Exhibition | A Look at 1700: Prints from the Viladegut Collection
Jacques Rigaud and Martin Engelbrecht, Siege of Barcelona of 1714 (Comment l’on soutient et repousse les sorties), etching, Augsurg, ca.1750.
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From the Museu Frederic Marès:
Una Mirada al 1700: A partir dels gravats de la col·lecció Gelonch Viladegut
Una Mirada al 1700: A partir de los grabados de la colección Gelonch Viladegut
A Look at 1700: The Engravings of the Gelonch Viladegut Collection
Museu Frederic Marès, Barcelona, 16 June — 2 November 2014, extended until 11 January 2015
A partir del diàleg entre els gravats de la col·lecció Gelonch-Viladegut i les col·leccions del Museu Frederic Marès es vol oferir una galeria d’imatges sobre la Catalunya de començament del segle XVIII, concretament a la fi de la Guerra de Successió. L’exposició mostra com des del col·leccionisme també es pot aportar una visió del context sociocultural del país al voltant del 1714.
The press release (in Catalan) is available here»
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The catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:
Xevi Camprubi et al, Una mirada al 1700: A partir dels gravats de la col·lecció Gelonch Viladegut (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, 2014), 154 pages, ISBN: 978-8498505597, $38.
Organised into five areas, the exhibition offers a view of Catalonia in the context of the War of the Spanish Succession based on the testimonies from collectors: first, the engravings from that period from the collection of Antoni Gelonch Viladegut, and secondly the collections of the Frederic Marès Museum, from which some works from its sculpture and 18th-century object collection in its extensive Collector’s Cabinet have been chosen. The five areas show images of power, territory, war, everyday life, and devoutness.
New Book | The Spiritual Rococo: Decor and Divinity
From Ashgate:
Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo: Decor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 454 pages, ISBN: 978-1409400639, $130.
A groundbreaking approach to Rococo religious décor and spirituality in Europe and South America, The Spiritual Rococo addresses three basic conundrums that impede our understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics and culture. Why did the Rococo, ostensibly the least spiritual style in the pre-Modern canon, transform into one of the world’s most important modes for adorning sacred spaces? And why is Rococo still treated as a decadent nemesis of the Enlightenment when the two had fundamental characteristics in common? This book seeks to answer these questions by treating Rococo as a global phenomenon for the first time and by exploring its moral and spiritual dimensions through the lens of populist French religious literature of the day-a body of work the author calls the ‘Spiritual Rococo’ and which has never been applied directly to the arts. The book traces Rococo’s development from France through Central Europe, Portugal, Brazil, and South America by following a chain of interlocking case studies, whether artistic, literary, or ideological, and it also considers the parallel diffusion of the literature of the Spiritual Rococo in these same regions, placing particular emphasis on unpublished primary sources such as inventories. One of the ultimate goals of this study is to move beyond the cliché of Rococo’s frivolity and acknowledge its essential modernity.
Thoroughly interdisciplinary, The Spiritual Rococo not only integrates different art historical fields in novel ways but also interacts with church and social history, literary and post-colonial studies, and anthropology, opening up new horizons in these fields.
Gauvin Alexander Bailey is Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1. ‘The Dream of Happiness’: The Literature of the Spiritual Rococo and the Christianity of Reason
2. ‘As Bizarre a Style as Ever Occurred’: Rococo in France
3. ‘Bright Shining as the Stars’: Spiritual Rococo in Central Europe
4. ‘Irregular Ornament in the Finest French Taste’: Spiritual Rococo in Portugal and Brazil
5. ‘O Happy Vision!’: Spiritual Rococo in Spain and Spanish South America
Epilogue: ‘Superfluous Stucco and Laughable Decoration’: Rococo, Religion, and the Global Enlightenment
Appendix A: French Spiritual Literature in Central European Collections
Appendix B: French Spiritual Literature in Luso-Brazilian Collections
Appendix C: French Spiritual Literature in the Spanish Southern Cone
Bibliography
Index
New Book | Rococo Echo
The latest volume of SVEC:
Melissa Lee Hyde and Katie Scott, eds., Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014), 398 pages, ISBN: 978-0729411585, £65 / €82 / $102.
