New Book | The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections
From Yale UP:
Robin Simon and MaryAnne Stevens, eds., The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018), 676 pages, ISBN: 9780300232073, $95.
Animated by an unprecedented study of its collections, this book tells the story of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and illuminates the history of art in Britain over the past two and a half centuries. Thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and engravings, as well as silver, furniture, medals, and historic photographs, make up this monumental collection, featured here in stunning illustrations, and including an array of little-studied works of art and other objects of the highest quality. The works of art complement an archive of 600,000 documents and the first library in Britain dedicated to the fine arts. This fresh history reveals the central role of the Royal Academy in British national life, especially during the 19th century. It also explores periods of turmoil in the 20th century, when the Academy sought either to defy or to come to terms with modernism, challenging linear histories and frequently held notions of progress and innovation.
Robin Simon is editor of the British Art Journal and honorary professor of English at University College London. MaryAnne Stevens is an independent art historian and curator.
Exhibition | Napoleon the Strategist
From the press release for the exhibition:
Napoleon the Strategist / Napoléon stratège
Musée de l’Armée, Paris, 6 April — 22 July 2018
Following on from the presentation of Napoleon’s political vision with the 2013 exhibition Napoleon and Europe and an exploration in 2016 of his fall and his legend with Napoleon in Saint Helena: His Fight for His Story, in spring 2018 the Musée de l’Armée will tackle another aspect of the history of Napoleon, whose skills as a ‘military genius’ are universally recognised.
Any examination of Napoleon the strategist has to start by defining the notion of strategy and how it evolved. For it was in Napoleon’s time that the notion became inextricably linked to power and the abilities of the person wields it. The word ‘strategy’ emerged in the military world, gradually taking on the meaning and form that are now applied more broadly to politics, the economy, finance, and communications. The idea behind the exhibition is therefore to train the spotlight on strategy, the intangible expression of Napoleonic thinking where the skill lies in mastering a vast range of parameters and their interactions. The exhibition will draw on maps, documents illustrating the master strategist’s deliberations, and objects—vestiges, symbols and representations of historical facts—that embody the tangible reality that strategic thinking seeks to control.
To ensure that the theme is as widely accessible as possible, Napoleon’s role will be illustrated in the context of his era, including a description of his education, abilities, and the means available to him and to his enemies. The exhibition sets out to show the strategist at work, explain the issues at stakes and how campaigns progressed, and get to the heart of the action to analyse his most famous battles, defeats as well as victories.
Although the new event is separate from the permanent collection galleries devoted to the Revolution and the Empire, it contributes to them with a complementary viewpoint. Multimedia tools will offer an immersive experience to help visitors grasp what is an abstract and complex notion. The permanent galleries will feature new digital installations providing a more narrative and explanatory approach to Napoleon’s strategic ideas. Visitors will be able to move freely between these two approaches. The visit continues on the Invalides site with an exploration of the Dome church, home to Napoleon’s tomb.
François Lagrange and Émilie Robbe, eds., Napoléon stratège (Paris: Lienart, 2018), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-2359062328, 29€.
New Book | European Porcelain in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Distributed by Yale UP:
Jeffrey Munger, with an essay by Elizabeth Sullivan, European Porcelain in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 288 pages, ISBN: 9781588396433, $65.
The quest to discover the process of making porcelain was one of the defining aspects of post-Renaissance Europe, and it had significant artistic, technical, and commercial ramifications. This beautifully illustrated book showcases ninety works, spanning the late 16th to the mid-19th century, and reflecting the major currents of European porcelain production. Each work is shown in glorious new photography, accompanied by analysis and interpretation by one of the leading experts in European decorative arts. Featuring blue-and-white wares from Italy, rare examples of German Meissen, French Sèvres, British Chelsea porcelain, and much more, this is a long-overdue survey of the greatest porcelain treasures from The Met’s vast collection.
Jeffrey H. Munger is former curator, and Elizabeth Sullivan is former associate research curator, both in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Exhibition | France Viewed from the Grand Siècle
Now on view at the Louvre:
France Viewed from the Grand Siècle: Drawings by Israël Silvestre (1621–1691)
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 15 March — 25 June 2018
Curated by Bénédicte Gady and Juliette Trey
While Israël Silvestre’s engravings circulated widely, his drawings remain relatively unknown. The Musée du Louvre is home to a remarkable collection of them, to be shown to the public for the first time.
After training as an engraver under Jacques Callot, Israel Silvestre very quickly turned to the cityscape. Small and picturesque, his early ‘views’ were of his native Nancy and the cities he passed through on the several journeys he made between Paris and Rome. By contrast, his mature works offer broad panoramas of the French capital, with its royal festivities and the changes it was undergoing, and outlines of the cities conquered by Louis XIV in Lorraine and the Ardennes. In addition, his series devoted to the handsome Ile-de-France châteaux—Vaux-le-Vicomte, Meudon, Montmorency, Versailles—brought a fresh eye to architecture and gardens.
