New Book | Hyacinthe Rigaud: Le Catalogue Raisonné
Published by Faton and available from Artbooks.com:
Ariane James-Sarazin, Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743): Le Catalogue Raisonné, 2 volumes (Dijon: Faton, 2016), 1408 pages, ISBN: 978-2878441734, 320€ / $395.
Fruit d’années de recherches, l’ouvrage en deux volumes d’Ariane James-Sarazin, archiviste, conservateur en chef du patrimoine et directrice des musées d’Angers, s’impose comme une étape décisive dans l’histoire de l’art moderne. Pour la première fois, l’auteur propose le catalogue exhaustif des oeuvres du grand peintre français Hyacinthe Rigaud (Perpignan, 1659 – Paris, 1743) : plus d’un millier de numéros organisés chronologiquement, tous rigoureusement étudiés, dévoilent bien des aspects méconnus du portraitiste des élites européennes, à travers peintures, dessins, répliques, copies et gravures. Les amateurs d’art exigeants et passionnés y trouveront l’étude la plus complète jamais publiée sur le peintre et son oeuvre, et une analyse inédite de la peinture, de la société au tournant du Grand Siècle et du siècle des Lumières. Le catalogue est précédé d’une biographie complète du peintre, établie avec une méthodologie rigoureuse, déjà saluée par les spécialistes pour les précédents travaux d’Ariane James-Sarazin sur l’artiste, ainsi que d’une étude fouillée sur la clientèle, le processus de création, l’oeuvre et son évolution. De nombreuses annexes complètent cette somme d’érudition : iconographie du peintre, chronologie raisonnée, généalogies, dictionnaire inédit des élèves et collaborateurs, aperçu de la fortune critique, table de concordances avec l’édition des livres de comptes de Joseph Roman en 1919, sources commentées, bibliographie, pièces justificatives et plusieurs index. Marqueur de l’évolution de la mode et des textiles, révélateur des intrigues de Cour, objet du paraître social, symbole de l’image royale, le portrait, miroir des enjeux d’une époque, offre une mine d’informations aux disciplines connexes de l’histoire de l’art.
Exhibition | Antonio Balestra: Nel Segno della Grazia
Now on view in Verona:
Antonio Balestra: Nel Segno della Grazia / In the Sign of Grace
Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona, 19 November 2016 — 19 February 2017
Il Comune di Verona, Direzione Musei d’Arte e Monumenti honors the painter Antonio Balestra (1666–1740) on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the artist’s birth with the exhibition Antonio Balestra: In the Sign of Grace, staged in the Castelvecchio Museum. The exhibition presents over sixty works: paintings, drawings, etchings, and volumes of prints, coming from public and private lenders.
Andrea Tomezzoli, Antonio Balestra: Nel Segno della Grazia (Verona: Scripta Edizioni, 2016), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-8898877690, $38.
New Book | Women Artists in Early Modern Italy
From Brepols:
Sheila Barker, ed., Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame, and Collectors (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2016), 181 pages, ISBN: 978-1909400351, $125.
Enhancing our understanding of early Italian female painters including Sofonisba Anguissola and introducing new ones such as Costanza Francini and Lucrezia Quistelli, this volume studies women artists, their patrons, and their collectors, in order to trace the rise of the social phenomenon of the woman artist.
In ten chapters spanning two centuries, this collection of essays examines the relationships between women artists and their publics, both in early modern Italy and across Europe. Drawing upon archival evidence, these essays afford abundant documentary evidence about the diverse strategies that women utilized in order to carry out artistic careers, from Sofonisba Anguissola’s role as a lady-in-waiting at the court of Philip II of Spain, to Lucrezia Quistelli’s avoidance of the Florentine market in favor of upholding the prestige of her family, to Costanza Francini’s preference for the steady but humble work of candle painting for a Florentine confraternity. Their unusual life stories along with their outstanding talents brought fame to a number of women artists even in their own lifetimes—so much fame, in fact, that Giorgio Vasari included several women artists in his 1568 edition of artists’ biographies. Notably, this visibility also subjected women artists to moral scrutiny, with consequences for their patronage opportunities. Because of their fame and their extraordinary (and often exemplary) lives, works made by women artists held a special allure for early generations of Italian collectors, including Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642–1723), who made a point of collecting women’s self-portraits. In the eighteenth century, British collectors wishing to model themselves after the Italian virtuosi exhibited an undeniable penchant for the Italian women artists of a bygone era, even though they largely ignored the contemporary women artists in their midst.
