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
Exhibition | Portraits, from Botticelli to Lempicka
From the press release for the exhibition opening this fall at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin:
Portraits! Surprising Encounters from Botticelli to Lempicka
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 16 October 2026 — 14 March 2027
Curated by Sven Jakstat and Stephan Kemperdick, with Marie-Luise Hugler
How do we see ourselves—and how have people in different historical periods wished to be seen? The special exhibition Portraits! Surprising Encounters from Botticelli to Lempicka at the Gemäldegalerie (Old Master Paintings) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, invites viewers on a fascinating journey through the history of portraiture. Unusual juxtapositions of works spanning five centuries reveal striking similarities, bringing the pieces to life and providing opportunities to reflect on the presentation of the self and others, as well as on staging, roles, and character. Masterpieces by artists such as Botticelli and Lempicka, Mino da Fiesole and Rogier van der Weyden, Dürer and Giorgione, or Rubens and Gainsborough are brought into conversation with one another, revealing striking and often surprising affinities. Works that have never ‘met’ before come together for the first time, offering a fresh perspective on themes such as identity, beauty, status and power.
Portraits reveal more than just people’s outward appearance. They also reveal details about self-awareness, character, emotion and staged representation. Clothing, posture, and accessories act as codes for social, political and gender affiliation. By comparing portraits from different regions and eras, visitors can recognise, trace, and understand artistic decisions and visual strategies: What was considered beautiful, dignified or worthy of authority? How did these ideals evolve over the centuries? The exhibition reveals the variety of these responses, while also highlighting the surprising connections between them.
The exhibition’s starting point is the outstanding international collection of portraits at the Gemäldegalerie, which is complemented by a selection of loans from other museums of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, including the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery) and the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), the Ägyptisches Museum (Egyptian Museum) and the Skulpturensammlung (Sculpture Collection). It presents a multifaceted panorama of portraiture from the 15th to the 20th centuries. Around 90 masterpieces by artists such as Petrus Christus, Mino da Fiesole, Botticelli, Giorgione, Dürer, Cranach the Elder, Holbein the Younger, Titian, Sofonisba Anguissola, Rembrandt, Zurbarán, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, and Tamara de Lempicka encompass a wide variety of portraiture’s diverse aspects, ranging from glorious portraits of rulers to intimate scenes of friendship and proud self-proclamations. Each encounter tells its own story and invites wonder, comparison and discovery.
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Anton Raphael Mengs, Self-Portrait, 1779 (Berlin: Staatliche Museen).
Various forms and functions of portraits are examined in the four sections of the exhibition. The prologue highlights the astonishing constancy of mimetic portrait art, which has spanned many centuries, and also sheds light on the genre’s roots in Europe.
Portrait Types North and South of the Alps
The first section of the exhibition explorse the development of portraiture in Italy and the North during the Renaissance. Various prototypes emerged, such as the northern three-quarter profile used by Rogier van der Weyden and the strict profile preferred by Filippo Lippi. Differing tendencies towards naturalism and idealisation soon mingled and influenced the development of portrait painting in the following centuries.
Self-Representation of the Elite
Portraits were a powerful means of social representation and distinction. The clothing, poses, and size of a work all revealed the aspirations and status of the person depicted. Anthonis Mor’s prestigious, knee-length portrait of the Duchess Margaret of Parma, with her regal gaze, is on a par with Giambattista Moroni’s portrait of the nobleman Don Gabriel de la Cueva.
Family, Friendship, and Intimacy
On the one hand, the section on family, friendship and intimacy is dedicated to the private aspects of portraiture. Relatives, close friends, and loved ones are captured in images that serve as personal mementos. Sofonisba Anguissola’s mother, Bianca, engages with her daughter while she paints, in a manner that is similar to how the wife of the painter Eugen Spiro looked at her husband 380 years later. Portraits of the deceased offer a final glimpse of them.
Portraits of Art Collectors and Artists
The final section of the exhibition focuses on portraits of art collectors and artists. For centuries, self-portraits have not only served as a means of self-exploration, but also as a way of positioning oneself and one’s work within traditional contexts. Therbusch portrays herself as an intellectual, while Poussin and Anton Raphael Mengs use their self-portraits to reflect on their lives and artistic fame.
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Portraits is not just an art historical exhibition; it also reflects our current image-obsessed world. In the age of selfies and social media:how do we construct our identity? How do we read faces? And what does our view reveal about ourselves? The reflection of masterworks from the past provides the perfect opportunity to study and understand these current questions.
The exhibition is curated by Sven Jakstat and Stephan Kemperdick, with assistance from Marie-Luise Hugler. A richly illustrated catalogue provides an in-depth exploration of the works and their relationships with each other.
Porträts! Überraschende Begegnungen von Botticelli bis Lempicka (Petersberg: Michael Imhof-Verlag, 2026), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-3731915980, €49.
New Book | Barocke Prälaturen oberdeutscher Zisterzienser
From Michael Imhof:
Elisabeth Krebs, Barocke Prälaturen oberdeutscher Zisterzienser: Raumfolgen & Bildprogramme (Petersberg: Michael Imhof-Verlag, 2026), 592 pages, ISBN: 978-3731915904, €99. Studien zur internationalen Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, Band 206
Für die oberdeutschen Zisterzienser der Neuzeit war die weltabgewandte Existenz ihrer mittelalterlichen Vorgänger bereits Geschichte. Im Rahmen der reichs- und ordenspolitischen, wirtschaftlichen, kulturellen und sozialen Randbedingungen des 17./18. Jahrhunderts mussten Beziehungen gepflegt und tradierte Rechte verteidigt werden, einem epochenbedingt steigenden Bauaufwand Rechnung getragen und dem Dekorum von Ausstattung genügt werden.
Der klausurfreie Wohn- und Amtssitz eines (Reichs-)Abtes — die hier hervorgehobene Prälatur — gewann an Repräsentation. Vestibüle, Stiegenhäuser, Tafelzimmer, große Säle, die Abtswohnung und ihr zugeordnete Gästezimmer boten Möglichkeiten der Äußerung von Bildprogrammen mit gezielt unterlegten Botschaften, ob nun reichspolitisch, konfessionell-katholisch, zur Selbstlegitimation oder geistlich-zisterziensisch motiviert. Die Arbeit fragt nach Kategorien, Ordnungen und Qualitäten von Raum und Bild, in denen sich das Selbstverständnis oberdeutscher Zisterzienseräbte zwischen ursprünglich auferlegter Simplicitas und selbsterhaltend notwendiger Außendarstellung reflektierte.
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