New Book | The Portrait Miniature: A New History
From Thames & Hudson:
Damiët Schneeweisz, Rosalind McKever, and Adriana Concin, The Portrait Miniature: A New History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2026), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0500481172, $50.
This richly illustrated study brings the fascinating stories behind this intimate art form to a broad audience and restores women to their place in the history of the portrait miniature.
The portrait miniature—a precious, hand-held painting, exchanged as a token of love or remembrance—has long been cherished for its ability to connect people. This book reveals the extraordinary stories, artistic achievement, and cultural and political impact behind these tiny artworks. This vibrant history of miniature painting, from its fifteenth-century origins to the early twentieth century, links art, fashion, and society in a captivating tale of identity and representation. The Portrait Miniature expands the story to explore the genre’s global reach and highlights the important role of women in its development. Illustrated with miniatures shown at or close to their actual size, as well as enlarged details that allow the reader to revel in the painters’ skill, this book celebrates some of the most sophisticated portraits ever accomplished.
Damiët Schneeweisz is assistant curator of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a specialist in early modern European and American art and empire.
Rosalind McKever is curator of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She specializes in modern European art, its reception in Britain and North and South America, and its relationship with fashion and design.
Adriana Concin is a research fellow and former assistant curator of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is a specialist in early modern portraiture and the history of collecting.
New Book | Prints from the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria in Naples
Enfilade readers may find this volume from Bibliopolis particularly interesting for its analysis of the creation of the print collection of Carlo Firmian in the 1770s, its discussion of the publishing history of Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte and antiquarian practices in eighteenth-century Naples, early Neapolitan experiments with aquatint in the 1760s, and of publication projects such as the so-called Vestiture del Regno (begun in 1784) and William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei, of 1776.
Paola D’Alconzo and Domenico Pino, eds., Le Stampe nel Castello: Studi sul Fondo Grafico della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2026), 302 pages, ISBN: 978-8870887570, €40. Also available in digital format, with the option of purchasing either the entire volume or individual chapters.
This volume brings to the attention of the public the first results of a several-year-long work of reorganization, conditioning, and cataloguing of the works pertaining to the Fondo Grafico (Prints and Drawings Cabinet) of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, Naples. Created shortly after the foundation of the Società in 1876, and enriched throughout the years, the Cabinet contains today around 3.600 drawings and 7.000 prints, with works varying in quality, subject, and material conditions. Although it has always been accessible to scholars, the print collection is undoubtedly the lesser known part.
The recent reorganization work has allowed for a better understanding of this nucleus, unveiling its specificities and layered history: as a whole the collection appears valuable in that it presents the potential to complicate, and in certain instances also to rewrite, some passages of the historiography on the graphic arts and their fortune in Naples and beyond.
Even as the essays take important steps in that direction, they also look beyond the prints held by the Società, considering works from the collection in reference to other categories of objects (such as porcelain and terraglie, i.e. Neapolitan earthenware) as well as other collections of works on paper in the city. This approach has proven particularly successful in that it unveils articulate relationships between the material heritage held by the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria and wider discourses, according to a methodological model that has proven very useful for historical studies, but that had never before been applied to the Fondo Grafico.
Paola D’Alconzo is Associate Professor of Museology, Art Criticism, and Conservation Theory at the University of Naples Federico II, where she also coordinates the Master’s degree programme in ‘Cultural Heritage, Art History and Museum Studies’. Her research mainly concerns the history of art-historical heritage conservation and the history of collecting in the 18th and 19th centuries. She has focused in particular on the restoration and musealization of wall paintings found in excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii; the reception of Vesuvian antiquities and their influence on artistic production; the collecting and antiquarian interests of Ferdinando Galiani; the regulations promulgated in the Kingdom of Naples and Spain to safeguard the archaeological and art-historical heritage; and the conservation and exhibition of paintings of the Farnese and later Bourbon collections. She sits on the directing board of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, being the referent for the Fondo Grafico.