Sheila Barker directs the Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists at the Medici Archive Project, the first archival program of its kind. Her publications of documentation on women artists have shed light on Lucrezia Quistelli, Artemisia Gentileschi, Irene Parenti Duclos, and the phenomenon of female copyists.
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C O N T E N T S
1 Editor’s Preface, Sheila Barker (The Medici Archive Project)
2 ‘Piu che famose’: Some Thoughts on Women Artists in Early Modern Europe, Sheila ffolliott (George Mason University, emerita)
3 Sofonisba Anguissola at the Court of Philip II, Cecilia Gamberini (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid Felsina Cattòlica)
4 Sofonisba Anguissola, ‘Pittora de Natura’: A Page from Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook, Barbara Tramelli (Max Planck Institute, Berlin)
5 Lucrezia Quistelli (1541–1594): A Noblewoman and Artist in Vasari’s Florence, Sheila Barker (The Medici Archive Project)
6 Arcangela Paladini and the Medici, Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato (Independent Scholar)
7 Costanza Francini. A Painter in the Shadow of Artemisia Gentileschi, Julia Vicioso (Archivio Storico dell’Arciconfraternita dei Fiorentini)
8 A Newly Discovered Late Work by Artemisia Gentileschi: Susanna and the Elders of 1652, Adelina Modesti (La Trobe University)
9 The Medici’s First Woman Court Artist: The Life and Career of Camilla Guerrieri Nati, Eve Straussman-Pflanzer (The Davis Museum, Wellesley College)
10 Female Painters and Cosimo III de’ Medici’s Art Collecting Project, Roberta Piccinelli (Univerity of Teramo)
11 The English Collectors of Italy’s Female Old Masters, 1700–1824, Nicole Escobedo (Independent Scholar)
Exhibition | The Artist
Elias Martin, King Gustav III Visits the Academy of Fine Arts in 1780, 1782, oil on canvas, 99 × 135 cm
(Stockholm: Nationalmuseum)
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Now on view at the Moderna Museet in Malmo:
The Artist / Konstnären
Konstakademien (Royal Academy of Fine Arts), Stockholm, 11 February — 11 September 2016
Moderna Museet, Malmö, 24 September 2016 — 19 February 2017
Throughout history, artists have played a wide variety of different roles. It’s a huge leap from the courtly painter who works on commission to the bohemian who refuses to rely on the approval of high society. This exhibition explores a number of different roles for artists, and also uncovers some of the myths that surround them.
How independent was the bohemian really? What kinds of new standards and rules have emerged within the avant-garde of modern art? And where did the idea of the free, creative, male genius come from? Women artists have often been portrayed as ‘exceptional anomalies’ in the history of art, but this exhibition shows just how numerous and how influential they have been, and how in the 1870s and 80s they shook up the preconception of the artist as a role for men.
Alexander Roslin, The Artist and His Wife Marie Suzanne Giroust Painting the Portrait of Wilhelm Peill, 1767, oil on canvas 131 × 98.5 cm (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum).
In more recent times, many artists have played the role of entrepreneur. Jeff Koons and Ernst Billgren work as modern businessmen in a commercial market economy. But the entrepreneurial artist has historical roots. Rosa Bonheur and Anders Zorn were both skilled painters as well as extremely competent when it came to building up their own personal brands, which helped them achieve great success in the international art market at the end of the nineteenth century. Entrepreneurial artists played an important role in seventeenth-century Holland as well.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the values of the art academies of Europe that set the standard in the art world. Artists in these academies were trained in reproducing the classical ideals. Today the research conducted in university art schools is an example of a new form of academic work for artists.
This exhibition illuminates how artists relate to travel and to encounters with other cultures. In some cases an artist’s view of foreign cultures may be full of clichés and stereotypes. But there are also plenty of examples of artists who have worked to expose underlying power structures and standards in their encounters with other cultures.
Many artists throughout history have seen themselves as visionaries or prophets. Feminist artists such as Siri Derkert and Gittan Jönsson have worked both with criticism of contemporary society and with politically charged visions of the future. Other artists have been preoccupied with visions of a more spiritual nature, including Hilma af Klint and Vassilij Kandinskij.
