the only major US exhibition to focus on the seminal British painter on the 250th anniversary of his birth, John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined offers a unique opportunity for American audiences to experience the breadth of the artist’s masterpieces. Bringing together a rich selection of Constable’s great works, the exhibition includes his remarkable cloud studies and plein air sketches alongside two of his ‘six-footers’, including Hadleigh Castle, one of the most iconic works of English landscape painting. The exhibition also presents works that have never before been publicly displayed in the US, among them a study of Hampstead Heath that was recently acquired by the YCBA.
These works are shown alongside engravings and drawings that illuminate the remarkable breadth of Constable’s achievement as a painter, printmaker, and draftsman. Seen together, they reveal how his creative process developed across different media and offer a fuller understanding of an artist who profoundly influenced subsequent generations of painters. The exhibition also includes key pieces by Constable’s contemporaries, such as John Linnell and Richard Parkes Bonington, that reveal the broader artistic context in which he worked. Through his direct engagement with the natural world, Constable established landscape painting as a serious and significant pursuit for artists.
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The landscape paintings of John Constable (1776–1837) are among the most iconic images in British art, transforming the genre of landscape painting. Born in Suffolk, England, the son of a corn and coal merchant and a farmer, Constable took up painting as a youth and entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1799 to study as a painter. As an adult, he moved from London to Hampstead, which would provide the inspiration for his most acclaimed works. Constable’s astonishing capacity to reproduce not only the appearance but also the feeling of nature in paint brought the landscape radically to life, and his commitment to painting ‘on the spot’ was part of a broader artistic approach that would profoundly influence subsequent generations of landscape painters—and shape how the English landscape is imagined and represented to this day.
Tim Barringer, with contributions by Nicholas Robbins, Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-0300284669, $40.
Print Quarterly, September 2026
Charles F. Greville, Title-Plate to the Set of Prints of the Portland Vase, 1786, etching and aquatint, 251 × 354 mm
(London: The British Museum)
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The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 43.3 (September 2026)
a r t i c l e s
• Georgii Titov, “Lost and Found: An Unpublished Woodcut by Pamvo Berynda,” pp. 235–45. In identifying the lower half of a 1629 woodcut, The Prison of The Holy Convicts, the author unfolds, “a revealing case study of how early modern prints circulated and were valued within imperial Russian collections” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Domenico Pino, “Filippo Morghen as Print Publisher in Naples: New Documents,” pp. 246–52. This article arises from the discovery of a small, dated letterpress catalogue of Filippo Morghen’s (1730–1807) production, preserved inside a bound copy of his print series Le Antichità di Pozzuoli, Baja e Cuma that surfaced at auction in Rome. Analysed in conjunction with an unpublished privilege application by Morghen, the new document sheds light on his printmaking, and, especially, on his highly prolific activity as a print-publisher in Naples. It significantly expands the limited archival material relating to the artist, including his known commissions, level of involvement and prices of his prints.
• Ann V. Gunn, “Charles F. Greville (1749–1809) and the Print Industry,” pp. 253–63. Gunn looks at the many ways an eighteenth-century gentleman, Charles F. Greville (1749–1809), interacted with the print industry. Through detailed examination of the sales catalogues of his various collections and correspondence, she demonstrates how his practical involvement in printmaking impacted other areas of his life and career, from disseminating visual knowledge of art, antiquarianism, minerology and horticulture to successfully introducing into Parliament an amendment and extension to the copyright law relating to prints and printmakers in 1777. A portion of the article recounts Greville’s campaign to have the Portland Vase and a painting previously attributed to Correggio engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815).
n o t e s a n d r e v i e w s
• Guido Scholten, Review of the exhibition catalogued ed. by Andreas Stolzenburg and Iris Wenderholm, Akte, Antike, Anatomie: Zeichnend die Welt erschliessen (Michael Imhof, 2024), pp. 281–83.
• Anthony Griffiths, Review of Martin Rose, Henry Winstanley, 1644–1703: The Last Renaissance Engineer. With a Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints (The Cygnet Press, 2024), p. 287.