Intermittently in and out of fashion, the persistence of the Rococo from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first is clear. From painting, print and photography, to furniture, fashion and film, the Rococo’s diverse manifestations appear to defy temporal and geographic definition. In Rococo Echo, a team of international contributors adopts a wide lens to explore the relationship of the Rococo with time.
Through chapters organised around broad temporal moments—the French Revolution, the First World War and the turn of the twenty-first century—contributors show that the Rococo has been viewed variously as modern, late, ruined, revived, preserved and anticipated. Taking into account the temporality of the Rococo as form, some contributors consider its function as both a visual language and a cultural marker engaged in different ways with the politics of nationalism, gender and race. The Rococo is examined, too, as a mode of expression that encompassed and assimilated styles, and which functioned as a surprisingly effective means of resisting both authority—whether political, religious or artistic—and cultural norms of gender and class. Contributors also show how the Rococo, from its birth in France, reverberated through England, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the South American colonies to become a pan-European, even global movement. The Rococo emerges from these contributions as a discourse defined but not confined by its original historical moment, and whose adaptability to the styles and preoccupations of later periods gives it a value and significance that take it beyond the vagaries of fashion.
Melissa Lee Hyde is Professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art at the University of Florida, and her work focuses on gender and visual culture in France. She is writing a monograph on Marie-Suzanne Roslin and is co-authoring a book with Mary D. Sheriff on women in French art.
Katie Scott is a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has written widely about the Rococo in relation to issues of class, race and gender and is currently writing a book on the origins of intellectual property in France before the 1793 Act of the Rights of Genius.
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C O N T E N T S
Foreword. Rococo Echo: Style and Temporality, Katie Scott
I. Rococo Revivals: The Nineteenth Century
1. The Uncomfortable Frenchness of the German Rococo, Michael Yonan
2. Rococo Republicanism, Elizabeth Mansfield
3. Scavenging Rococo: Trouvailles, Bibelots and Counter-Revolution, Tom Stammers
4. Vive l’amateur! The Goncourt House Revisited, Andrew McClellan
5. Pierrot’s Periodicity: Watteau, Nadar and the Circulation of the Rococo, Marika T. Knowles
6. Remembrance of Things Past: Robert de Montesquiou, Emile Gallé and Rococo Revival during the Fin de Siècle, Meredith Martin
7. Irregular Rococo Impressionism, Anne Higonnet
II. Rococo: The Eighteenth Century
8. Was There Such a Thing as Rococo Painting in Eighteenth-Century France?, Colin B. Bailey
9. ‘A Wild Kind of Imagination’: Eclecticism and Excess in the English Rococo Designs of Thomas Johnson, Brigid von Preussen
10. Out of Time: Fragonard, with David, Satish Padiyar
11. Rococo and Spirituality from Paris to Rio de Janeiro, Gauvin Alexander Bailey
III. New Rococo: The Twentieth Century and Beyond
12. Sedlmayr’s Rococo, Kevin Chua
13. Warhol’s Rococo: Style and Subversion in the 1950s, Allison Unruh
14. The New Rococo: Sofia Coppola and Fashions in Contemporary Femininity, Rebecca Arnold
15. Post-Colonial Rococo: Yinka Shonibare MBE Plays Fragonard, Sarah Wilson
16. The Rococo Revival and the Old Art History, Carol Duncan
Afterword. The Rococo Dream of Happiness as ‘a Delicate Kind of Revolt’, Melissa Lee Hyde
List of illustrations
Summaries
Select bibliography
Index
Details for ordering a copy are available (as a PDF file) here»
(more…)
Exhibition | Tiepolo: I Colori del Disegno
Giandominico Tiepolo, The Three Angels Appearing to Abraham
(Venice: Accademia)
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Now on at the Capitoline Museum (with caveats concerning an English translation in this particular case) . . .