The exhibition is organized by Bénédicte Gady and Juliette Trey of the Department of Prints and Drawings, Musée du Louvre.
Benedicte Gady and Juliette Trey, La France vue du Grand Siècle: Dessins d’Israël Silvestre (1621–1691) (Paris: Lienart, 2018), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-2359062311, 29€.
New Book | The Queen’s Embroiderer
From Bloomsbury:
Joan DeJean, The Queen’s Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1632864741, £30.
From the author of How Paris Became Paris, a sweeping history of high finance, the origins of high fashion, and a pair of star-crossed lovers in 18th-century France.
Paris, 1719. The stock market is surging and the world’s first millionaires are buying everything in sight. Against this backdrop, two families, the Magoulets and the Chevrots, rose to prominence only to plummet in the first stock market crash. One family built its name on the burgeoning financial industry, the other as master embroiderers for Queen Marie-Thérèse and her husband, King Louis XIV. Both patriarchs were ruthless money-mongers, determined to strike it rich by arranging marriages for their children.
But in a Shakespearean twist, two of their children fell in love. To remain together, Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot fought their fathers’ rage and abuse. A real-life heroine, Louise took on Magoulet, Chevrot, the police, an army regiment, and the French Indies Company to stay with the man she loved.
Following these families from 1600 until the Revolution of 1789, Joan DeJean recreates the larger-than-life personalities of Versailles, where displaying wealth was a power game; the sordid cells of the Bastille; the Louisiana territory, where Frenchwomen were forcibly sent to marry colonists; and the legendary ‘Wall Street of Paris’, Rue Quincampoix, a world of high finance uncannily similar to what we know now. The Queen’s Embroiderer is both a story of star-crossed love in the most beautiful city in the world and a cautionary tale of greed and the dangerous lure of windfall profits. And every bit of it is true.
Joan DeJean is Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of ten books on French literature, history, and material culture, including most recently The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual and the Modern Home Began and The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour. She lives in Philadelphia and, when in Paris, on the street where the number 4 bus began service on July 5, 1662.
Exhibition | The Chocolate Girl by Liotard
On view this fall at the Zwinger in Dresden:
‘The Most Beautiful Pastel Ever Seen’: The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Étienne Liotard
Zwinger, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 28 September 2018 — 6 January 2019
Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Chocolate Girl, ca. 1744–45 (Dresden: SKD, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister).
The exhibition focuses on one of the most famous works in the collection of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, The Chocolate Girl by the Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789). Liotard enjoyed enormous success as a pastel painter; even Rosalba Carriera, whose mastery of the medium had helped transform it into a serious and highly-admired art form, declared The Chocolate Girl to be “the most beautiful pastel ever seen.”
It was thanks to the art dealer Count Francesco Algarotti, who purchased the picture in Venice in 1745, buying it directly from the artist for the Dresden collection of Augustus III, that the gallery first began to show works by contemporary artists. The pastel medium suited the Rococo taste for lifelike, brilliant portraits and allowed Liotard to create flawless, porcelain-smooth surfaces. The great popularity of the picture, however, also rests on the fact that it depicts a simple, unidentified housemaid, a hitherto rare motif. The clear-eyed precision of Liotard’s observation anticipated not only the art of the Enlightenment but also nineteenth-century Realism.
Equally worthy of mention are the countless adaptations and appropriations of the motif for other, often trivial purposes. Of no less interest is the eccentric painter himself. A true cosmopolitan, he travelled far and wide, sported a luxuriant beard, exotic clothing and a turban and called himself ‘Le peintre turc’. The exhibition’s epilogue showcases Hann Trier’s take on Liotard’s masterpiece. Painted in 1991, Trier’s three-part sequence La Tasse au chocolat, reinterpreted The Chocolate Girl for the twentieth century.
Stephan Koja and Roland Enke, eds., ‘The Most Beautiful Pastel Ever Seen’: The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Étienne Liotard in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2018), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-3777431369, $42.
A full press release is available via Art Daily.
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Note (added 28 September 2018) — The posting was updated to include details of the catalogue and a link to the press release.
New Book | Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790
From Anthem Press:
John Regan, Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790 (London: Anthem Press, 2018), 222 pages, ISBN 9781783087723, £70 / $115.
Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790 explores under-examined relationships between poetry and historiography in the eighteenth century, deepening our understanding of the relationship between poetry and ideas of progress with sustained attention to aesthetic, historical, antiquarian, and prosodic texts from the period. Its central contention is that the historians and theorists of the time did not merely instrumentalize verse in the construction of narratives of human progress, but that the aesthetics of verse had a kind of agency—it determined the character of—historical knowledge of the period. With numerous examples from poems and writing on poetics, Poetry and the Idea of Progress, 1760–1790 shows how the poetic line became a site at which one could make assertions about human development even as one experienced the expressive effects of metred language.
