New Book | Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors
From Paul Holberton:
Hugh Belsey, Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors: An Insight into the Artist’s Last Decade (London: Paul Holberton, 2013), 120 pages, ISBN: 978-1907372506, £25 / $40.
The work of Thomas Gainsborough is characterized by a series of subjects that preoccupied him, which with time he was able to hone and define more clearly. Inspired by the recent identification of a third autograph version of his masterpiece The Cottage Door, this book examines the significance of the multiple versions of designs that the artist produced during the 1780s. It demonstrates that without the pressure of exhibiting his work annually at the Academy and without a string of sitters waiting for their finished portraits, Gainsborough’s work became more personal, more thoughtful and searching.
A study of his unconventional background, training and early development as an artist provides some clues as to why Gainsborough came to use painting in this very personal way. It was not until the 1780s, however, that his creative energies really changed in this direction. He had never been happy with the constraints of the Royal Academy and he was at odds with the dictatorial opinions promoted by its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. In removing himself from the Academy he cast off the shackles of producing paintings, competitive in their design and colouring, which inhibited the artist’s natural goals of likeness, subtlety and balanced tonality. He could now be choosey about the commissions he accepted, paint for his own pleasure and satisfy his own curiosity. He began to turn to portrait compositions that he had developed and refined over a number of years. With subtle alterations they could be made suitable for a variety of sitters. The margin between ‘fancy’ pictures and portraits became blurred and the categorization of some of these paintings changed while they were on the easel. Always finding composition difficult, rather than begin something new he often revisited earlier designs that had pleased him. He would paint them again and make slight changes of tone and emphasis that would radically change the concept and intention of the design.
Richly illustrated with beautiful new photography, this study of the last phase of the artist’s work is a totally fresh interpretation of not only the Cottage Door theme, which Gainsborough revisited over nearly 20 years, but other key late works such as Mrs Sheridan and Diana and Acteon. The subject matter in some of these late work veers towards the autobiographical and provides an invaluable insight into the artist’s personality and his very worrying concerns.
Hugh Belsey is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art with the task of writing the definitive catalogue of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough.
Exhibition | Revisiting The Cottage Door: Gainsborough’s Masterpiece
From The Huntington:
Revisiting The Cottage Door: Gainsborough’s Masterpiece in Focus
The Huntington Library, San Marino, 1 June — 2 December 2013
Thomas Gainsborough, The Cottage Door, ca. 1780
(San Marino: The Huntington)
The Cottage Door (ca. 1780), one of the treasures of The Huntington’s collections, is among Thomas Gainsborough’s most famous paintings. The idealized scene of rustic country life was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, but both the subject and the composition continued to haunt the artist, and he repeated the design twice during the course of the decade. All three paintings are shown together for the first time in this special display, providing a unique opportunity to compare the subtle differences among them. Both of the later versions, on loan from private collections, are less finished than The Huntington’s canvas, and there are variations in tone and detail that give each a particular mood and a different emphasis.
A new book by Gainsborough specialist Hugh Belsey, Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors: An Insight into the Artist’s Last Decade, complements the installation. Inspired by the recent attribution of the third version, it examines how Gainsborough freed himself from the constraints of the Royal Academy and was able to make radical changes to his work during the last years of his
life.
New Book | Il Disegno nell’Europa del Settecento
Available from Artbooks.com:
Piera Giovanna Tordella, Il disegno nell’Europa del Settecento: Regioni teoriche ragioni critiche (Florence: Olschki, 2012), 284 pages, ISBN: 978-8822262332, $65.
The book follows the theoretic and critical evolution of European drawing and of its complex configuration in the eighteenth century, with the aid of texts by German, French, English, Dutch and Italian authors. The theme is naturally variegated and connects the activity of intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, artists, connoisseurs and collectors. The scene is often animated by original interpreters that crossed conceptual and aesthetic horizons populated by acclaim and disapproval.