Domenico Pino takes care of the Fondo Grafico of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria since 2024, being in charge of cataloguing, reorganisation projects, and access to the collection. He obtained a PhD in History of Art from University College London in 2025 with a thesis on printmaking in Naples between 1734 and 1799. He has held fellowships from the British Museum (2020), the Centre for the History of Art and Architecture of Port Cities at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte (2022–23), and the Pio Monte della Misericordia at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici (2023–25).
c o n t e n t s
Preface – Renata De Lorenzo
• Le Stampe nel Castello: Un patrimonio da riscoprire — Paola D’Alconzo and Domenico Pino
• MetaFAD e il Polo Digitale degli Istituti Culturali di Napoli: Un modello di catalogazione e fruizione integrata — Donatella Zampano
• La Storia del Fondo Grafico della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria — Costanza Marsico
• Diplomacy in Print: Carlo Firmian’s Collection at Capodimonte — Emma De Jong
• Un’inedita veduta della città: Iscrizioni manoscritte sulle incisioni napoletane — Domenico Pino
• Alla ricerca di un metodo per pubblicare le prime scoperte vesuviane: Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte tra tentativi falliti e ipotesi in corso d’opera — Paola D’Alconzo
• Esperimenti e innovazioni dell’industria editoriale napoletana del ‘700: Il San Gennaro di Giuseppe Aloja — Domenico Pino
• Creato sotto pressione: Il Vesuvio e gli scambi interculturali dell’Illuminismo europeo — Domenico Pino
• 1770–1800: Gli anni d’oro dell’Illuminismo ferdinandeo e la fortuna delle Vestiture del Regno — Angela Caròla Perrotti
• Declinazioni dall’antico: Dalle stampe alle terraglie — Alessandra Zaccagnini
Index of names
Index of places
Exhibition | Inspired by Flaxman
Wedgwood, The Apotheosis of Homer, 1777–80
(National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery)
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Now on view at the York Art Gallery:
Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman
York Art Gallery, 18 September 2026 — 17 January 2027
Curated by Beatrice Bertram and Richard Johns
Marking 200 years since the death of York-born artist John Flaxman, this exhibition celebrates his life, work, and lasting influence on art and design.
Showcasing Flaxman’s remarkable skill as a draughtsman, sculptor, and designer, the exhibition explores his influence on fellow artists including J.M.W Turner, William Blake, and potter Josiah Wedgwood. Objects from York Art Gallery’s collection are displayed alongside key loans from UK institutions including the National Gallery, Royal Academy, V&A, and the Barber Institute of Fine Art, amongst others.
Flaxman is one of the York-born artists engraved into the façade of York Art Gallery, celebrating the incredible talent that emerged from the city. Following classic Grecian and Roman styles, Flaxman’s designs were used on the iconic Wedgwood pottery as well as inspiring drawings, paintings, stonework, buildings, sculpture, metalwork, chess pieces, funerary monuments, and more. Though not as well-known as Turner or Wedgwood have come to be, Flaxman had a significant influence on art that extends through to modern day from humble beginnings in the city.
Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman is curated by Beatrice Bertram, Senior Curator at York Art Gallery, and Richard Johns, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of York. The exhibition has been supported by and produced in partnership with the University of York’s History of Art Department and accompanied by an academic publication, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to Flaxman in York.
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From Paul Holberton Publishing with distribution by Yale UP:
Beatrice Bertram and Richard Johns, eds., Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2026), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1917976220, £25 / €30 / $35.
This collection of thought-provoking new writing explores the far-reaching creative legacy of the sculptor, designer, and illustrator John Flaxman (1755–1826). Timed to coincide with the bicentenary of Flaxman’s death in 1826, it accompanies a major exhibition at York Art Gallery, developed in collaboration with the University of York.
Flaxman found his subjects in the epic myths of ancient Greece and on the streets of modern Rome, in the drama of a game of chess, and in the global events that unfolded in his lifetime. His work has, in turn, inspired generations of artists and makers. For the first time in more than 40 years, Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman explores the full range and impact of the artist’s work across different media. A collection of insightful essays and shorter ‘objects in focus’ by leading curators, artists, art historians, and literary critics introduce Flaxman for a new audience, as an artist whose work in ceramic, marble, silver and gold, and on paper continues to resonate.
Each author takes an object or concept from the exhibition as a starting point to bring new light to Flaxman’s legacy, including the creative dialogue between his art and the work of William Blake, William Etty, Henry Fuseli, Angelica Kauffman, J.M.W. Turner, and Josiah Wedgwood. The result is an ambitious reframing of the artist’s creative connections, with new perspectives on the collaborative nature of Flaxman’s enterprise, his identity as a disabled artist, the colonial reach of his monumental sculpture, the poetical legacies of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, and more.
