Recent TLS Reviews
The eighteenth century in The Times Literary Supplement (16 & 23 August 2013). . .
Paula Findlen, “Man of the Museum: Review of Michael Hunter, Alison Walker, and Arthur MacGregor, eds., From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections (British Library, 2012),” p. 27.
The story of the founding of the British Museum has been told many times. Less often discussed is the man behind the museum. Who was Hans Sloane, and how did he become Britain’s greatest collector? The twenty essays in Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor and Michael Hunter’s From Books to Bezoars, written by leading scholars and curators and accompanied by a modern transcription of Thomas Birch’s Memoirs relating to the life of Sir Hans Sloane, offer us a preliminary answer. They are the result of recent efforts to reconstruct Sloane’s collections from surviving materials in the main repositories established (or partly established) by his bequest: the British Museum, the British Library, and the Museum of Natural History. . .
The contributors to From Books to Bezoars repeatedly invite us to return to Sloane’s lists and catalogues as a guide through the original collection. They urge us to pull out the drawers of his cabinets, contemplating his collections of shoes, weapons, musical instruments, tobacco pipes and pouches, and many other things such as a Caribbean dugout canoe. . .
In the past two decades, museums and libraries have become ever more conscious of the importance of reconstructing their pasts. This volume cannot answer all our questions about why and how Hans Sloane built his collection, or how an eighteenth-century public embraced and satirized it, but it paints a vivid picture of the man. It also lays the groundwork for a new history of the origins of the British Museum, and prompts us to consider how that history might inform the presentation of its artefacts.
The full review is available here (subscription required)
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Jennifer Potter, “Before Arcadia: Review of Gordon Campbell, The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (Oxford University Press, 2013),” p. 31.
Ornamental hermits, like garden gnomes, are great dividers of taste. Dorothy and William Wordsworth sneered at the “distressingly puerile” theatrics of an Ossian-inspired hermitage in the rugged landscapes of Perthshire. Horace Walpole, despite his architectural predilection for Strawberry Hill Gothic, poked fun at the notion of setting aside a quarter of one’s garden in which to be melancholy. Even Gordon Campbell, in The Hermit in the Garden, describes his subject as “Pythonesque.” Yet the story of how Georgian Britain peopled its gardens with real, imaginary and occasionally stuffed hermits of a secular rather than religious nature is one he rightly wills us to take seriously.
As defined by Campbell, the British craze for keeping a pet hermit in your garden began at Richmond with William Kent’s ornamental hermitages for Queen Caroline, consort to George II (first a ruined hermitage, begun in 1730, and then a druidic Merlin’s cave). It ended a century later with the death of George IV, although a venal, fortune-telling hermit lingered on in London’s pleasure gardens at Vauxhall. Casting his eye beyond Britain’s shores, Campbell looks first for origins and antecedents, principally religious garden hermits in Renaissance Italy, northern France, Spain and Bohemia; and garden retreats of Europe’s rulers, starting with Emperor Hadrian’s island pavilion at his magnificent villa complex near Rome, the Villa Adriana, where so much of garden history began. While the Reformation swept away England’s religious hermits for three centuries or more, secular hermits emerged with the transitional figure of Thomas Bushell, a mining engineer and one-time secretary to Francis Bacon. . .
The full review is available here (subscription required)
Exhibition | Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios
From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History:
Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios
Smithsonian Castle, Washington, D.C., 9 August 2013 — 17 August 2014
Panel from George Washington’s Coach, 17 x 15 inches. President Washington’s state coach featured four side panels representing the seasons; this panel, encased in an oak frame, depicts ‘Spring’ (Smithsonian)
Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes and Curios features a selection of diminutive and personal objects that Americans have taken, made and saved as historical mementos from the Early Republic up to the present day. Many of the postcards, structural fragments such as a brick from George Washington’s childhood home, consumer goods, locks of hair and other keepsakes on display are part of the earliest Smithsonian collections now in the museum’s Division of Political History. Highlights include a fragment of Plymouth Rock, presidential hair, wood from George Washington’s coffin and pieces from Joan of Arc’s dungeon, the Bastille, and the Berlin Wall.