Exibition | Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment
From The Hunterian:
Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment
The Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, 13 September 2013 — 5 January 2014
Allan Ramsay, Lady Anne Campbell, Countess of Strafford, 1743 (Glasgow: The Hunterian)
In 2013 The Hunterian will stage a major new exhibition dedicated to one of Britain’s most accomplished 18th-century painters. Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) is best known as a portrait painter whose elegant style set him apart from other portraitists of the time. Born in Edinburgh, his career took him from a small Scottish clientele to the Hanoverian court of King George III. Away from his studio, Ramsay was in close contact with a number of influential figures, and his published writing includes works on taste, politics and archaeology. The exhibition centres on a selection of portraits from across Ramsay’s thirty years as a painter and also features drawings, watercolours, published books, pamphlets, letters and other materials which demonstrate Ramsay’s fascinating place in the intellectual and cultural life of Edinburgh, London, Paris and Rome in the mid 18th century. The exhibition also includes key loans from UK public and private collections and new research, examining the intellectual context in which Ramsay painted a number of his most important portraits, including that of Hunterian founder Dr William Hunter.
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From ArtBooks.com:
Mungo Campbell, ed., Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment (New York: Prestel, 2013), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-3791348780, $60.
Allan Ramsay’s accomplished canvases and refined drawings offer us some of the defining portraits of the Enlightenment. He was as well equipped to offer a deep sense of engagement with his Enlightenment sitters through his intellectual and cultural upbringing as he was trained to create elegantly constructed paintings through his extended education as a painter in Italy. Establishing himself in London and Edinburgh, Ramsay was admired for his understanding of contemporary political, cultural, and intellectual issues, as well as for his portraits of key protagonists in these debates. This beautiful volume brings together Ramsay’s most celebrated sitters, such as Rousseau, Hume, and William Hunter, along with numerous drawings and prints to consider his critical role in the British Enlightenment. Many of the artist’s rarely seen portraits of women are included. Alongside exquisite reproductions, the volume presents fascinating new research exploring the unique sensitivity of Ramsay’s
painting, the development of his technique, and
familial influences on his work.
New Book | Delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum
From Philip Wilson’s current catalogue:
Michael Archer, Delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2012), 464 pages, ISBN: 978-1781300022, £55 / $95.
This complete catalogue of the English and Irish delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, reveals much that is beautiful and unusual. The greater part of the collection was bequeathed by Dr J.W.L. Glaisher in 1928, and much of it is little known. A detailed publication has long been overdue, and 588 items are illustrated here in colour, many with multiple views. The strength of Dr Glaisher’s collection is the English earthenware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly delftware: no better assemblage has ever been made by a single collector. He amassed objects with great academic rigour over a period of more than thirty years, concentrating particularly on dated pieces while always exercising a discriminating and aesthetical eye. Michael Archer’s catalogue provides details of date and place of manufacture, size, body, glaze, decoration and provenance with a full discussion where appropriate.
Julia Poole has contributed a fascinating chapter with much new material on Dr Glaisher’s life and the extraordinary breadth of his collecting interests. There is also a general introduction to delftware, including a description of the manufacturing process; further sections give indexes and exhaustive information on all the works. This book is an essential addition to the library of all scholars, collectors,auction rooms and dealers in the field and invaluable to those members of the public with an interest in the history of English pottery generally and delftware in particular.
Michael Archer, O.B.E, M.A., F.S.A. is a former Keeper of the Ceramics Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum where he becamethe acknowledged expert on English delftware. He has written numerous articles and books on ceramics, culminating in Delftware: The Tin-Glazed Earthenware of the British Isles, a catalogue of the collections inthe Victoria and Albert Museum, published in 1997.
New Book | The Diary of Constantijn Huygens
From Brill (with thanks to Hélène Bremer for noting it — chapter 7 addresses Huygens as an art connoisseur) . . .
Rudolf Dekker, Family, Culture, and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 195 pages, ISBN: 978-9004250949. €98 / $136.
Based on analysis of a diary kept by Constantijn Huygens Jr, the secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange, this book proposes a new explanation for the invention of the modern, private diary in the 17th century. At the same time it sketches a panoramic view of Europe at the time of the Glorious Revolution and the Nine Years’ War, recorded by an eyewitness. The book includes chapters on such subjects as the changing perception of time, book collecting, Huygens’s role as connoisseur of art, belief in magic and witchcraft, and gossip and sexuality at the court of William and Mary. Finally this study shows how modern scientific ideas, developed by Huygens’s brother Christiaan Huygens, changed our way of looking at the world around us.
Rudolf Dekker taught history at Erasmus University Rotterdam and directs the Institute for the Study of Egodocuments and History, Amsterdam. He is the author of several books, including Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Palgrave 2001). With Arianne Baggerman he wrote Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary (Brill 2005).
New Book | Newton and the Netherlands
From The University of Chicago Press (with thanks to Hélène Bremer for noting it) . . .