Tiepolo: The Colours of Drawings / I Colori del Disegno
The Capitoline Museum, Rome, 3 October 2014 — 18 January 2015
Curated by Giorgio Marini with Massimo Favilla and Ruggero Rugolo
For the first time in Rome, the work of one of the greatest painters and printmakers of the eighteenth-century Venice, Giambattista Tiepolo. In the history of European figurative art, the impressive quantity and variety of designs produced by Tiepolo stands out as a great monument of eighteenth-century graphic representation.
The history of European figurative culture is remarkably marked by a huge amount and variety of drawings of the Tiepolos, which stand out as a magnificent monument of Eighteenth-century graphics. Indeed, drawing is the basic element of Giambattista Tiepolo’s genial art and is where he was the most prolific. Similarly, drawing characterized the exceptional and unique production of his family-owned original atelier, where he guided the graphical activity of his sons, Giandomenico and Lorenzo, in the last example of a very old Venitian tradition. Such an inexhaustible narrative vein, mainly intended as an independent exercise, is made of an extensive variety of registers that the artist used to adjust to the different functionalities of his production. Thus, the various typologies, techniques and themes give rise to a ‘colour of drawing’. This occasion is dedicated to this peculiar perspective on the many-sided world of Tiepolo and finds its reason in the lucky chance of gathering a selection of works coming from Italian collections, unfamiliar to the great public, with sheets that have been hardly ever exhibited before.
The four sections of the exhibition feature drawings and a selection of etchings according to prominent thematic clusters, but still arranged according to the range of their techniques: from the project to the early sketches, from ‘memories’ to ‘amusements’ and to the replicas of Giandomenico and Lorenzo, as an emulation of their father’s works. A measured selection of paintings is also exhibited in order to introduce and somehow represent the painting outcomes of every graphical typology. Some are well known, others have re-emerged or have been recognized only by the most recent research activities—even in the preparation of this exhibition—but they all contribute to grasp the dynamics of Tiepolo’s language, whose exceptional imaginative fertility does not exclude a constant innovation in the iteration of models.
The catalogue is available from ArtBooks.com:
Giorgio Marini et al., Tiepolo: I Colori del Disegno
(Rome: Campisano Editore, 2014), 192 pages, ISBN:
978-8898229338, $78.
New Book | The Churches of Rome, 1527–1870
From Pindar:
Michael Erwee, The Churches of Rome, 1527–1870: Volume I. The Churches (Oxford: Pindar Press, 2014), 780 pages, ISBN: 978-1904597285, £150 / $300.
The churches of Rome constitute arguably the most important manifestations of art and architecture in the Western world. This book is a detailed description of 251 churches in Rome and the Vatican City, built or decorated between 1527 and 1870, and is based on extensive research in state, church and private archives, as well as an exhaustive survey of modern and historical bibliographical sources.
Its aim is to provide a more complete picture of the construction and decoration of these churches than previously known. This entails not only providing the names of the architects who designed the churches, but also the names of the masons (muratori) and stone cutters (scalpellini), who built the churches and whose skills were essential for realising the architect’s plans. This depth of information is carried through to the interior decorations. The interior of each church is then described in depth, on a chapel-by-chapel basis, and includes stucco work, marble revetment, monuments, metal work, fresco and painted decorations and altarpieces. For each church, a brief historical introduction is given and a general bibliography supplied. Archival research has brought to light a great number of works of art whose authorship and/or dates have hitherto been unknown, including works by well-known artists but also many that are unknown to scholars. A great number of works of art whose authorship has hitherto been unknown are published in this volume for the first time.
An alphabetic index of artists (consisting of over two thousand names) is supplied, and includes the churches where their works are to be found and accurate biographical information for each artist. In addition there is an index of patrons, and a street and rione index. Also provided are the names and contact details of the archives consulted in researching this book. The book is intended to be used as a reference and resource book, as well as to be used by visitors to these churches. It is lavishly illustrated with photographs.