This exhibition is a collaboration between Moderna Museet, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and the National Museum of Fine Arts. We want to show how powerful it is when we allow our collections from different eras to meet, and then complement that mix with a number of key works on loan.
Anne Dahlström, Margareta Gynning, Per Hedström, Carl-Johan Olsson, Andreas Nilsson, John Peter Nilsson, and Eva-Lena Bengtsson, Konstnären / The Artist (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2016), 130 pages, ISBN: 978–9171008626, SEK149.
Exhibition | Portrait of the Artist
Press release (6 September 2016) from the Royal Collection Trust:
Portrait of the Artist
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 4 November 2016 — 17 April 2017
The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, TBA
The first-ever exhibition of portraits of artists in the Royal Collection examines the changing image of the creative genius through more than 150 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and decorative arts. Portrait of the Artist explores themes such as the cult of the artistic personality, the artist at work, and artists’ self-portraits.
From the 16th century, artists rose from the ranks of skilled artisans to a more elevated social status, a change in part influenced by royal patronage. The medieval tradesmen’s guilds were replaced first by workshops run by a master and subsequently by the first art academies. The lives of the most successful artists were recorded for posterity in the new literary genre of artists’ biographies. One of the most important collections of biographies from this period was Giorgio Vasari’s Delle vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori (1568), which described the lives of over 150 artists including that of the author. As artists became more prominent in society, a market developed for images of those deemed to be exceptional by virtue of their artistic talent. At the same time, artists increasingly saw self-portraiture as a way of demonstrating their skills to potential collectors and asserting their new standing in the world.
Images of artists became a valuable commodity, keenly acquired by monarchs and other influential patrons. The inventory compiled by Charles I’s Surveyor of Pictures in the late 1630s shows that three of the most important artists’ portraits owned by the monarch, including self-portraits by Daniel Mytens (c.1630) and Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1623), hung outside the King’s Withdrawing Room at Whitehall Palace. The 1666 inventory of Charles II’s collection lists 24 portraits of artists in “the Pafsage betweene ye Greene Roome and ye Clofet.” In this most intimate part of the royal apartments, accessible only to the King’s closest acquaintances and family, were Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) (c.1638–39), Rubens’s self-portrait (1623) and portrait of his former assistant Anthony van Dyck (c.1627–28).
During the 17th century, general advancements in optics and practical developments in the production of mirrors enabled artists to be increasingly experimental and ambitious in their self-portraits. Artemisia Gentileschi used two mirrors to capture herself from an unusual angle for her powerful self-portrait as the personification of Painting, a remarkably unorthodox representation of a woman at this early date.
Artists frequently incorporated their own image into their works, as major players in historical and mythological narratives or through more subtle means. In Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1613), the painter Cristofano Allori appears as the decapitated Holofernes, his former lover Maria di Giovanni Mazzafiri is the murderous Judith, and her mother is Judith’s maidservant. Jan de Bray’s The Banquet of Cleopatra (1652) is a thinly disguised family portrait in which the artist casts his father Salomon de Bray, also a successful painter, in the role of Mark Antony.
Jean-Étienne Liotard, Self-Portrait, ca. 1753, enamel (London: Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 421436).
Through the choice of costume, gesture, props and setting, a self-portrait enabled an artist to take on a variety of roles. After visiting the Levant in 1738–43, the painter Jean-Étienne Liotard adopted a style of clothing for which he was to become known as ‘Le Peintre Turc’. His unconventional appearance—the Moldavian fur headdress and long beard seen in his self-portrait miniature of 1753—was thought by some to have contributed to his commercial success.
For young artists without the funds to pay a professional model, self-portraiture was a convenient way to practice their drawing skills. Annibale and Agostino Carracci’s self-portraits of c.1575–80 were probably produced by the teenage artists to hone their talents in this way. Some self-portraits appear to have been produced solely for the purpose of self-scrutiny. In a chalk drawing, possibly executed at the age of 80 in the final year of his life, Gianlorenzo Bernini records his hooded eyes and sunken cheeks with unflinching honesty.