Eric Jorink and Ad Maas, eds., Newton and the Netherlands: How Isaac Newton was Fashioned in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-9087281373, $37.
The Dutch Republic proved to be extremely receptive to the groundbreaking ideas of Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Dutch scholars such as Willem Jacob Gravesande and Petrus van Musschenbroek played a crucial role in the dissemination of Newton’s work, not only in the Netherlands, but also in the rest of Europe. With Newton and the Netherlands, editors Eric Jorink and Ad Maas collect a variety of essays that seek to contextualize Newtonian ideas within Dutch intellectual history and examine Newton’s powerful influence on his contemporaries in the Netherlands.
Eric Jorink is researcher at the Huygens Institute for Netherlands History (Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences). He is the author of Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575-1715 (Leiden 2010). Ad Maas is curator at the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.
Exhibitions | Edward Harley: The Great Collector
Press release from The Harley Gallery:
Edward Harley: The Great Collector
The Harley Gallery, Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, 25 May 2013 — May 2014
From opulence and obsession to debt and despair, the exhibition Edward Harley: The Great Collector follows the fortunes of the 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689-1741). Showing at The Harley Gallery from 25 May 2013, it explores Edward Harley’s background, family and marriage through his spectacular collections of fine and decorative art and books.
Lord Edward Harley was a dedicated but extravagant collector. He bought at inflated prices when the desire to possess overrode any sense of the value of the piece or the extent of his resources. In 1738 he found himself in great debt and had to sell his family home and his collections.
The son of Robert Harley, one of the most powerful politicians in the country, Edward Harley married Henrietta Cavendish-Holles – the wealthiest heiress in Britain. Harley filled his family home at Wimpole Hall with a hubbub of activity – writers, poets, artists, bibliophiles would be regular visitors. He was a dedicated collector; his collections were extensive and extravagant as he passionately sourced the rarest and most beautiful things. Harley was surrounded by the finest thinkers and the finest things.
Besides magnificent silver, curios, paintings, and other works of art, he collected English miniature portraits dating from the early 1500s to his own time. These likenesses were intended as precious, jewel-like treasures to be kept in cabinets, brought out to be admired, and then returned to safety. They could be love tokens and gifts, souvenirs between friends and family members. Being so small, they were easily portable. Some were to be designed to be worn by a loved one as a pendant or bracelet. Many of Harley’s miniatures came from branches of his and his wife’s families; others were purchased because of the distinction of the artist or the importance of the sitter. They are the work of the greatest masters in the medium.
Harley rapidly added to the library started by his father, and his collection included pivotal works such as Shakespeare’s Second Folio and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Through Harley’s dedication, the library at Wimpole Hall grew at an astonishing rate, with some 12,000 books in the collection by September 1717. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, books and pictures were needing special accommodation in more and more houses. They were to become an essential part of country-house life. It was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that rooms called libraries became more common in country houses. Informed buying of art and literature was virtually non-existent until Charles I and other members of the court circle built up their collections in the 1620s and 30s. It required leisure, knowledge and money and house design grew to accommodate the collections with libraries, picture galleries and cabinet rooms. By the end of his life in 1741 Edward Harley had amassed the largest private library in Britain, but his passion for collecting ranged far beyond books and manuscripts. Edward Harley’s library contained 50,000 printed books, 7,639 manuscripts, 14,236 rolls and legal documents, 350,000 pamphlets, 41,000 prints: “the most choice and magnificent that were ever collected” (Collins).
His wealth gradually dwindled, yet Harley continued to add to his collections, often driving up the price of objects in his lust for ownership. In this obsessive collecting, Harley bankrupted himself and spent much of his wife’s fortune, eventually selling his family home and his collections to pay his debts. The great library, started by his father and described by Dr Johnson as excelling any offered for sale, was dispersed in 1742, but the celebrated Harleian collection of manuscripts was one of the founding collections of the British Library. Harley was also a patron of contemporary writers, including Alexander Pope and Jonathon Swift and of artists and architects.
The Harley Gallery is situated in the countryside of Welbeck, a ducal estate which has been home to the Cavendish-Bentinck family for more than 400 years. Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689-1741) married into this family around 1713, when he wed Lady Henrietta Cavendish–Holles, uniting one of the most politically powerful families in the country with one of the richest. Edward Harley: The Great Collector will be accompanied by a full colour publication written by Curator Derek Adlam.