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From Princeton Architectural Press:
William Bird, Souvenir Nation: Relics, Keepsakes, and Curios from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1616891350, $25.
Buried within the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History exists an astonishing group of historical relics from the pre-Revolutionary War era to the present day, many of which have never been on display. Donated to the museum by generations of souvenir collectors, these ordinary objects of extraordinary circumstance all have amazing tales to tell about their roles in American history. Souvenir Nation presents fifty of the museum’s most eccentric items. Objects include a chunk broken off Plymouth Rock; a lock of Andrew Jackson’s hair; a dish towel used as the flag of truce to end the Civil War; the microphones used by FDR for his Fireside Chats; and the chairs that seated Nixon and Kennedy in their 1960 television debate. This fascinating collection of Americana includes an introductory essay on this nation’s passion for souvenir collecting, as well as a brief history and a glimpse behind the scenes of the Smithsonian.
Exhibition | Artists & Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France
Press release (3 June 2013) from The Met:
Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1 October 2013 — 5 January 2014
Curated by Perrin Stein
During the eighteenth century in France, a great number of artists—painters, sculptors, draftsmen, and amateurs—experimented with etching, a highly accessible printmaking technique akin to drawing. Featuring 130 works by such artists as Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Hubert Robert, and many others, Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France will be the first exhibition to focus on the original etchings created by painters and amateurs in eighteenth-century France. It will present a fresh exploration of how etching flourished in ancien régime France, shedding new light on artistic practice and patronage at that time. In a period when artists strained to navigate the highly regulated Académie Royale and the increasingly discordant public spheres of the marketplace and the Salon, etching afforded them stylistic freedom and allowed them to produce exquisite works of art in a spirit of collaboration and experimentation. The exhibition will present etchings, plus a few drawings and preparatory sketches, from the Metropolitan Museum’s rich holdings, as well as loans from North American museums and private collections. The selection of prints includes a number of rare or unique examples.
While printmaking was dominated by professionals for much of its early history, the technique of soft-ground etching—where a plate was coated in varnish and could then be drawn on with a metal stylus—transformed the practice from a specialized technique practiced by an exclusive group with extensive training, to a highly accessible art form. Some artists, like Antoine Watteau and François Boucher, encountered the process within the thriving commerce of the Paris print trade, where a painter would sometimes be asked to make a preliminary sketch on a prepared copper plate to guide the professional printmaker who would later reinforce the design with engraving. Others, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert, first experimented with the technique during their student years in Rome, where Piranesi’s studio was in close proximity to the French Academy. For some, like Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre, etching formed a bridge with amateurs, wealthy members of the court or aristocracy who wanted to learn etching as a cultured, leisure pursuit. Because of these relationships, the making of the prints became intermingled with the collecting and studying of prints, creating an environment of cross-fertilization which led to a flourishing of the art form.
Jacques François Joseph Saly, Design for a Vase with Two Mermaids, from the “Vases” series, 1746 (NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Artists and Amateurs will highlight the freedom, spontaneity, and creativity of the medium of etching in the hands of artists and collectors. Over the course of the century, etching came to be viewed not solely as a reproduction medium, but also, as one capable of original artistic expression. As the free and improvisational aesthetic of the etching process increasingly was embraced, French artists looked to seventeenth-century masters—such as Rembrandt in the North and Salvator Rosa and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione to the South—for inspiration. The expressive potential of the technique was also explored in a more experimental manner by artists like Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and Louis Jean Desprez, who harnessed the inky tonalities of the medium to their personal and idiosyncratic vision. The painters who felt the urge to pick up the etching needle were drawn to the freedom and accessibility of the technique, and not necessarily focused on exploiting commercial potential. Their prints tend to be rare and are valued for their qualities of expressiveness and experimentation—in many ways the opposite of the mass production and technical expertise of professional printmakers like Demarteau and Bonnet.