Turner, Wedgwood and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman is edited by the exhibition co-curators, Beatrice Bertram and Richard Johns, with additional contributions by Pat Barker (Booker Prize winner and author of The Silence of the Girls), Kenneth Clark (University of York), Jason Edwards (University of York), Tony Heaton (sculptor and disability activist) and Martin Myrone (art historian), Catrin Jones (V&A Wedgwood Collection), Brigid von Preussen (Oxford University), Erica Sheen (University of York), and Michael Smith (University of York).
New Book | Birth of a Global City: London in a Revolutionary World
From Penguin Random House:
Jerry White, Birth of a Global City: London in a Revolutionary World, 1789–1815 (London: Bodley Head, 2026), 528 pages, ISBN: 978-1847927354, £30.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars changed London beyond recognition, turning it into the capital of the world—the centre of international finance and trade. Victory over France in 1815 ushered in the ‘British Century’: the next hundred years would be defined by Britain’s capitalist innovation and financial might, naval supremacy and imperial ambition. In this brilliant portrait of these pivotal years, Jerry White looks at how revolution and war on the Continent transformed the capital. While the manufacture of war materials brought wealth for some, high food prices led to bread riots. The war divided public opinion, with ultra-patriots clamouring for the defeat of ‘Boney’, while others sought to emulate the democratic reforms pioneered across the Channel. Crucially, the chaos and uncertainty on the continent led to a mass flight of aristocratic wealth, foreign bankers and European merchants to London, which would help turn the capital into the world’s leading financial centre.
Jerry White shows how huge docks transformed the Port of London into the world’s trading centre; how the City of London financed the war against France and Nathan Mayer Rothschild provided the gold that crushed Napoleon at Waterloo; how a newly embellished Paris stimulated the reconstruction of central London and fuelled its expansion; and how this moment of Britain’s greatest imperial expansion revived briefly the London slave trade before it was finally ended in 1807. It was this turbulent period of war and political turmoil that created London as we know it today.
Jerry White teaches London history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of London from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His more recent books include Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison and Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University of London in 2005 and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
c o n t e n t s
A Note on Money
Maps
Prologue: A World Turned Upside Down
Part 1 | Chaos, 1789–1801
1 Divided City
2 Gateway to a Turbulent World
3 Pitt’s Gold
Part 2 | Foundations, 1802–1815
4 Revolution on the River
5 Party v Country
6 Wellington’s Gold
7 London Remade
Afterword: The End of the Beginning
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
New Book | Performing Enlightenment: Buddhism and Theater
From Harvard UP (Professor Wang will present on the book at Yale this Thursday at 4pm as part of the China Colloquium Lecture Series) . . .
Mengxiao Wang, Performing Enlightenment: Buddhism and Theater in Early Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2026), 348 pages, ISBN: 978-0674303423, $53.
In early modern China, a major revival of Buddhism coincided with a surging fascination with theater. Buddhist monastics and laypeople increasingly participated in viewing, discussing, and writing plays. Far from merely serving as a medium for conveying religious teachings and practices, drama became a source of deep concern for Buddhists due to the perceived tension between spiritual discipline and worldly entertainment.
In Performing Enlightenment, Mengxiao Wang examines how Buddhist clerics and laity engaged with and drove innovations in theater during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. Drawing on an extensive range of sources—including clerical sermons, scriptural commentaries, temple gazetteers, morality books, literati prose, and dramatic texts and paratexts—Wang argues that Ming-Qing Buddhists resolved the conflict between religion and entertainment by transforming theater into a creative mode of devotional practice. Consequently, playwriting, stage performance, and theatergoing all emerged as legitimate pathways to spiritual enlightenment. This interdisciplinary work provides fresh insights into Chinese studies, Buddhist studies, and theater studies while offering a comparative perspective on the complex interplay between religion, literature, and performance across cultures.