The relationship between contemporaries in the art world is explored in the exhibition through representations of artists by their friends, admirers and pupils. Francesco Melzi’s chalk drawing of the aged Leonardo da Vinci (c.1515) is thought to be the most reliable surviving likeness of his teacher. Rubens’s portrait of his former assistant and lifelong friend Van Dyck shows the artist in three-quarter profile, his gaze averted to make him appear reflective, in contrast to the confident figure presented in Van Dyck’s self-portraits. The friendship between the engraver Francesco Bartolozzi and the painter Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Italian artists working in London, is recorded in charming pencil sketches that the pair made of each other in 1770—one painting, the other dozing in a chair.
In the 19th century, romanticised episodes from the lives of famous artists from the past were popular subject-matter. Johann Michael Wittmer’s Raphael’s First Sketch of the ‘Madonna della Sedia’ (c.1853) depicts the fable of how the Renaissance master came to create one of his best-known works on the base of a wine barrel. Frederick Leighton’s monumental work Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession (1855) encapsulates the Victorian artist’s belief that, during the Renaissance, great art was appreciated at all levels of society and artists were held in high esteem, their genius widely acknowledged.
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In the US and Canada, the catalogue is distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Anna Reynolds, Lucy Peter, and Martin Clayton, Portrait of the Artist (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2016), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1909741324, $48.
Dürer’s Self-Portrait at Age Twenty-Eight. Hockney’s Self-Portrait with Cigarette. Melzi’s drawing of Leonardo da Vinci, widely regarded as the most reliable surviving likeness of this most famous Old Master. Throughout history, many of the world’s most renowned artists have made portraits to represent themselves and others.
The first book to focus on images of artists from within the Royal Collection, Portrait of the Artist brings together paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs by artists from across the centuries, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, David Hockney, and Lucian Freud. While some of the portraits included in this book were created to showcase the artist’s talent, others were motivated by more personal reasons, to preserve the images of cherished friends. Anna Reynolds, Lucy Peter, and Martin Clayton explore the miscellany of themes running throughout the discipline of portraiture, from the rich symbolism found in images of the artist’s studio to the transformation of styles with which artists depicted themselves, changing their portrayals to align with their changing status. They also explore the relationships between artists and patrons, including the important role of the monarchy in commissioning and collecting portraits of artists.
New Book | Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Royal Collection
Published by the Royal Collection Trust and distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Chicago:
John Ayers, Chinese and Japanese Works of Art in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, 3 volumes (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2016), 1296 pages, ISBN: 978-1905686490, £150 / $250.
The Royal Collection includes some of the most important examples of Eastern applied art in the Western world, reflecting the West’s long-standing appetite for rarities from distant lands. With more than 2,000 objects distributed across the royal residences in England and Scotland, the collection represents a rich cross-section of Chinese and Japanese porcelains, jades, lacquers, and other works of art.
This three-volume catalogue raisonné covers this substantial and important collection in comprehensive detail. It includes for the first time the many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bronze mounts that are such a striking feature of the collection. Made in French and British workshops to enhance the objects they display, the mounts themselves are often of superb quality and of great historical importance.
More than 2,400 colour images are used to illustrate the collection, including intricate decorative details and makers’ marks. Introductory essays cover the history and development of the collection and the ways in which these works of art have been displayed in the royal palaces and adapted according to the fashions of the day.
Volume One presents the Chinese ceramics of the Ming and Qing dynasties in chronological order (continued in Volume Two). In addition, due to their unique historical significance, the contents of the collection at Hampton Court Palace are presented here separately. Volume Two continues the works of the Qing dynasty, and ends with the Japanese works; the volume also contains a special focus on the European mounts that were added to works of Chinese and Japanese porcelain during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Volume Three contains non-porcelain works, namely lacquer, jade and other hardstones, carved ivories, textiles and metalwork. Many of these works came into the Royal Collection as Imperial gifts, to George III, Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and Queen Alexandra, with the exception of the Japanese lacquer wares, which were acquired for George IV to furnish the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Although not much studied, these pieces were admired by the royal family, and Chinese rooms were created at Windsor and Sandringham House, decorated with an eclectic mixture of European chinoiserie and authentic works of Asian art.
New Book | The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon
From The Getty:
Édouard Kopp, The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1606065044 , $65.