The exhibition will also focus on the French Academy in Rome as a setting that provided the means and freedom to explore this medium; the etchings made by amateurs, both in Rome and in Paris; and, finally, the increasing stylistic engagement with past masters. Overall there will be a balance between works of the most successful painters of the period and lesser known, but equally accomplished figures, including the work of amateurs and the working relationships between them where the influence went both ways.
The exhibition will be organized thematically and will explore how, where, and why artists first learned to etch, their occasional experimentation with marketing their prints for sale, and their technical innovations as they found new ways to manipulate the medium for individual expression. Highlights include Watteau’s Recruits Going to Join the Regiment (ca. 1715-16), Fragonard’s The Satyr’s Family (1763) and The Armoire (1778), Liotard’s Self-Portrait, Boucher’s Andromeda (1734), Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s View of the Salon of 1753, de Boissieu’s Study of Thirteen Heads (ca.1770), and amateur Ange-Laurent de la Live de Jully’s etching after a drawing by Jacques-François-Joseph Saly of Nicolas Bremont, Cook at the French Academy in Rome (ca. 1754).
From Yale UP:
Perrin Stein, ed., Artists and Amateurs: Etching in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0300197006, $60. With essay by Charlotte Guichard, Rena M. Hoisington, Elizabeth Rudy, and Perrin Stein.
Exhibition | Picturing America
In addition to the exhibition, the Dixon has devised a truly-inspired plan to lure visitors to the museums on Fridays: food trucks in the parking lot!
Picturing America: Signature Works from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art
Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, 4 August — 6 October 2013
Vero Beach Museum of Art, Vero Beach, Florida, 15 February — 25 May 2014
Over the past fifty years, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, has assembled a collection of works by significant American artists, concentrating on the mid-18th through the mid-20th centuries. Featuring works by John Singleton Copley, Charles Wilson Peale, and Mary Cassatt, Picturing America showcases the signature works from the museum’s collections, from preeminent American artists of the Hudson River School to modernists such as Milton Avery and Doris Lee.
Barbara Jones, Picturing America: Signature Works from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (Greensburg, PA: Westmoreland Museum of American Art, 2010), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0931241376, $45.
New Books | Summer Reading
With the arrival of August, many of you begin thinking about syllabi and teaching loads. If, however, you’re looking for a bit more summer reading before it all starts again, you might consider one of these books: a trio of novels and a sampling of non-fiction that might even count as research for those of you working on topics in natural history. -CH
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From the Peepal Tree Press:
David Dabydeen, Johnson’s Dictionary (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2013), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1845232184, $20.
Manu, a revenant from Dabydeen’s epic poem “Turner,” leads us through 18th-century London and Demerara (in British Guiana), recounting experiences that might be dreamed or remembered. We meet slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers, sodomites and pious Jews – characters who have somehow come alive from engravings by Hogarth and others. Hogarth himself turns up as a drunkard official artist in Demerara, from whom the slave Cato steals his skills and discovers a way of remaking his world. The transforming power of words is what enlightens Francis when his kindly (or possibly pederastic) master gifts him a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary, whilst the idiot savant, known as Mmadboy, reveals the uncanny mathematical skills that enable him to beat Adam Smith to the discovery of the laws of capital accumulation – and teach his fellow slaves their true financial worth. From the dens of sexual specialities where the ex-slave Francis conducts a highly popular flagellant mission to cure his clients of their man-love (and preach abolition), to the sugar estates of Demerara, Dabydeen’s novel revels in the connections of empire, art, literature and human desire in ways that are comic, salutary and redemptive.
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From Canongate:
Jonathan Grimwood, The Last Banquet (London: Canongate, 2013), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0857868794, £15. [due out in North America from Europa Editions in October]
Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout is many things. Orphan, soldier, diplomat, spy, lover. And chef. This is his story.
We meet Jean-Marie d’Aumout as a penniless orphan eating beetles by the side of a road. His fate is changed after an unlikely encounter finds him patronage and he is sent to military academy. Despite his frugal roots, and thanks to wit and courage in great measure, he grows up to become a diplomat and spy. Rising through the ranks of eighteenth-century French society, he feasts with lords, ladies and eventually kings, at the Palace of Versailles itself.