Mengxiao Wang is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD from Yale University and was the Sheng Yen Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Buddhism at UC Berkeley.
c o n t e n t s
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Note to the Reader
Introduction
1 Forbidding Theater
2 Philosophizing Theater
3 Playwright as Buddha
4 Drama as Scripture
5 Staging as Ritual
Coda
Appendix 1 Translation of Zhuhong’s “Jiyue”
Appendix 2 Translation of Zhida’s “Xiju gongtong”
Appendix 3 Plot Synopsis for Tanhuaji
Appendix 4 Plot Synopsis for Guiyuanjing
Appendix 5 Extant Editions of Guiyuanjing
Bibliography
New Book | Objects in Conflict
The papers grew out of the 2023 conference at the University of Regensburg. From Routledge:
Volker Depkat and Harriet Rudolph, eds., Objects in Conflict: The Material Culture of Intercultural Diplomacy, 1600–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2027), 348 pages, ISBN: 978-1032884691 (hardback), $234 / ISBN: 978-1032884691 (ebook), $55.
This book presents case studies that analyze the diplomatic uses and functions of robes, furniture, weapons, tools, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, books, food, and other material objects in early modern inter-cultural diplomatic encounters in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific world. Readers will gain insights into the material dimensions of early modern diplomacy and the cultural logics and diplomatic rationales of object use in a wide range of regional, political, and imperial contexts spanning the Habsburg Empire, France, Spain, the Ottoman Empire, British and French colonial North America, colonial Mexico, Hawaii, and the South Seas. Transcending the established topic of gift exchanges, the volume aims at an analysis of the overall material settings of early modern diplomatic encounters. With its clear temporal focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the source-driven case studies on concrete objects and object groups open multiple paths into the complexities of the early modern era as a formative phase in the history of diplomacy.
Volker Depkat is Professor of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His recent publications include American Exceptionalism (2021), A New American Confederation: How German Federalism Inspired the US-Constitution (2024; co-authored), and Representations and Uses of the American Revolution in Past and Present (2025; co-edited).
Harriet Rudolph is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Her publications include Material Culture in Modern Diplomacy from the 15th to the 20th Century (2016; co-edited) and “Istanbul as a Collection Site: Cross-Cultural Networks of Knowledge in the Alba Amicorum of Ernst Brinck and Wolfgang Leuthkauff” in WissensWelten – Worlds of Knowledge (2026).
c o n t e n t s
1 Introduction — Volker Depkat and Harriet Rudolph
I | Where are the Objects? Tracing the Material Culture of Intercultural Diplomacy in European Collections
2 Exotic Gifts, On the Lobbying of Indigenous Elites to Influence European Colonial Policy: Selected Examples from around the World in European Museums — Viola König
3 Crafting Diplomacy: Extraordinary Embassies and the Programmatic Display of French Luxury Goods, 1662–1789 — Barbara Lasic
4 Immaterial Diplomacy: Dissimulating Muslim Embassies in Habsburg Spain — Rubén González Cuerva
II | Beyond Official Procedures: Individual Material Practices of Diplomatic Actors in a Transcultural Setting
5 Materialities, Spaces, Emotions: The Leuthkauff album amicorum as an Entangled Object and the Challenges of Researching the Material Culture of Diplomacy — Harriet Rudolph
6 Diplomatic Homes Abroad: Exploring Ottoman and Habsburg Relations through Furniture and Decoration in the Early Modern Period — Gamze İlaslan Koç
7 Material Culture and Practices of Friendship in Intercultural Diplomacy: A Case Study from Late Seventeenth-Century Istanbul — Christine Vogel
III | Material Procedures of Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in Imperial and Local Centers of Power
8 Gift Exchange, Marketing, and Memory: The Material Culture of the Moroccan Embassy to Vienna in 1783 — Mark Häberlein
9 The Stool, the Curtain, and the Robes of Honour: A Ludic and Material Reading of the Diplomatic Space at Baron Kuefstein’s Reception in Ottoman Hungary (1628) — M. Halef Cevrioğlu
10 Mere Container or Object of Intrinsic Value?: A Leather Wallet on Diplomatic Mission in the Ottoman-Habsburg Wars — Suraiya Faroqhi
IV | Frontier Objects: The Material Culture of Diplomacy on Imperial Peripheries
11 Textile Diplomacy: Tahitian Bark Cloth in the Age of Early Pacific Encounter — Anne Mariss
12 English Liquor, Indian Corn: Food Diplomacy and Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Haudenosaunee Relations — Markus J. Diepold
13 Objects, Power, and Anishinaabeg-British Diplomacy at Fort St. Joseph, 1796–1810 — Jonathan Quint
New Book | Jacques Courtin (1668–1752)
From Silvana Editoriale (as noted by Adam Busiakiewicz at Art History News, now back with its usual array of informative posts after an August break) . . . .