The celebrated French artist Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) is primarily known as a sculptor today, but his contemporaries widely lauded him as a draftsman as well. Talented, highly innovative, and deeply invested in the medium, Bouchardon made an important contribution to the European art and culture of his time, and in particular to the history of drawing. Around two thousand of his drawings survive—most of which bear no relation, conceptual or practical, to his sculpture—yet, remarkably, little scholarly attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre. This is the first book-length work devoted to the artist’s draftsmanship since 1910.
Ambitious in scope, this volume offers a compelling narrative that effectively covers four decades of Bouchardon’s activity as a draftsman—from his departure for Rome in 1723 as an aspiring student to his death in Paris in 1762, by which time he was one of the most renowned artists in Europe. His accomplished and dynamic style is analyzed and copiously illustrated in a series of five interrelated chapters that serve as case studies, each of which focuses on a coherent group of drawings from a particular period of Bouchardon’s career.
Edouard Kopp is the Maida and George Abrams Associate Curator of Drawings, Harvard Art Museums. He is the coauthor, with Scott Allan, of Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau (Getty Publications, 2016) and the author of Capturing Nature’s Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscapes (Getty Publications, 2009).
New Book | Les Rothschild: Une Dynastie de Mécènes en France
From Somogy:
Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, ed., Les Rothschild: Une Dynastie de Mécènes en France, 3 volumes (Paris: Somogy éditions d’Art, 2016), 1112 pages, ISBN: 978-2757202128, 290€.
Grands collectionneurs et mécènes d’exception selon une tradition familiale « qui veut qu’à chaque génération, nous nous efforcions d’enrichir de notre mieux le patrimoine de notre pays », les Rothschild ont joué un rôle essentiel dans le domaine culturel depuis le dernier quart du XIXe siècle. L’ampleur de leur générosité à l’égard des musées et des collections publiques françaises—près de cent vingt mille œuvres d’art données à plus de deux cents institutions—est pour la première fois l’objet d’une publication d’envergure. De l’Antiquité à nos jours, toutes les périodes de l’histoire de l’art y sont représentées, ainsi que tous les continents et les domaines de création.
Pour mener à bien cet ambitieux projet, Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy a réuni cinquante-trois spécialistes, conservateurs et universitaires, français et étrangers, qui explorent ici tous les aspects de ce mécénat exceptionnel.
Auteurs: Sous la direction de Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy, Historienne de l’art – avec les textes de Mathilde Avisseau-Broustet (BNF), François Avril (BNF), François Baratte (Universitaire), Marc Bascou (Louvre), Blaise Ducos (Louvre), Gwenaëlle Fellinger (Louvre), Anne Forray-Carlier (Musée des Arts décoratifs), Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros (Musée Galliéra), Dominique Hollard (BNF), Philippe Malgouyres (Louvre), Julie Olivier (BNF), Alain Pasquier (Louvre), Evelyne Possémé (Musée des Arts décoratifs), Marie-Hélène Tesnière (BNF), Dominique Thiébaut (Louvre), Dimitrios Zikos (Universitaire).
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V O L U M E 1 : 1 8 7 3 – 1 9 2 2
Les Rothschild: Une Dynastie de Mécènes en France
Edmond James de Rothschild (1845–1934)
• Edmond James de Rothschild
• Edmond James et Gustave de Rothschild, mécènes de l’archéologue et donateurs au musée du Louvre, 1873
• Le trésor de Boscoreale au musée du Louvre, 1895
• Dons de la baronne James Édouard et du baron Edmond James de Rothschild au département des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1902–08
• Dons de costumes rares du baron et de la baronne Edmond James de Rothschild au musée Carnavalet et au musée des Arts décoratifs, 1906–08
• Le mécénat envers les artistes vivants, 1906–20
• Un ensemble de moucharabiehs au musée du Louvre et au musée des Arts décoratifs, 1920
Alphonse de Rothschild (1827–1905)