Michael Erwee was born in Zambia. He received his doctorate from the University of Sydney and was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt post doctorate scholarship from the German Government. At present he is an independent researcher.
Exhibition | Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden
Studio of Marco Ricci, A View of the Cascade, Bushy Park Water Gardens (detail),
ca. 1715 (Royal Collection Trust)
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Press release (9 October 2014) from the Royal Collection Trust:
Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 20 March — 11 October 2015
The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, 5 August 2016 — 26 February 2017
Curated by Vanessa Remington
Whether a sacred sanctuary, a place for scientific study, a haven for the solitary thinker or a space for pure enjoyment and delight, gardens are where mankind and nature meet. A new exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace will explore the many ways in which the garden has been celebrated in art through over 150 paintings, drawings, books, manuscripts and decorative arts from the Royal Collection, including some of the earliest and rarest surviving records of gardens and plants. From spectacular paintings of epic royal landscapes to jewel-like manuscripts and delicate botanical studies, Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden reveals the changing character of the garden and its enduring appeal for artists from the 16th to the early 20th century, including Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn and Carl Fabergé.
The idea of an earthly paradise—an enclosed space with orchards, flowing water, shade and shelter—can be traced back to Persia in the 6th century BC. The painted miniature Seven Couples in a Garden, c.1510, from the earliest illustrated Islamic manuscript in the Royal Collection, shows a beautiful Persian garden with an octagonal pool, plane and cypress trees, and elaborately tiled pavilions laid with floral carpets.
Before the 15th century, most European images of gardens appeared in illuminated religious manuscripts. The Book of Genesis, with its references to the Tree of Life, Tree of Knowledge and Four Rivers, provided a framework for artists to create images of Eden, as in Hartmann Schedel’s woodcut of 1493. In Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1615, Jan Brueghel the Elder relegates the main protagonists and the Tree of Knowledge to the middle distance in an abundant woodland landscape rich in flora and fauna. As court painter to the Habsburg Archdukes Albert and Isabella, Breughel was able to study botanical specimens in the palace garden in Brussels.
Until the 16th century, gardens in paintings and manuscripts remained largely those of the imagination. Henry VIII’s Great Garden at Whitehall Palace, seen in the background of the painting The Family of Henry VIII, c.1545, is the first real garden recorded in British art. By the Renaissance, gardens had become status symbols to be employed in royal propaganda. The wealth of a garden’s owner could be demonstrated through elaborate horticultural features such as obelisks, pergolas, knot designs and topiary. Although in the painting Pleasure Garden with a Maze by Lodewijk Toeput (Pozzoserrato), c.1579–84, the water labyrinth is the artist’s invention, it is inspired by contemporary descriptions of 16th-century Italian formal gardens.
By the 17th century, aristocratic gardens were created on a previously unimaginable scale. The intense rivalry between the French and English kings, Louis XIV and William III, produced two of the largest and most elaborate royal gardens ever made. The exhibition includes a panoramic view by Jean-Baptiste Martin of the French king’s gardens at Versailles, c.1700, and A View of Hampton Court, by Leonard Knyff, c.1702–14, the greatest surviving Baroque painting of an English garden.
With their amphitheatres, cascades and fountains, statuary, exotic birds and aviaries, Baroque gardens offered much to engage artists. The only surviving pair of sundials by the great 17th-century horologist, Thomas Tompion, are shown in the exhibition. The fashion for parterres (ornamental flower gardens) is reflected in An Exact Prospect of Hampton Court, an etching by Sutton Nicholls, c.1700, while A View of Bushy Park Water Gardens by the studio of Marco Ricci, c.1715, shows a large cascade, a rare feature in an English landscape.
By the 18th century, gardens took on a more natural, informal style, inspired in part by the poet John Milton’s romantic description of a wild and untamed Eden in Paradise Lost, 1667. An oil painting of Kew by the Swiss artist Johan Jacob Schalch, 1759, is from a series of views of the gardens designed for Frederick, Prince of Wales by William Kent and William Chambers. The distant pagoda is the only obvious sign of human intervention among the gently sloping hills, grazing sheep and lake.