Passion, political intrigue and international adventure abound in Jean-Marie’s life, yet his drive stems from a single obsession: the pursuit of the perfect taste. Three-Snake Bouillabaisse, Pickled Wolf’s Heart and Flamingo Tongue are just some of the delicacies he devours on his journey toward the ultimate feast. But beyond the palace walls, revolution is in the air and the country is clamouring with hunger of a different kind.
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From Harper Collins:
Michael Irwin, The Skull and the Nightingale: A Novel (New York: William Marrow, 2013), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0062202352, $26.
Michael Irwin’s The Skull and the Nightingale is a chilling and deliciously dark, literary novel of manipulation and sex, intrigue and seduction, set in 18th-century England.
When Richard Fenwick, a young man without family or means, returns to London from a Grand Tour of Europe in 1761, his godfather, James Gilbert, has an unexpected proposition. Gilbert has led a sedate life in the country, but now, in his advancing years, he feels the urge to experience, if vicariously, the extremes of human feeling—love and passion, in particular—along with something much more sinister. He asks Richard to serve as his proxy and to write to him of his city adventures, and his ward believes he has no option but to accept. It quickly becomes clear that Gilbert desires correspondence of a titillating nature—tales of carousal, seduction, and excess—and so Richard begins to write of London’s more salacious side. For here is an invitation to hedonism and Richard, eager to taste all that a privileged life has to offer, rises to the challenge.
But Gilbert’s elaborate and manipulative “experiments” into the most intimate workings of human behavior soon drag Richard into a vortex of betrayal, where lives may be ruined and tragedy is only a step away. And when Richard does the unthinkable and falls in love, the stakes are raised and he must make a defining choice. But what sort of man has he by now become?
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From Harvard UP:
Edward H. Burtt and William E. Davis, Alexander Wilson: The Scot Who Founded American Ornithology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 464 pages, ISBN 978-0674072558, $35.
Audubon was not the father of American ornithology. That honorific belongs to Alexander Wilson, whose encyclopedic American Ornithology established a distinctive approach that emphasized the observation of live birds. In the first full-length study to reproduce all of Wilson’s unpublished drawings for the nine-volume Ornithology, Edward Burtt and William Davis illustrate Wilson’s pioneering and, today, underappreciated achievement as the first ornithologist to describe the birds of the North American wilderness.
Abandoning early ambitions to become a poet in the mold of his countryman Robert Burns, Wilson emigrated from Scotland to settle near Philadelphia, where the botanist William Bartram encouraged his proclivity for art and natural history. Wilson traveled 12,000 miles on foot, on horseback, in a rowboat, and by stage and ship, establishing a network of observers along the way. He wrote hundreds of accounts of indigenous birds, discovered many new species, and sketched the behavior and ecology of each species he encountered.
Drawing on their expertise in both science and art, Burtt and Davis show how Wilson defied eighteenth-century conventions of biological illustration by striving for realistic depiction of birds in their native habitats. He drew them in poses meant to facilitate identification, making his work the model for modern field guides and an inspiration for Audubon, Spencer Fullerton Baird, and other naturalists who followed. On the bicentennial of his death, this beautifully illustrated volume is a fitting tribute to Alexander Wilson and his unique contributions to ornithology, ecology, and the study of animal behavior.
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From Harvard UP:
Peter Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 392 pages, ISBN 978-0674047990, $35.
The history of mountaineering has long served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. Once upon a time, the Alps were an inaccessible habitat of specters and dragons, until heroic men—pioneers of enlightenment—scaled their summits, classified their strata and flora, and banished the phantoms forever. A fascinating interdisciplinary study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mount Everest, The Summits of Modern Man surveys the far-ranging significance of our encounters with the world’s most alluring and forbidding heights.