John Regan is a research fellow in English literature at the University of Cambridge. His research interests centre on the cultural dialogue between poetics and historical writing in the long eighteenth century.
C O N T E N T S
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Progress by Prescription
2 Thomas Sheridan and the Divine Harmony of Progress
3 ‘There Is a Natural Propensity in the Human Mind to Apply Number and Measure to Every Thing We Hear’: Monboddo, Steele and Prosody as Rhythm
4 ‘[C]ut into, distorted, twisted’: Thomas Percy, Editing and the Idea of Progress
5 ‘Manners’ and ‘Marked Prosody’: Hugh Blair and Henry Home, Lord Kames
Afterword: Rude Manners, ‘Stately’ Measures: Byron and the Idea of Progress in the New Century
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Visitors to Versailles
An earlier posting included information for the exhibition at Versailles, but here’s information for the exhibition at The Met, including details for the English edition catalogue, distributed by Yale UP:
Visitors to Versailles: From Louis XIV to the French Revolution
Château de Versailles, 24 October 2017 — 25 February 2018
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 16 April — 29 July 2018
Curated by Bertrand Rondot and Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide
The palace of Versailles and its gardens have attracted travelers ever since it was transformed under the direction of the Sun King, Louis XIV, from a simple hunting lodge into one of the most magnificent and public courts of Europe. French and foreign travelers, including royalty, ambassadors, artists, musicians, writers, scientists, grand tourists, and day-trippers, all flocked to the royal palace surrounded by its extensive formal gardens. Versailles was always a truly international setting, and not only drew visitors from Europe and America, but also hosted dignitaries from as far away as Thailand, India, and Tunisia. Their official receptions at Versailles and gift exchanges with the king were among the attractions widely recorded in tourists’ diaries and court gazettes.
Bringing together works from The Met, the Château de Versailles, and over 50 lenders, this exhibition will highlight the experiences of travelers from 1682, when Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles, to 1789, when the royal family was forced to leave the palace and return to Paris. Through paintings, portraits, furniture, tapestries, carpets, costumes, porcelain, sculpture, arms and armor, and guidebooks, the exhibition will illustrate what visitors encountered at court, what kind of welcome and access to the palace they received, and, most importantly, what impressions, gifts, and souvenirs they took home with them.
Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide and Bertrand Rondot, eds., Visitors to Versailles: From Louis XIV to the French Revolution (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 392 pages, ISBN: 9781588396228, $65.
New Book | Picturing War in France
From Yale UP:
Katie Hornstein, Picturing War in France, 1792–1856 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 208 pages, ISBN: 9780300228267, $70.
From the walls of the Salon to the pages of weekly newspapers, war imagery was immensely popular in postrevolutionary France. This fascinating book studies representations of contemporary conflict in the first half of the 19th century and explores how these pictures provided citizens with an imaginative stake in wars being waged in their name. As she traces the evolution of images of war from a visual form that had previously been intended for mostly elite audiences to one that was enjoyed by a much broader public over the course of the 19th century, Katie Hornstein carefully considers the influence of emergent technologies and popular media, such as lithography, photography, and panoramas, on both artistic style and public taste. With close readings and handsome reproductions in various media, from monumental battle paintings to popular prints, Picturing War in France, 1792–1856 draws on contemporary art criticism, war reporting, and the burgeoning illustrated press to reveal the crucial role such images played in shaping modern understandings of conflict.
Katie Hornstein is assistant professor of art history at Dartmouth College.
Exhibition | France, Between Enlightenment and Gallantry
From the Städtischen Museen Freiburg:
La France, Zwischen Aufklärung und Galanterie: Meisterwerke der Druckgraphik
La France au siècle des Lumières et de la galanterie: Chefs-d’œuvre de la gravure
La France, Between Enlightenment and Gallantry: Masterworks of Graphic Reproduction
Augustinermuseum, Freiburg, 24 February — 3 June 2018
Das französische Bürgertum des 18. Jahrhunderts liebte gute Unterhaltung: galant und charmant, mit Witz und scharfem Verstand. Reich bebilderte Bücher erfreuten sich größter Beliebtheit. Die Verlage druckten Romane, Gedichte und Theaterstücke mit Illustrationen und gaben Graphikserien heraus, gestochen nach Gemälden des Rokoko.
Angespornt durch die große Nachfrage schufen die Künstler der Zeit wahre druckgraphische Meisterwerke. Das Haus der Graphischen Sammlung zeigt Zeichnungen, Graphiken und illustrierte Ausgaben galanter Literatur, satirischer Romane und moralischer Fabeln aus der Schenkung des Freiburger Sammlers Josef Lienhart, darunter Radierungen von François Boucher und Bilderfindungen Antoine Watteaus.
Hélène Iehl and Felix Reusse, eds., La France—Zwischen Aufklärung und Galanterie: Meisterwerke der Druckgraphik aus der Zeit Watteaus (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2018), 192 pages, ISBN: 9783731906339, $53. [French and German Text]
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