In the 19th century the garden became a symbol of wholesome and virtuous family life, and a necessary ingredient of ordered domestic harmony. In a portrait of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert by Edwin Landseer, commissioned only two months after their marriage in 1840, the royal couple are set against a view of the East Terrace garden at Windsor Castle. William Leighton Leitch’s 1855 watercolour of the Swiss Cottage, created by Prince Albert for his children in the garden of Osborne House, reflects the informal and private existence enjoyed by the family on the Isle of Wight.
The 16th and early 17th centuries saw the birth of botanical illustration, florilegia (flower books) and still-life painting. Leonardo da Vinci was the first artist to produce true botanical studies, and the exhibition includes a number of exquisite examples by the artist. The only surviving painted flower book from 17th-century England is by the English gardener and botanical artist Alexander Marshal. Produced over a period of 30 years, it includes rare specimens, such as Auriculas (Primula x pubescens), grown only in the finest gardens of the time.
Flower designs on porcelain, silver, furniture and textiles, such as the vine-covered tapestry of a pergola by Jacob Wauters, c.1650, brought the garden inside the home. In the 19th century, the ‘language of flowers’ was translated into precious luxury items, such as the brooch presented by Prince Albert to Queen Victoria in celebration of their betrothal in 1839. In the form of orange blossom, symbolising chastity, it was the first of a suite of flower jewellery given to the Queen over several years. The skill of replicating the charm and beauty of flowers in three-dimensional objects reached new heights in the workshops of Carl Fabergé, the great Russian jeweller and goldsmith. Fabergé’s Bleeding Heart, c.1900, carved in nephrite, rhodonite and quartzite, has its flowers suspended from gold stems, so that they can move gently, as if blown by the wind.
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Published by the Royal Collection and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Vanessa Remington, Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden (London: The Royal Collection Trust, 2015), 312 pages, ISBN: 9781909741089, $75.
The garden is of perennial interest to artists. Yet, as cultural attitudes toward the garden and how we enjoy it have changed, so too have the ways in which it has been represented in art. From a space for solitary communion with nature to the backdrop for a budding romance, and from a place for scientific study to the source of the foods we eat, Painting Paradise looks at why the garden has remained such a seductive artistic subject.
For centuries, gardens have prompted reflection on the relationship between nature and man. They have also been considered representations of the divine, as in Flemish master Jan Brueghel’s famous Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise. Their ability to carry messages about their creator’s status will be clear to all who have had the pleasure of walking the grounds of meticulously manicured palaces or stately homes, but they are also evocative of prevailing cultural values and a desire to better understand, classify, and collect elements of the natural world. By the sixteenth century, artists were also attempting to bring the garden indoors as a source of design elements in the decorative arts, from seventeenth-century Flemish Pergola tapestries to handcrafted flowers from the Russian House of Fabergé.
Tracing these and other themes that attracted the attention of artists from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, Painting Paradise explores how these ideas came to be expressed in ways characteristic to a particular place and time, including works in both the Eastern and Western traditions. The curator of an accompanying exhibition opening at Buckingham Palace, Vanessa Remington has weeded through the Royal Collection to cultivate a selection of paintings, drawings, manuscripts, tapestries, and jewelry of exceptional value and extraordinary beauty. With more than three hundred color illustrations—including many treasures that have been previously unpublished—the book will be of great interest to artists, art and design historians, and all who find inspiration in the beauty of the garden.
Vanessa Remington is Senior Curator of Paintings, Royal Collection Trust, and the author of several books highlighting its collection, including Victorian Miniatures in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen.
