Exhibition | Goya: Lights and Shadows
From ArtDaily.com (16 March 2012):
Goya: Lights and Shadows / Luces y Sombras
The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 22 October 2011 — 29 January 2012
CaixaForum Barcelona, 15 March — 24 June 2012
Curated by Manuela B. Mena and José Manuel Matilla
Francisco de Goya, The Clothed Maja, ca. 1800
(Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado)
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Nearly two hundred years after his death, Francisco de Goya continues to exercise a universal attraction that very few others in the history of art have equalled. Not only is Goya enveloped in the greatness of his art and his genius, he is also shrouded in mystery and popular legend in a way that makes him doubly attractive and accessible. Now, almost thirty-five years after the last major exhibition devoted to the Spanish master in Barcelona, Goya. Lights and Shadows brings a large selection of great works the collection of El Prado National Museum, the most important in the world. The show features nearly one hundred pieces – oils, drawings, prints and letters – in a chronological journey through the main periods in the career of this Aragón-born artist. From the early years, in which Goya’s realism contrasted with the over-refined Rococo style favoured by his contemporaries, to the intimate works he produced towards the end of his life in Bordeaux, not forgetting the drama of the Peninsular War, which marked a turning-point in his artistic development. The exhibition is the fruit of a cooperation agreement signed between ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Prado National Museum 2011 under which the Catalan organisation became a Benefactor of the museum. Under the terms of the agreement, three more joint exhibitions will be organised in the coming years. Goya. Lights and Shadows is the first show planned as part of the joint exhibition programme established by ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Prado National Museum, the result of an agreement made between the two institutions in July 2011, under which ”la Caixa” becomes a Benefactor of the Spanish art gallery. . .
The full press release (which includes programming and lectures) is available here»
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Exhibition | Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings
Press release from Sue Bond:
Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings from The Courtauld Gallery
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 June — 9 September 2012
The Frick Collection, New York, 2 October 2012 — 27 January 2013
Curated by Stephanie Buck and Colin B. Bailey
The Courtauld Gallery holds one of the most important collections of drawings in Britain. Organised in collaboration with the Frick Collection in New York, this exhibition presents a magnificent selection of some sixty of its finest works. It offers a rare opportunity to consider the art of drawing in the hands of its greatest masters, including Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Cézanne and Matisse. The Courtauld last displayed a comparable selection of its masterpieces more than twenty years ago and this exhibition will bring the collection to new audiences nationally and internationally.
The exhibition opens with a group of works dating from the 15th century, from both Northern and Southern Europe. An exquisite and extremely rare early Netherlandish drawing of a seated female saint from around 1475-85 is rooted in late medieval workshop traditions. It was also at this time that drawing assumed a new central role in nourishing individual creativity, exemplified by two rapid pen and ink sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. These remarkably free and exploratory sketches show the artist experimenting with the dynamic twisting pose of a female figure for a painting of Mary Magdalene. For Renaissance artists such as Leonardo, drawing or disegno was the fundamental basis of all the arts: the expression not just of manual dexterity but of the artist’s mind and intellect.
These ideas about the nature of drawing achieved their full expression in the flowering of draughtsmanship in the 16th century. At the heart of this section of the exhibition is Michelangelo’s magisterial The Dream. Created in 1533, this highly complex allegory was made by Michelangelo as a gift for a close friend and it was one of the earliest drawings to be produced as an independent work of art. More typically, drawings were made in preparation for other works, including paintings, sculptures and prints. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s engaging scene of drunken peasants cavorting at a festival in the Flemish village of Hoboken was drawn in 1559 in preparation for a print. Whereas Michelangelo sought ideal divinely inspired beauty in the human figure, Bruegel here revels in the disorder of everyday life.
Charles Joseph Natoire, "Life Class at the Académie Royale," 1746, watercolour, chalk (black) on paper, 454 x 323 mm, © The Courtauld Gallery, London
Despite the important preparatory function of drawing, many of the most appealing works in the exhibition were unplanned and resulted from artists reaching for their sketchbooks to capture a scene for their own pleasure. Parmigianino’s Seated woman asleep is a wonderful example of such an informal study surviving from the early 16th century. Drawn approximately 100 years later in around 1625, Guercino’s Child seen from behind retains the remarkable freshness and immediacy of momentary observation. Guercino was a compulsive and brilliantly gifted draughtsman. Here the red chalk lends itself perfectly to the play of light on the soft flesh of the child sheltering in its mother’s lap. No less appealing in its informality is Rembrandt’s spontaneous and affectionate sketch of his wife, Saskia, sitting in bed cradling one of her children. The exhibition offers a striking contrast between this modest domestic image and Peter Paul Rubens’s contemporaneous depiction of his own wife, the beautiful young Helena Fourment. Celebrated as one of the great drawings of the 17th century, this unusually large work shows the richly dressed Helena – who was then about 17 – moving aside her veil to look directly at the viewer. Created with a dazzling combination of red, black and white chalks, this drawing was made as an independent work of art and was not intended for sale or public display. In its imposing presence, mesmerising skill and subtle characterisation, it is the equal of any painted portrait.