• An Van Camp, Review of Vincent Wackenheim, La mort dans tous ses états: Modernité et esthétique des Danses macabres, 1785–1966 (L’Atelier contemporain, 2025), pp. 289–92.
• Timon Screech, Review of the exhibition catalogue by Alfred Haft, Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road (British Museum Press, 2025), pp. 312–15.
New Book | Unconventual Women in the Habsburg Low Countries
From Routledge (and discounted until December 31, with code ADC26) . . .
Sarah Joan Moran, Unconventual Women in the Habsburg Low Countries, 1585–1794: Visual Culture at the Court Beguinages (New York: Routledge, 2026), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-9462986343, $234.
This book examines the Court Beguinages, a fascinating group of semi-monastic female communities that were endemic to cities of the Southern Low Countries from the thirteenth century into the twentieth. Their members, called Beguines, played fundamental social and religious roles in their communities, and they also became major patrons of art and architecture, building vast complexes and filling them with paintings, sculptures, prints, textiles, and all sorts of other decorative objects. As the first comprehensive and primary source-driven account of Court Beguinage visual culture, this study explores the historical importance of these institutions and reveals how the Beguines used buildings and images to support devotional practice, shape public perception, raise funds, and negotiate power relationships during the Counter-Reformation. Unconventual Women in the Habsburg Low Countries is intended for scholars and students of early modern history, art and architectural history, cultural history, religious history, and women’s and gender studies.
Sarah Joan Moran is an interdisciplinary historian focused on early modern women and their relationships to visual culture. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University in 2010, and her work has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, Belgian American Educational Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Research Council, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. From 2009 to 2013, she held a junior faculty post at the University of Bern; and at Utrecht University, she was Assistant Professor of Art before 1850 in 2017–18 and Associate Professor of Art before 1850 from 2018 until 2022. Dr. Moran currently holds a research faculty appointment in the Department of Theology at the University of Oslo.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 Beguine Visual Culture in Context
2 The Architecture of the Court Beguinages
3 A ‘Monastic Makeover’: Art and the Consolidation of Beguine Identity in the Counter Reformation
4 Models of Piety: Portrayals of Beguines and Their Audiences
5 Inside Beguine Homes: Material Culture, Devotion, and Family Ties
6 Inside Beguine Churches: Patterns of Patronage and Devotion
7 Framing the Mass: The Altars and Their Altarpieces
8 Beguine Church Furniture for Sacrament, Sermon, and Song
Conclusions
Exhibition | A Light in the Dark: Joseph Wright of Derby
Opening this fall at The Getty:
A Light in the Dark: Joseph Wright of Derby
Getty Center, Los Angeles, 24 November 2026 — 14 March 2027
The British painter Joseph Wright of Derby is celebrated for his astonishing ability to capture the magic of light piercing the dark. In 1760s London he exhibited a series of remarkable pictures that catapulted the provincial artist to national fame. This exhibition reunites several of these works—including the Getty’s recently rediscovered Two Boys with a Bladder—and explores the technical innovations and artistic ambitions behind some of the most enthralling paintings of the 18th century.
From the Getty Shop:
Julia Siemon, ed., A Light in the Dark: Joseph Wright of Derby (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2026), 144 pages, ISBN: 979-8887120416, $30.
The dramatic ‘candlelight’ paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) cast a spell, enthralling viewers with striking scenes that portray human curiosity, the quiet intensity of domestic life, and the excitement of scientific discovery. With a variety of brushstrokes—dabbed here, whiskered there, and dragged elsewhere—Wright pushed boundaries with the transformative power of light. In 2020, the Getty Museum acquired the newly rediscovered Two Boys with a Bladder (1767), a luminous study of innovation, intimacy, and artistic brilliance that challenged established assumptions about Wright and sparked renewed interest in his experiments with light.