• Alphonse de Rothschild
• Le mécénat envers les artistes vivants en faveur des musées de région, 1895–1905
Charlotte de Rothschild (1825–1899) et Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812–1870)
• Charlotte et Nathaniel de Rothschild
• Dons et legs de la baronne Nathaniel de Rothschild, 1885–99
• Le goût pour la Renaissance italienne, musée du Louvre, 1899
• Un ensemble de coffrets en cuir au musée des Arts décoratifs, 1899
• Une collection de bijoux au musée des Arts décoratifs, 1899
Adolphe de Rothschild (1823–1900) et Julie de Rothschild (1830–1907)
• Adolphe et Julie de Rothschild
• L’art médiéval au musée du Louvre et au musée de Cluny, 1901
• Les objets de la Renaissance, musée du Louvre, 1901
James Édouard de Rothschild (1844–1881) et Thérèse de Rothschild (1847–1931)
• James Édouard et Thérèse de Rothschild
• Les manuscrits de la première rédaction des œuvres de Brantôme à la Bibliothèque nationale, 1903
• Monnaies et pierres gravées au Cabinet des médailles de la Bibliothèque nationale, 1903–04
Arthur de Rothschild (1851–1903)
• Arthur de Rothschild
• Une collection de bagues au musée de Cluny, 1904
• Peintures flamandes, hollandaises et françaises au musée du Louvre, 1904
V O L U M E 2 : 1 9 2 2 – 1 9 3 5
Salomon de Rothschild (1838–1864) et Adèle de Rothschild Pauline (1843–1922)
• Salomon et Adèle de Rothschild Pauline
• Peintures, dessins et sculpture, 1922
• Un ensemble exceptionnel d’orfèvrerie et de bijoux, 1922
• Ivoires et Bronzes, 1922
• Arts du feu de la Renaissance, 1922
• Armes occidentales, 1922
• Objets d’art islamique, 1922
• Porcelaines du XVIIIe siècle, 1922
• Tabatières du XVIIIe siècle, 1922
• Montres et écailles piquées, 1922
• Meubles et tapisseries du XVIIIe siècle, 1922
• Objets d’art d’Extrême-Orient, 1922
• Manuscrits, 1922
• Livres et estampes, 1922
• Albums de photographies, 1922
• Monnaies, 1922
Robert de Rothschild (1880–1946)
• Robert de Rothschild
• Dons au musée des Arts décoratifs
Henri de Rothschild (1872–1946)
• Henri de Rothschild
• Le mécénat envers les artistes vivants en faveur des musées de régions, 1906–194
• Têtes de mort au musée des Arts décoratifs, 1926
• Autographes à la Bibliothèque nationale, 1933
Alice de Rothschild (1847–1922)
• Pipes et boîtes d’allumettes
• Don d’Alice de Rothschild à la bibliothèque de Grasse, 1927
Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild (1864–1934)
• Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild
• Sculptures, 1933
• Peintures italiennes et espagnoles, 1933
• Le XVIIIe siècle à la villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, 1933
• Porcelaines françaises, 1933
• Porcelaines étrangères, 1933
• Biscuits, 1933
• Textiles, 1933
• Arts d’Extrême-Orient, 1933
• Peintures et dessins du XIXe siècle, 1933
V O L U M E 3 : 1 9 3 5 – 2 0 1 6
La Donation Edmond de Rothschild au Département des Arts Graphiques du Musée du Louvre, 1935
• Histoire de la constitution d’un « Musée de la gravure »
• Les nielles
• Les débuts de la gravure en Allemagne, dans les anciens Pays-Bas et en Italie
• Dürer et Rembrandt
• Les estampes allemandes du XVIe siècle
• La gravure flamande au XVIe siècle
• Les estampes italiennes du XVIe siècle
• Les estampes françaises du XVIe siècle
• Les estampes du XVIIe siècle
• Les estampes du XVIIIe siècle
• Les gravures d’architecture, d’ornements et d’arts décoratifs du XVIIIe siècle
• Les dessins du XVe siècle au XVIIIe siècle
• Les livres illustrés
• La fortune critique
• Historique et installation au musée du Louvre
Dons de la Baronne Edmond James et de James Armand de Rothschild, 1934–36
• La collection de dentelles de la baronne Edmond James de Rothschild au musée des Arts décoratifs, 1935
• Monnaies et médailles à la Bibliothèque nationale, 1935
• Objets de fouilles en Palestine, 1936
Les Rothschild et La Bibliothèque Nationale Après-Guerre
Le Legs Henri de Rothschild en 1947
• La bibliothèque de James Édouard de Rothschild (1844–1881)
• Les manuscrits enluminés de la collection de James Édouard, Thérèse et Henri de Rothschild
• Théâtre et poésie entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance
• La collection théâtrale d’Henri de Rothschild
Deux Manuscrits d’Edmond James et Adolphe de Rothschild