The Harley Gallery has recently announced plans to build a new Gallery which will show objects from The Portland Collections, the fine and decorative art collected by this family over the centuries. These collections include many objects purchased by Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford.
Exhibition | Madame Elisabeth: The Tragic Fate of a Princess
From the exhibition website:
Madame Elisabeth (1764-1794): Une Princesse au Destin Tragique
Domaine de Madame Elisabeth, Versailles, 27 April — 21 July 2013
Curated by Juliette Trey
Who was the real Madame Elisabeth, the princess who never married and lived at Versailles with her brother Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette? When she turned nineteen, the King gave her the estate of Montreuil, a country house very close to the Palace of Versailles. Madame Elisabeth spent her days there in simple pursuits – music, science, painting, embroidery and games – surrounded by her friends. In 1789, when she was twenty-five years old, the age of majority for unmarried women, she was finally entitled to sleep at Montreuil. However, the events of the French Revolution dictated otherwise.
This first major exhibition devoted to Madame Elisabeth is located in two areas of the estate. In the Residence, the furniture and objects with which the Princess surrounded herself have been assembled for the first time, conjuring up the lifestyle at Montreuil. The Orangery traces the life of the princess and the history of the estate.
130 works and objects have been assembled, including paintings, drawings, furniture, objets d’art, costumes, jewellery, and archive plans and documents. They come from the Palace of Versailles and several public and private collections and some exhibits have never previously been displayed. The exhibition space design aims to recreate the intimate atmosphere of Montreuil during the era of Madame Elisabeth. A multi-sensory tour allows visitors to experience this directly via perfumes, music, handling materials, and listening to contemporary accounts.
This tribute to the young princess also offers an opportunity to learn about the art of 18th-century gardens. The grounds are laid out in the English landscape garden style and have retained their original feel, with a grotto and groves of trees. Beds of aromatic and medicinal plants have been recreated in front of the Orangery, conjuring up the figure of Lemonnier, Madame Elisabeth’s physician, who cultivated plants on the estate. The walk between the two exhibition venues is enlivened with topiary representing animals.
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From the Versailles bookstore:
Juliette Trey, ed., Madame Elisabeth (1764-1794): Une Princesse au Destin Tragique (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2013), 192 pages, 28€.
Although she was an obscure princess, Madame Élisabeth had an exceptional destiny. She never married and stayed with her elder brother, Louis XVI, who made her a present of the Montreuil estate on her 19th birthday: a country house only a few hundred metres from the Palace of Versailles.
This matchless horsewoman spent her days pleasantly there, surrounded by her friends who accompanied her on hunting outings or fishing trips. Passionately interested in mathematics and geography, and gifted in drawing, she never really interrupted her studies. Deeply pious, learned and sensible, Madame Élisabeth was also funny, cheerful and incredibly generous to everyone, heaping gifts on her friends and winning the affection of the inhabitants of Montreuil by her many acts of charity.
She showed great courage during the Revolution, refusing to go into exile in order to stay with her family. Imprisoned in the Temple with the royal family, she was guillotined just after reaching the age of thirty. A cult grew up around the memory of Madame Élisabeth which intensified after the Restoration and the return to power of her brothers from 1814 on.
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New Book | Green Retreats
From Cambridge UP:
Stephen Bending, Green Retreats: Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 319 pages, ISBN: 978-1107040021, $40.
Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture explores the world of eighteenth-century aristocratic women and the gardens they created, inhabited, visited, and imagined. It examines both the physical spaces created by women and the role of the garden (physical and imagined) in relation to female sociability, scandal, high politics, piety, the erotic, and the powerful but contradictory language of retirement with which women in the country were confronted. Combining a survey of cultural representations of the woman in the garden with case studies of four major women gardeners, it offers comprehensive readings of letters, journals and diaries, novels, poetry and physical landscape to demonstrate the complex cultural negotiations and manipulations women undertook when they gardened on a large scale. Detailed case studies include Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking circle, the gardening neighbours Lady Caroline Holland and Lady Mary Coke, and the scandalous retirement of Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
Part I:
1. ‘Gladly I leave the town’: Retirement
2. ‘No way qualified for retirement’: Disgrace
Part II:
3. Bluestocking Gardens: Elizabeth Montagu at Sandleford
4. Neighbours in Retreat: Lady Mary Coke and the Hollands
5. ‘Can you not forgive?’ Henrietta Knight at Barrells Hall
6. ‘Though very retired, I am very happy’
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