Exhibition | Prints after Veronese
From the Remondini Museum in Bassano:
Veronese Inciso: Stampe da Veronese dal XVI al XIX Secolo
Museo della Stampa Remondini, Bassano del Grappa, 14 September 2014 — 19 January 2015
Curated by Giuliana Ericani
Si inserisce nell’itinerario Scopri il Veneto di Paolo Veronese con altre 5 mostre e 32 siti intitolati al grande artista del Cinquecento Veneto la mostra che i Musei civici di Bassano del Grappa dedicheranno a settembre alla fortuna di Veronese nella stampa “di traduzione.” Sarà così segnalata con larga evidenza l’enorme fama dell’artista e le capacità tecniche degli incisori di rendere con i tratti segnati sulla lastra la felicità e l’esuberanza del colore del Caliari.
La scelta di 58 fogli consente di riconoscere quasi tutti i capolavori del grande artista, alcuni irrimediabilmente perduti, opere riprodotte tra acqueforti e xilografie, tra la fine del Cinquecento fino a tutto il Settecento, a partire dalle acqueforti contemporanee di Agostino Carracci. Un paio di secoli più tardi, in pieno Neoclassicismo, la produzione più corrente dei Remondini non esita a tradurre nei segni fortemente inchiostrati la magniloquenza del disegno più che la felicità del colore, documentando per il mercato un artista la cui fama, complici il barocco e Tiepolo, non aveva mai visto flessioni.
Nella seconda metà del Settecento Giuseppe Remondini raccoglie una consistente collezione di incisioni a paragone, modello e supporto tecnico della produzione calcografica e tipografica della più grande stamperia dell’epoca, prima in Europa—è l’Encyclopédie a ricordarlo—per numero di addetti e quantità della produzione. Tale fondo, donato nel 1847 alla città dall’ultimo erede, Giambattista, è il nucleo fondante per il più recente tra gli antichi musei bassanesi—premio ICOM 2010—prezioso giacimento di questa e delle altre mostre che il Museo della stampa Remondini va via via proponendo dal 2007.
Posto d’onore in mostra per i legni xilografici incisi, con tecnica da lui inventata, dall’inglese John Baptist Jackson, tutti ceduti a Giuseppe Remondini, che saranno esposti assieme ad una selezione dei fogli da lui eseguiti sulle opere di Veronese. Una chicca che, in mezzo a stampe multiple, da sola vale il viaggio a Bassano, per gli addetti ai lavori e per chi vuole capire come le immagini si propaghino grazie alla forza espressiva delle immagini stesse.
Giuliana Ericani, ed., Veronese Inciso: Stampe da Veronese dal XVI al XIX Secolo (Naples: Arti Grafiche Zaccaria, 2014), 90 pages, ISBN: 978-8885821446, €10.
Writing for The Burlington 156 (December 2014), Xavier Salomon judges the catalogue “an essential contribution to the subject and complements Paolo Ticozzi’s catalogue of 1977” (p. 843).
Exhibition | Remembering Radcliffe
James Gibbs, Radcliffe Camera, Oxford, 1735–49
(Photo: Mike Peel, December 2007, Wikimedia Commons)
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From the Bodleian:
Remembering Radcliffe: 300 Years of Science and Philanthropy
Bodleian Library, Oxford, 28 November 2014 — 20 March 2015
Curated by Stephen Hebron
A new exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries explores the life and legacy of John Radcliffe, the doctor and philanthropist who gave Oxford some of its most iconic buildings. Remembering Radcliffe: 300 Years of Science and Philanthropy opens on 28 November and marks the 300th anniversary of the physician’s death.
John Radcliffe (bap. 1650–1714) was the most successful doctor of his day and was sought after as a physician to the royal family. On his death he left the bulk of his fortune to charitable causes. With beautiful engravings, watercolours, and architectural drawings, the Bodleian’s free exhibition tells the story of the Oxford landmarks funded by Radcliffe’s legacy: the Radcliffe Camera (the first circular library in Britain), the Radcliffe Observatory, and the Radcliffe Infirmary (the precursor of the modern John Radcliffe Hospital). The exhibition also looks at Radcliffe’s ongoing legacy in the work of The Radcliffe Trust.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for people to learn more about this remarkable physician and philanthropist,” said Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian. “John Radcliffe’s legacy lives on today—not only in Oxford’s stunning buildings but through his legacy’s investment in scientific research and its support for UK heritage and crafts, and classical music performance and composition through The Radcliffe Trust.”
