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’
Summer Reading Idea | The Stockholm Octavo
From Harper Collins:
Karen Englemann, The Stockholm Octavo: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2012), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0061995347, $27.
Life is close to perfect for Emil Larsson, a self-satisfied bureaucrat in 1791 Stockholm. He is a true man of The Town—drinker, card player, and contented bachelor. Until one evening, when Mrs. Sophia Sparrow, proprietor of an exclusive gaming parlor and fortune teller, shares with him a vision she has had—a golden path that will lead to love and connection for Emil. She offers to lay an Octavo for him, a spread of cards that augur the eight individuals who can help him realize this vision—if he can find them. Emil begins his search, intrigued by the puzzle of his Octavo and the good fortune Mrs. Sparrow’s vision portends. But when Mrs. Sparrow wins a mysterious folding fan in a card game, the Octavo’s deeper powers are revealed. No longer just a game of the heart, collecting his Eight is now crucial to pulling his country back from the crumbling precipice of rebellion and chaos. Set against the luminous backdrop of late 18th-century Stockholm, as the winds of revolution rage through the great capitals of Europe, The Stockholm Octavo brings together a collection of characters both fictional and historical whose lives tangle in political conspiracy, love, and magic in a breathtaking debut that will leave readers spellbound.
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From Ron Charles’s review (4 December 2012) for The Washington Post:
Engelmann lived in Sweden for almost 10 years and worked as an art director for Ikea, which you might see reflected in her story’s careful attention to design. No sepia tones for these 200-year-old scenes. Every room here vibrates with color. Even a relatively modest shop, for instance, “was painted in broad horizontal stripes of cheery lemon and cream, and the white crown moldings were like sculpted meringue oozing against the ceiling.” And Engelmann is just as captivating with the gorgeous outfits these people don to entertain and impress one another at a time when clothing was a strict marker of class and status. The antique etchings sprinkled throughout these pages are a nice touch, too . . .
Reviewed | Taking Time: ‘Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Juliet Carey, with essays by Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, Pierre Rosenberg and Katie Scott, Taking Time: “Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards” and Other Paintings (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1907372339, £30.
Reviewed by Paula Rea Radisich, Department of Art and Art History, Whittier College; posted 16 May 2013.
‘Taking Time: Chardin’s “Boy Building a House of Cards” and Other Paintings’ is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition mounted at Waddesdon Manor, the country house in Buckinghamshire, England, built in the nineteenth century for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Today the manor is run jointly by the National Trust and a charitable Rothschild Family Trust headed by Jacob Rothschild, 4th Lord Rothschild. In 2007, the trust purchased Jean-Siméon Chardin’s ‘Boy Building a House of Cards’ (1735). ‘Taking Time’ celebrates the arrival of Chardin’s painting to Waddesdon Manor, where it joins another famous genre painting by Chardin, ‘Girl with a Shuttlecock’ (1737), on loan from the Rothschild Collection, Paris.
As Lord Rothschild notes in his foreword to the catalogue, this is the first time Waddesdon has organized an exhibition consisting of loans from other countries. The curatorial premise of the show was to display the Waddesdon ‘House of Cards’ with Chardin’s other versions of the same subject belonging to the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. . . .
The full review is available here» (CAA membership required)
New Book | Painters and Paintings in the Early American South
From Yale UP:
Carolyn J. Weekley, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0300190762, $75.
This beautifully illustrated volume presents the complex ways in which the lives of artists, clients, and sitters were interconnected in the early American South. During this period, paintings included not only portraits, but also seascapes, landscapes, and pictures made by explorers and naturalists.
The first comprehensive study of this subject, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South draws upon materials including diaries, correspondence, and newspapers in order to explore the stylistic trends of the period and the lives of the sitters, as gentility spread from the wealthiest southerners to the middle class. Featuring works by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Benjamin West, among many others, this important book examines the training and status of painters, the distinction between fine art and the mechanical arts, the popularity of portraiture, and the nature of clientele between 1540 and 1790, providing a new, critical understanding of the history of art in the American South.
Carolyn J. Weekley is Juli Grainger Curator at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. She is co-author of Treasures of American Folk Art: From the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center and The Kingdoms of Edward Hicks.
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Note (added 27 July 2013) — The book accompanies a major exhibition of more than 80 works created in or for the South between 1735 and 1800, on view at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Colonial Wiliamsburg from 23 March 2013 until 7 September 2014. The press release is available here.
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