The central role of drawing in artistic training is underlined in a remarkable sheet by Charles Joseph Natoire from 1746. It shows the artist, seated in the left foreground, instructing students during a life class at the prestigious Académie royale in Paris. Drawing after the life model and antique sculpture was considered essential in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the great champions of this academic tradition was Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The beautiful elongated forms of the reclining nude in his Study for the ‘Grand Odalisque’, 1813-14, represents the highest refinement of a precise yet expressive linear drawing style rooted in the academy. Outside the academy, drawing could offer the artist a means of liberating creativity. Goya’s Cantar y bailar (Singing and dancing), 1819-20, comes from one of the private drawing albums which the artist used to inhabit the world of his dreams and imagination.
Canaletto’s expansive and meticulously composed View from Somerset Gardens, looking towards London Bridge is one of several highlights of a section exploring the relationship between drawing and the landscape. This group stretches back as early as Fra Bartolomeo’s Sweep of a river with fishermen drawn in around 1505-09, and also includes a particularly strong selection of landscapes from the golden age of the British watercolour. The interest in landscape is nowhere more powerfully combined with the expressive possibilities of watercolour than in the work of J.M.W. Turner. His late Dawn after the Wreck of around 1841 was immortalised by the critic John Ruskin, who imagined the solitary dog shown howling on a deserted beach to be mourning its owner, lost at sea. For Ruskin, this was one of Turner’s ‘saddest and most tender works’. (more…)
Exhibition | Taking Time: Chardin’s ‘Boy Building a House of Cards’
From Waddesdon Manor:
Taking Time: Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards and Other Paintings
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 28 March — 15 July 2012
Curated by Juliet Carey
This exhibition brings together some of the greatest works to come out of eighteenth-century France. Prompted by Waddesdon’s recent acquisition of Boy Building a House of Cards (1735) by Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), the exhibition will unite all four of the artist’s paintings of the subject for the first time ever.
Loans from the UK, France and the USA will demonstrate how Chardin paired these works with other compositions to explore themes of childhood, adolescence and play. A group of Chardin’s images of servants – again, never seen together before – will provide a contrast with these images of children playing.
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From Paul Holberton Publishing:
Juliet Carey, with essays by Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, Pierre Rosenberg and Katie Scott, Taking Time: Chardin’s Boy Building House of Cards and Other Paintings (London: Paul Holberton, 2012), 160 pages, ISBN: 9781907372339, £30.
Recently acquired by Waddesdon Manor, Jean-Siméon Chardin’s early masterpiece Boy Building a House of Cards has a self-contained stillness that contrasts with the splendour of its new setting. Yet, it resonates with existing apspects of the collection from games and the representation of childhood to the influence of North European genre painting on French art. A child playing – with cards, bubbles, spinning-top or shuttlecock – was a favourite subject of Chardin’s. Such scenes, with their intimations of the transitory nature of human life, were derived from 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish vanitas, but display a delight in childhood for its own sake.
Full of repetition, pendants and series, this catalogue allows the reader to scrutinize some of Chardin’s greatest works, and to follow the artist’s exploration of some of his most arresting subjects. Prints by Pierre Filloeul, Antoine Marcenay de Ghuy and others demonstrate the shifts in appearance and meaning that Chardin’s card-house compositions underwent through transposition from painting to engraving. The prints also help reconstruct some of the occasional pairings in which Chardin’s figure paintings were staged, whether on the walls of the Salon or in the cabinets of private collectors. The pendants include two of the most famous of all Chardin’s figure paintings, Lady Taking Tea and Girl with a Shuttlecock. Essays in self-containment and stillness, these works invite us to consider the nature of attention – the attention of the painter, his human subjects and ourselves.
This richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (28 March – 15 July 2012) that will unite Chardin’s four paintings of a boy with a house of cards for the first time (loans come from the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the National Gallery, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington), allowing us to examine Chardin’s treatment of the subject in the context of his fascination with themes of play, childhood and adolescence. Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Musée du Louvre and the pre-eminent scholar of Chardin’s work, considers the Rothchilds as collectors of Chardin; Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, an independent scholar and Rothschild specialist, gives an insight into Charlotte de Rothschild’s collecting; Katie Scott, lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in French art and architecture of the early modern period, explores Chardin’s paintings of games; and Juliet Carey, Curator of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture at Waddesdon Manor and curator of the exhibition, writes on repetition and meaning in Chardin’s houses of cards and their pendants.