Exhibition Highlights
• Architectural designs by Nicholas Hawksmoor and James Gibbs for Dr Radcliffe’s Library, which later became the Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library
• A 3D scale model of the Radcliffe Camera from 1735
• Rare and first edition books from the first collection of books housed in the Radcliffe Camera
• Early photographs and maps of Oxford including the buildings that bear Radcliffe’s name
• Watercolours, sketches, and engravings of the Radcliffe Camera, Radcliffe Observatory, and Radcliffe Infirmary
• Medical instruments, prescriptions, and records from Radcliffe’s medical career
• Letters, diary entries, and other materials related to Radcliffe’s life and death
• Silverware, stone carvings, and basket weavings produced by contemporary artists supported by The Radcliffe Trust
“The exhibition explains how an 18th-century doctor became one of Oxford’s greatest benefactors,” said curator Stephen Hebron. “Visitors can discover the story behind one of Oxford’s most famous buildings, the Radcliffe Camera, including its origins, its design, how it was built, and its role as a university library.”
On his death in 1714 Radcliffe left the bulk of this fortune to the University of Oxford, including £40,000 for the construction of the Radcliffe Camera, funds for an extension to University College and provision for two travelling fellowships in medicine. He stipulated that the residue of his estate be used for charitable purposes, forming the basis of The Radcliffe Trust. The Trust continues to this day and supports classical music performance and training as well as the UK’s heritage and crafts sector. To celebrate their tercentenary, The Radcliffe Trust has generously supported the Bodleian Libraries’ Remembering Radcliffe exhibition.
“If the amazing Dr Radcliffe had done no more than create the Radcliffe Camera as a monument to his memory this would have been an extraordinary achievement,” said Felix Warnock, Chairman of The Radcliffe Trust. “As it is, his endowment of The Radcliffe Trust was if anything even more visionary: the Trust, one of the very first grant-making charities, now stands on the threshold of a remarkable fourth century of philanthropic giving. We welcome you to the exhibition and accompanying events and hope you leave enriched and inspired by this truly original and remarkable benefactor.”
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Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Stephen Hebron, Dr Radcliffe’s Library: The Story of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015), 104 pages, ISBN: 978-1851244294, $25.
The Radcliffe Camera is one of the most celebrated buildings in Britain. Named for the physician John Radcliffe—who directed a large part of his fortune to its realization at the heart of the University of Oxford in the early eighteenth century—the circular library is instantly recognizable, its great dome rising amidst the Gothic spires of the university. Drawing on maps, plans, photographs, and drawings, Dr Radcliffe’s Library tells the fascinating story of the building’s creation over more than thirty years. Early designs for the Radcliffe Camera were drawn by the brilliant architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, who conceived the shape so recognizable today: a great rotunda topped by the University of Oxford’s only dome. From there, it would take decades to acquire and clear the site between the University Church of St Mary’s and the Bodleian. After Hawksmoor’s death, the project was taken on by the Scottish architect James Gibbs who refined the design and supervised the library’s construction. Published to accompany an exhibition opening in November at the Bodleian Library, Dr Radcliffe’s Library tells the fascinating story of the making of this architectural masterpiece.
Stephen Hebron is a curator working in the Department of Special Collections at the Bodleian Libraries. He is the author, most recently, of Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collections of the Bodleian Libraries.
New Book | British Romanticism and Italian Old Masters
From Ashgate:
Maureen McCue, British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793–1840 (Ashgate, 2014), 204 pages, ISBN: 978-1409468325, $110.
As a result of Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities. Maureen McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.