Our obsession with “who got to the top first” may have begun in 1786, the year Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard climbed Mont Blanc and inaugurated an era in which Romantic notions of the sublime spurred climbers’ aspirations. In the following decades, climbing lost its revolutionary cachet as it became associated instead with bourgeois outdoor leisure. Still, the mythic stories of mountaineers, threaded through with themes of imperialism, masculinity, and ascendant Western science and culture, seized the imagination of artists and historians well into the twentieth century, providing grist for stage shows, poetry, films, and landscape paintings.
Today, we live on the threshold of a hot planet, where melting glaciers and rising sea levels create ambivalence about the conquest of nature. Long after Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest, though, the image of modern man supreme on the mountaintop retains its currency. Peter Hansen’s exploration of these persistent images indicates how difficult it is to imagine our relationship with nature in terms other than domination.
New Title | Woods in British Furniture-Making, 1400–1900
Distributed by the University of Chicago Press:
Adam Bowett, Woods in British Furniture-Making, 1400–1900: An Illustrated Historical Dictionary (London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2012), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-0955657672, $180.
Bowett charts the species, sources, and history of the woods used in British furniture making from medieval times to the twentieth century. The main dictionary section of the book has 460 entries that cover 477 species of hardwoods and softwoods and detail the history of each wood, describe its uses, and provide cross references to other woods. Extensively illustrated with examples of historic furniture, this book also includes an introductory survey of the historic timber trade and several appendices, including over 160 illustrated wood samples from the Economic Botany collection at Kew Gardens. The layout and accompanying photographs make this a valuable and accessible read that will interest furniture and antique enthusiasts, collectors, restorers, curators, and botanists, among others.
Adam Bowett is an independent furniture historian. He has published widely in academic and popular journals and is the author of two books on English furniture. He works as a consultant to museums and auction houses, as well as to organizations such as the National Trust,
Historic Scotland and Historic Royal Palaces.
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
How to use this book
Hardwoods
Softwoods
Appendix I: Map of the principal trade routes for imported timber 1400–1900
Appendix II: Woods named in the text, arranged by family
Appendix III: Woods named in the text, arranged by geographical region
Appendix IV: Wood specimens
Bibliography
Index of Botanical Names
General Index
Exhibition | Charakterköpfe: Portrait Busts in the Enlightenment
From the museum’s 2013-14 exhibition schedule:
Charakterköpfe: Die Bildnisbüste in der Epoche der Aufklärung
Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, 6 June — 6 October 2013
Curated by Frank Matthias Kammel and Anna Pawlik
The portrait bust is one of the most fascinating genres of sculpture. It was particularly adaptable to the varieties of concurrent artistic styles prevalent at the end of the 18th century. Portraits of rulers, burghers, artists and intellectuals were oriented towards idealized images, towards the antique, or presented the subject in unidealized, haunting realism. Often they show consideration of the interconnectedness between physiognomy and personality. Through the presentation of sculptural masterpieces, this exhibition illuminates a major facet of a politically and spiritually fascinating era, and not least will convey a lively image of the Enlightenment’s novel interest in the individual.
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From the Germanisches Nationalmuseumm:
Die Porträtbüste ist eine der faszinierendsten Gattungen der Bildhauerkunst. Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts war sie von der Gleichzeitigkeit gegensätzlicher Stile bestimmt wie in kaum einer anderen Epoche zuvor. Bildnisse von Regenten, Bürgern, Künstlern und Gelehrten orientieren sich an Idealbildern, an der Antike oder stellen den Porträtierten ungeschönt, in einem packendem Realismus dar. Nicht selten spiegeln sie Überlegungen zur Abhängigkeit von Gesichtzügen und Charakter wider. Die Ausstellung präsentiert dieses breite Spektrum anhand plastischer Meisterwerke zahlreicher bedeutender Künstler wie Johann Heinrich Dannecker, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Johann Valentin Sonnenschein oder Johann Gottfried Schadow. Namhafte Geistesgrößen der Zeit, wie Goethe, Herder, Pestalozzi oder Winckelmann, erscheinen in Glanzleistungen früher realistischer und klassizistischer Strömungen der Bildhauerei. Flankiert von zeitgenössischer Graphik und Malerei vermittelt die Ausstellung eine lebhafte Vorstellung von einem damals neuartigen Interesse am Bild des Menschen.