• Deux livres d’heures royaux : les Heures de Jeanne de Navarre, 1972; et les Très Belles Heures de Jean de Berry, 1956
Les Rothschild et les Musées Après-Guerre: Dons et Dations
• La récupération et la restitution des collections spoliées, 1945–53
• Les héritiers du baron Édouard de Rothschild
• Le château de Ferrières
• Les héritiers du baron Robert de Rothschild
• Mobilier Art déco au musée des Arts décoratifs
• Dons de Maurice et Miriam Alexandrine de Rothschild, 1935–37
• Dons d’Edmond de Rothschild à Versailles, 1966–88
• Don d’Edmond de Rothschild au musée du Louvre, 1990
• Objets antiques, peintures, dessins et objets d’art du XVIIIe siècle. Dation de 1990
Donations et Mécénat, 1955–2016
• Alix de Rothschild (1911–1987)
• Dons d’Alix de Rothschild au musée national des Arts et Traditions populaires et au musée de l’Homme
• Dons d’Alix de Rothschild au musée de l’Homme
• Dons de la baronne Élie de Rothschild aux musées français
• Dons du baron Élie de Rothschild au Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’Art moderne
• Dons de Béatrice Rosenberg au musée d’Orsay et au musée des Arts décoratifs, 2005–06
Mécénat au Bénéfice des Musées, 1963–2016
• Mécénat au bénéfice des musées
Annexes
• Historique et installation au musée du Louvre, 1935 ; textes cités en annexes
• Le don de la baronne Edmond James de Rothschild au Cabinet des médailles de la Bibliothèque nationale
• Liste des livres légués par le baron James de Rothschild (1792–1868) à son petit-fils James (1844–1881)
• Bibliographie
• Index des lieux de conservation
• Index des noms de personnes
Exhibition | Meta-painting: A Journey to the Idea of Art
José del Castillo, The Study of Drawing, 1780, oil on canvas, 105 × 160 cm
(Madrid: Prado).
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Now on view at the Prado:
Meta-painting: A Journey to the Idea of Art / Metapintura: Un viaje a la idea del arte
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 15 November 2016 — 19 February 2017
Curated by Javier Portús
With Meta-painting, the Museo del Prado is offering a new approach to its collection in the latest in a series of exhibitions that began in 2010 with Rubens and continued with Captive Beauty (2013) and Goya in Madrid (2014). This series has aimed to offer visitors the chance to reflect on the Museum’s own collections and to look at its works in a new context which encourages different interpretations. Meta-painting proposes a journey that begins with mythological and religious narratives on the origins of artistic activity at the dawn of the modern age and concludes in 1819, the year of the Prado’s foundation. The exhibition thus also celebrates the 197th anniversary of the Museum’s founding as a temple of the arts, signifying their full acceptance as disciplines of social utility.
Juan González / Miguel González, Conquista de México por Hernán Cortés (30 y 31), 1698. Enconchado, Óleo sobre lienzo sobre tabla, 97 × 53 cm.
Two aspects central to the Prado—the Spanish royal collections and Spanish art—provide the context for the exhibition’s structure. Furthermore, these are two inseparable terms, given that the evolution of Spanish art was determined by the existence of the royal collections. The survey offered by the exhibition is a wide-ranging and varied one, including paintings, drawings, prints, books, medals, examples of the decorative arts and sculptures. Twenty-two of these works have been loaned by eighteen museums and collections, including the Fundación Casa de Alba, the National Gallery in London, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville, the Banco de España, and the Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Arts de San Fernando in Madrid.
All the 137 works in the exhibition refer to art or to images, either as self-portraits of creators such as Titian, Murillo, Bernini and Goya; or because they include other paintings and sculptures, such as Saint Benedict destroying Idols by Ricci and Arachne by Rubens; or because they analyse issues relating to the definition of art and its history, such as José García Hidalgo’s book Principles for studying the very noble and royal art of painting […] and Goya’s Portrait of Jovellanos.