Maureen McCue is a Lecturer in English Literature at Bangor University.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1. Attempting ‘To Engraft Italian Art on English Nature’
2. Connoisseurship
3. Making Literature
4. Samuel Rogers’s Italy
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Marks of Genius: Drawings from the MIA
Edme Bouchardon, Design for a Token: Marine, 1744,
ca. 1743, red chalk (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
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Press release (7 May 2014) from the MIA:
Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 13 July — 21 September 2014
Grand Rapids Art Museum, 26 October 2014 — 18 January 2015
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, TBA
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, TBA
Curated by Rachel McGarry
Louis Lafitte, Young Woman in Classical Dress, Study for the Month of Thermidor, ca. 1804–05, black chalk, partially incised (Minneapolis Institute of Arts).
This summer, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) showcases an exemplary selection of its rarely seen, superb drawings collection in Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings from the Minneapolis institute of Arts. This special exhibition marks the first time this selection of drawings, which spans over 500 years, will be seen together by the public. Featured artist include celebrated masters such as Ludovico Carracci, Guercino, Thomas Gainsborough, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, René Magritte, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Marks of Genius opens at the MIA and will then travel to the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. A fully illustrated catalogue.
“Due to their sensitivity to light, drawings are exhibited for only short periods of time and are otherwise kept in dark storage,” says exhibition curator Rachel McGarry. While works from the museum’s large paper collection—over 40,000 prints and drawings—can be seen by appointment in the Herschel V. Jones Print Study, Marks of Genius is a rare opportunity for the public to see the cream of this collection.
Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié, Standing Male Nude, 1760s–80s, red chalk (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
Marks of Genius is exhibited at an apropos time. The MIA’s ‘treasury’ of drawings, which includes over 2,600 works, has increased by 20 percent since 2009. Several of these recent additions will be on view for the first time in this show. The exhibition brings to life the immediacy of drawings and explores its multiple roles as a means of study, observation, problem solving, a record of the artist’s imagination, and a medium for creating finished works of art.
The thematic display highlights these different aspects of drawing:
• Spark of Creation features ‘first draft’ sketches and inventions. This portion of the exhibition, showcasing the immediacy of the artistic process, features works such as Giuseppe Bazzani’s Pan and Syrinx, c. 1760, and George Romney’s Study for ‘The Lapland Witch,’ completed c. 1775–77.
• From Life is a section which features various observational studies drawn from nature throughout history. Notable works include Käthe Kollwitz’s c. 1903 Two Studies of a Woman’s Head and Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s Amaryllis lutea. c. 1800-06.
Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Amaryllis lutea, ca. 1800–06, watercolor and graphite on vellum (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)
• Portrait Drawings presents works such as Lovis Corinth’s Self-Portrait completed in 1908 and Egon Schiele’s Standing Girl, c. 1910.
• Figural Abstraction a section which documents artists’ studies of human forms and expression. Works featured in this section include Guercino’s Hercules, (1641–42) and Ernst Kircher’s Seated Woman in the Studio, completed in 1909.
• Storytelling presents drawings with a narrative theme, such as Arthur Rackham’s Little Red Riding Hood, 1909, and Ludovico Carracci’s Judith Beheading Holoferenes, c. 1581–85.
• Other themes include Sense of Place with Emil Nolde’s Heavy Seas at Sunset, c. 1930–35, and Appropriation with Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 Bratatat!
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From the MIA@Artbook:
Rachel McGarry and Thomas Rassieur, Master Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2014), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-0989371841, $60.
This lavishly illustrated book presents one hundred significant drawings from the 15th to the 21st century, including new discoveries and works by both celebrated masters and others who deserve to be better known. Among the artists represented are Annibale and Ludovico Carracci, Guido Reni, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Pierre-Paul Prud hon, Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Lovis Corinth, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Egon Schiele, Edward Hopper, John Marin, Grant Wood, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Edward Ruscha.
Catalogue entries for each drawing include complete documentation, provenance, and bibliography. The text provides important new scholarship and attributions; examines a variety of themes, such as connoisseurship, patronage, materials and techniques, watermarks, and collectors’ stamps; and discusses how a work fits into the artist’s oeuvre or represents larger developments in artistic movements or trends in artistic production
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