François Marandet, Jacques Courtin (Sens, 1668 – Paris, 1752): Le pari de l’autopromotion (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2026), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-8836661312, €30.
Cet ouvrage fait redécouvrir un artiste français du début du XVIIIe siècle presque totalement oublié et pourtant des plus originaux : le peintre Jacques Courtin, né à Sens en 1668 et mort à Paris en 1752. D’origine modeste (son père était boucher), il quitta sa région natale, la Bourgogne, aux alentours de 1686 afin de mener une carrière artistique à Paris. Devenu académicien en 1710, il chercha à s’affirmer en peignant des fantaisies, qui, selon la presse de l’époque, désignaient des scènes de genre réalisées à la manière des maîtres hollandais du Siècle d’or, et gravées dans la foulée selon une maquette identique. Sans avoir donné lieu à un recueil relié, cette entreprise pionnière anticipait le fameux « Recueil Jullienne » (1735) réunissant l’œuvre gravée de Watteau. La présente monographie restitue également la production historiée de Courtin, qui avait presque entièrement disparu. Outre les nombreuses peintures d’histoire exposées aux Salons de l’Académie, on redécouvre sa contribution à un cycle aussi important que la tenture de l’Histoire d’Achille, commandée par le cardinal de Rohan vers 1733.
Faute de biographie publiée du vivant de l’artiste ou à titre posthume, on ignorait tout de sa vie. Grâce aux documents retrouvés aux Archives de l’Yonne, aux Archives des Yvelines et aux Archives nationales, son itinéraire artistique a été reconstitué en très grande partie. Parallèlement à cette refonte, le corpus de Courtin se trouve considérablement enrichi : des critères stylistiques et l’art de l’estampe ont en effet permis de lui réattribuer dix-sept tableaux, alors qu’on ne lui en connaissait que quinze. S’y ajoutent quatre tapisseries tissées d’après ses compositions, ainsi que le tout premier dessin identifié de sa main. Indépendamment de cette renaissance de Courtin, c’est une nouvelle facette de la peinture française du début du XVIIIe siècle qui se révèle. Sans doute parce qu’il partageait ce même esprit frondeur, un artiste aussi célèbre que Fragonard lui rendra indirectement hommage, à la fin des années 1760, en peignant une nouvelle série de fantaisies.
c o n t e n t s
Préface
Introduction
Chronologie
1 L’Historie des Débuts, 1668–1713
Du Sénonais à la capitale
Premières commandes
2 Le «Recueil Courtin», 1714–1734
Trente-six fantaisies
Premiers signes d’alarme
3 Le Retour au Grand Format ou la Dernière Chance, 1735–1752
L’espoir d’Achille
Des tableaux anciens au Salon
L’étrange hommage posthume
Annexe 1 | Extrait du transport de bail et vente de meubles par Jacques Courtin à Guillaume de Mazières (1717)
Annexe 2 | Extrait de l’inventaire après décès de Jacques Courtin (1752)
Bibliographie
New Book | The Connoisseur: A Cultural History
From Reaktion Books with distribution in the U.S. by The University of Chicago Press:
Peter Burke, The Connoisseur: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2026), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1836391951, £20 / $28.
The connoisseur has been an influential, if somewhat mysterious, figure in the history of art, responsible for making or breaking high-profile collections and reputations and influencing taste, the art market, and the field of art history with their pronouncements. But what did it take to become a connoisseur, and how reliable were the great connoisseurs of previous centuries? With the advent of scientific techniques and artificial intelligence, what future is there for expertise based on the trained eye? This book offers the first history of the art connoisseur, from the Renaissance to the professionalization of the role in the nineteenth century and on to the present day. Featuring portrayals of some of the leading connoisseurs, such as Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi, and Giovanni Morelli, this is a highly readable history of the extraordinary characters and intellects that shaped the art world through a mixture of intuition, learning, and chutzpah.
Peter Burke is a pioneering cultural historian and author of over thirty books, including Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Reaktion, 2019). His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy.
c o n t e n t s
Preface
1 What Is Connoisseurship?
2 The Birth of the Connoisseur
3 Codifying Connoisseurship
4 The Age of the Amateurs
5 The Age of the Professionals
6 Globalization and Science
7 Crisis
Conclusion: Can We Trust Connoisseurship?
References
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
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
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