A Light in the Dark presents new research to uncover the origins of Two Boys and expand our understanding of Wright’s early candlelights, tracing the invention and initial development of his distinctive style. Whereas recent scholarship has maintained an outward approach that ties the artist’s oeuvre to places that he visited, this volume returns the focus to Wright himself—his biography, technique, and hometown of Derby—in a much-needed reexamination. Complete with fresh historical and technical evidence, this is a fascinating look into the inspirations, aspirations, and experiments behind some of the most remarkable paintings in the history of British art.
Julia Siemon is deputy director and chief curator at Bard Graduate Center. Her publications include, as editor and primary author, The Silver Caesars (2017), and, as contributing author, The Medici (2021), A Royal Renaissance Treasure and Its Afterlives (2021), and others.
Exhibition | Wood and Water: Furniture on Long Island, 1660–1860
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Now on view, with additional information available at The Magazine Antiques:
Wood and Water: Furniture on Long Island, 1660–1860
Preservation Long Island, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, 2 July — 22 November 2026
Over centuries, furniture has connected Long Islanders to each other and the world beyond their shores. Discover the work of the region’s many unsung craftspeople: Quaker joiners, Black makers, women upholsterers, Dutch turners, and Indigenous weavers. From the workshop to the home, these objects reveal networks of exchange, identity, and innovation during a time of profound change.
Wood and Water is presented in celebration of two significant milestones: the 50th anniversary of PLI’s landmark publication, Long Island Is My Nation: The Decorative Arts and Craftmen, 1640–1830, and the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Lauren Brincat and Steven Baltsas with Laini Farrare, Peter Fedoryk, and Katherine C. Hughes, Wood and Water: Furniture on Long Island, 1660–1860 (Cold Spring Harbor: Preservation Long Island, 2026), $35.
New Book | Loving Insects
From the University of Georgia Press:
Beth Fowkes Tobin, Loving Insects: John Abbot’s Drawings and Natural History Collecting in the Atlantic World, 1760s–1840s (Athens, Georgia: Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books, 2026), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0820373577, $40.
The life and work of an overlooked early American artist, naturalist, and specimen hunter John Abbot’s love of insects manifested itself in his exquisite watercolor drawings of butterflies, moths, beetles, cicadas, dragonflies, wasps, and spiders. Considered one of the finest illustrated entomological publications of its era, The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia combined those watercolors with Abbot’s terse notes that described his encounters with these creatures.
Born in London in 1751, Abbot journeyed to the American South in 1773 to collect and draw insects and birds for natural history collectors in Britain. Although he had had ambitions as a young man to join the ranks of London’s natural history illustrators, he never returned to Britain. Instead, Abbot lived most of his long life in Georgia, where he made thousands of watercolor drawings of insects and supplied thousands of insect specimens to his British, European, and American clients. Despite his accomplishments as a naturalist and an artist, he is little known today. Loving Insects aims to rectify this omission by detailing Abbot’s activities as a natural history artist, a specimen hunter, and a naturalist and by claiming a space for him as a major figure in the story of early American natural history.
Beth Fowkes Tobin is professor emerita of English and women’s studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author and/or editor of several books, including The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages and two award-winning books, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting and Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1830. She lives in Chicago.
New Book | The Matter of Still Life
From the University of California Press:
Carol Armstrong, The Matter of Still Life Between Chardin and Morandi (Oakland: University of California Press, 2026), 150 pages, ISBN: 978-0520416994, £42 / $50.
How does still life ‘matter’? The two essays in this book, based on Carol Armstrong’s lectures as part of the 2020 Franklin D. Murphy Lectureship at the University of Kansas, explore the concept of ‘material thought’ as it relates to still life. Armstrong looks at two major figures of European still-life painting: eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. She discusses their paintings alongside the works of other European painters, philosophers, and critics. These close readings consider the question of how we understand materiality in relation to still-life painting and the material objects this genre represents.
Carol Armstrong is Professor of History of Art at Yale University, where she teaches nineteenth-century European art. Her most recent books are Cézanne’s Gravity and Painting Photography Painting.
c o n t e n t s
Preface
1 Chardin, Diderot, and the Muteness of Made Things: Between Ekphrasis and the Encyclopedia
2 Giorgio Morandi and the Matter of Still Life
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
Enfilade 
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