Frank Matthias Kammel, Charakterköpfe: Die Bildnisbüste in der Epoche der Aufklärung (Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2013), 244 pages, ISBN: 978-3936688757, €33.
New Title | Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’
Distributed for the University of Wales by the University of Chicago Press:
John Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: ‘A Native Artist’ (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 245 pages, ISBN: 978-0708325667, £65 / $100.
Born in Ruthin, Denbighshire, Edward Pugh (1763–1813) was a Welsh-speaking artist and writer who worked as a miniaturist in London, exhibiting frequently at the Royal Academy. But Pugh’s passion was the landscape, and he painted remarkable views of North Wales that not only captivate but also reveal the development of the Welsh economy and Welsh national consciousness. Pugh also wrote and illustrated a fascinating, informative, and humorous account of a tour of North Wales around 1800–one of the only travel books written at that time by someone who could actually converse with the inhabitants.
Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813 is the first book to consider the work of this nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer in detail, linking the history of art in Wales with the social history of the country. John Barrell shows how Pugh’s pictures and writings portray rural life and social change in Wales during his lifetime, from the effects of the war with France on industry and poverty, to the need to develop and modernize the Welsh economy, to the power of the landowners. Almost all of the pictures and accounts we have today of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers, and none of these, as Barrell demonstrates, can tell us about life in North Wales with the same depth and authenticity as does Pugh.
John Barrell is professor in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. He is the author of numerous books, including The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s.
New Title | Ireland and the Picturesque
Due in August from Yale UP:
Finola O’Kane, Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting, and Tourism, 1700–1840 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0300185386, $85.
That Ireland is picturesque is a well-worn cliché, but little is understood of how this perception was created, painted, and manipulated during the long 18th century. This book positions Ireland at the core of the picturesque’s development and argues for a far greater degree of Irish influence on the course of European landscape theory and design. Positioned off-axis from the greater force-field, and off-shore from mainland Europe and America, where better to cultivate the oblique perspective? This book charts the creation of picturesque Ireland, while exploring in detail the role and reach of landscape painting in the planning, publishing, landscaping and design of Ireland’s historic landscapes, towns, and tourist routes. Thus it is also a history of the physical shaping of Ireland as a tourist destination, one of the earliest, most calculated, and most successful in the world.
Finola O’Kane is lecturer in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, University College Dublin.
Exhibition | Quilts 1700–1945
From the QAG press release (14 June 2013) . . .
Quilts 1700–1945
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 15 June — 22 September 2013
Curated by Sue Prichard
Coverlet with sundial, cotton, 1797
(London: Victoria and Albert Museum)
An exhibition of historic British quilts from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is now on view at the Queensland Art Gallery, presenting enthralling social histories and personal stories of more than 200 years of quiltmaking and patchwork. The exhibition includes more than 35 hand-crafted textiles created to provide comfort and commemorate historical events and family occasions between 1690 and 1945, plus a host of associated material such as pin cushions, needlework tools and sewing baskets.
The works come primarily from the esteemed collection of the V&A, the world’s leading decorative arts and design museum. Select pieces have travelled from British regional museums and private collections, and there is the special addition of the much-admired Rajah quilt of 1841, sewn by convict women during transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, on loan from the National Gallery of Australia.
Divided into four thematic sections, the exhibition explores the domestic landscape of the wealthy bedrooms of 18th-century Britain; the private thoughts and political debates that emerged as patchwork spread to aspirational middle class homes in the early 19th century; the movement of quilts to the public sphere for exhibition and display in Victorian England; and the survival of quiltmaking in economically deprived areas in the face of the emergence of mass production in the early 20th century.
“The exhibition has been curated for QAG by Sue Prichard, Curator of Contemporary Textiles at the V&A, based on the popular exhibition Quilts 1700–2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories, presented in 2010 at the V&A,” explained Director Chris Saines.
The exhibition is accompanied by the 196-page publication Quilts 1700–1945, a co-edition from QAGOMA and the V&A.
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