The exhibition’s ‘journey’ is divided into different phases. Fifteen sections focus on the relationship between art, the artist and society, each one of which looks at a specific issue, among them: the powers attributed to religious images; the role played by the ‘painting within the painting’; artists’ attempts to break through the pictorial space and continue it towards the viewer; the origins and practice of the idea of artistic tradition; portraits and self-portraits of artists; places for the creation and collecting of art; the origin of the modern concept of art history; the subjectivity that emerged in self-portraits from the Enlightenment onwards; and the importance of the concepts of love, death and fame in the modern artistic discourse.
Francisco Tomás Prieto, Segundo premio de primera clase de la Academia de San Fernando, 1753, Silver-gilt, 44,5 mm diameter (Madrid: Prado)
The exhibition also represents a tribute by the Museo del Prado to Cervantes on the 400th anniversary of his death as it includes a section on Don Quixote as one of the great examples of self-referential literature, juxtaposed with Las Meninas. Thus, just as Cervantes’ text is a ‘novel within a novel’ so Velázquez’s painting is a ‘painting on painting’ in which the artist not only depicts himself painting but which involves various important issues regarding the potential of the art of painting and the role of the painter.
Las Meninas will remain in Room 12 of the Villanueva Building where it is habitually displayed but it is present in the exhibition through a modern facsimile of part of Laurent’s graphoscope which is displayed alongside editions of the two parts of Don Quixote, reminding visitors that these two masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age are both reference points in the history of meta-fiction.
Javier Portús, Metapintura: Un viaje a la idea del arte (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2016), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-8484803270.
New Book | Painting and Narrative in France
From Routledge:
Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren, eds., Painting and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gauguin (New York: Routledge, 2016), 218 pages, ISBN: 978-1472440105, $150.
Before Modernism, narrative painting was one of the most acclaimed and challenging modes of picture-making in Western art; yet, by the early twentieth century storytelling had all but disappeared from ambitious art. France was a key player in both the dramatic rise and the controversial demise of narrative art. This is the first book to analyse French painting in relation to narrative, from Poussin in the early seventeenth to Gauguin in the late nineteenth century. Thirteen original essays shed light on key moments and aspects of narrative and French painting through the study of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Charles Le Brun, Jacques-Louis David, Paul Delaroche, Gustave Moreau, and Paul Gauguin. Using a range of theoretical perspectives, the authors study key issues such as temporality, theatricality, word-and-image relations, the narrative function of inanimate objects, the role played by viewers, and the ways in which visual narrative has been bound up with history painting. The book offers a fresh look at familiar material, as well as studying some little-known works of art, and reveals the centrality and complexity of narrative in French painting over three centuries.
Peter Cooke is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester. His most recent book is Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism.
Nina Lübbren is Art Historian and Principal Lecturer in Film Studies, and Deputy Head of Department of English, Communication, Film and Media, Anglia Ruskin University.
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C O N T E N T S
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Narrativity and (French) Painting, Peter Cooke and Nina Lübbren
I. Ancien Régime
1 Units of Vision and Narrative Structures: Upon Reading Poussin’s Manna, Claudine Mitchell
2 Figures of Narration in the Context of a Painted Cycle: The North Bays of the Grande Galerie at Versailles, Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc
3 The Crisis of Narration in Eighteenth-Century French History Painting, Susanna Caviglia
4 Obscure, Capricious, and Bizarre: Neoclassical Painting and the Choice of Subject, Mark Ledbury
II. Restoration and July Monarchy
5 Delacroix and ‘The Work of the Reader’, Beth S. Wright
6 Narrative and History in Léopold Robert’s Arrival of the Harvesters in the Pontine Marshes, Richard Wrigley
7 Narrative Strategies in Paul Delaroche’s Assassination of the Duc de Guise, Patricia Smyth
III. Second Empire and Third Republic
8 Eloquent Objects: Gérôme, Laurens, and the Art of Inanimate Narration, Nina Lubbren
9 Tyrannical Inopportunity: Gustave Moreau’s Anti-narrative Strategies, Scott C. Allan
10 Theatricality versus Anti-Theatricality: Narrative Techniques in French History Painting (1850−1900), Pierre Sérié
11 The Conflicted Status of Narrative in the Art of Paul Gauguin, Belinda Thomson
IV. Key Issues of Pictorial Narrative
12 Narrativity, Temporality and Allegorisation, from Poussin to Moreau, Peter Cooke
13 Towards a Study of Narration in Painting: The Early Modern Period, Étienne Jollet
Index
Enfilade 
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