2011 Edition of CAA’s ‘Graduate Programs in Art History’
From CAA:
CAA has published new editions of Graduate Programs in Art History: The CAA Directory and Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts: The CAA Directory. As comprehensive resources of schools across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, these guides list 650 programs in fine art and design, art and architectural history, curatorial studies, arts administration, and more.
The directories provide prospective graduate students with information they need prior to beginning the application process. The directories are also key professional references for career-services representatives, department chairs, graduate and undergraduate advisors, librarians, professional-practices educators, and professors interested in helping emerging generations of artists and scholars find success.
Graduate Programs in Art History covers four program types: History of Art and Architecture, Arts Administration, Curatorial and Museum Studies, and Library Science. This directory integrates programs in visual studies into History of Art and Architecture. . . .
More information is available here»
New Title | ‘Pygmalion in Bavaria’
From Penn State UP:
Christiane Hertel, Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011), 344 pages, ISBN: 9780271037370, $100.
In Pygmalion in Bavaria, Christiane Hertel introduces the sculptor Ignaz Günther, placing him in the historical context of Bavarian Rococo art and Counter-Reformation religious visual culture. She also considers the remarkable aesthetic appeal of Günther’s oeuvre—and connects it to the eighteenth-century art theory that focused on sculpture and the creative paradigm of Pygmalion. Through this interweaving of contexts and discourses, Hertel offers insights into how Rococo art’s own critical dimension positions it against the Enlightenment and introduces a particular notion of subjectivity.
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“This is an extraordinary book. Extraordinary is Hertel’s command of eighteenth-century aesthetic art theory, extraordinary her command of Bavarian Rococo art, especially the art of Ignaz Günther, and extraordinary the depth of her understanding of the religious culture of eighteenth-century Bavaria. Pygmalion in Bavaria may seem to be a book for a small number of specialists. But the spell of Ignaz Günther’s art should ensure that this unusually engaging text will find the readers that it deserves and will help secure, in the English-speaking world, Günther’s place among the major artists of the eighteenth century.” —Karsten Harries, Yale University
Exhibition | Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi
Press release from the Asia Society Museum:
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857
Asia Society Museum, New York, 7 February — 6 May 2012
Curated by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 brings together 100 masterpieces created during an artistically rich period in India’s history. This major international loan exhibition provides a new look at an era of significant change during which the Mughal capital in Delhi shifted from being the heart of the late Mughal Empire to becoming the jewel in the crown of the British Raj. The exhibition includes jewel-like portrait paintings, striking panoramas, and exquisite decorative arts crafted for Mughal emperors and European residents alike, as well as historical photographs. The exhibition is curated by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma. It is accompanied by a 264-page illustrated book with essays by William Dalrymple, Yuthika Sharma, Jean Marie Lafont, Malini Roy, Sunil Sharma, and J.P. Losty, published by Asia Society Museum in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
(Yale University Press, 2012), ISBN: 9780300176667, $60
“Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 is a reappraisal of a transitional era in India that provided unprecedented impetus for artistic innovation and experimentation,” says Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum Director and Vice President for Global Art Programs. “We’re pleased to be taking a new approach to this magnificent and vibrant work with notable author William Dalrymple and art historian Yuthika Sharma as curators.”
The exhibition focuses on the reigns of the last four Mughal emperors: Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748), Shah Alam II (reigned 1759–1806), Akbar Shah II (reigned 1806–1837) and Bahadur Shah II Zafar (reigned 1837–1857). Having lost military, political and economic power to the newlyarrived British in Calcutta, Delhi continued to maintain its extraordinary cultural, literary, and artistic patronage networks. Artists were supported by the Mughal court in Delhi and the city’s ascendant European residents, creating an environment of extraordinary interaction and influence between them and the new world of the British East India Company.
As the British took over the reign of a dispersed empire from the Mughals in 1803, they were enamored of its courtly elegance and sought to participate in its culture as patrons and enthusiasts. Company painting, involving artistic commissions undertaken by Indian artists for officers of the British East India Company, was practiced alongside Mughal court painting, with both patrons utilizing the services of a common group of artists.
The exhibition looks at recognized works by Delhi-based court artists Nidha Mal and Chitarman, and less familiar works by artists such as Ghulam Murtaza Khan, Ghulam Ali Khan, and Mazhar Ali Khan. In addition to Mughal miniatures produced under later emperors, this exhibition highlights a selection of so-called Company School paintings produced for Delhi-based personalities such as William Fraser, James Skinner, and Thomas Metcalfe. The exhibition also chronicles the rise in genre portraiture during this era, epitomized by character studies of urban and rural residents of Delhi.
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From Yale UP:
William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 224 pages, ISBN: 9780300176667, $60.
. . . Sumptuous color illustrations of such works illuminate the pages of this book, painting a vivid portrait of this important city and its art, artists, and patrons. Masterworks by major Mughal artists, such as Nidha Mal and Ghulam Ali Khan, and works by non-Mughal artists demonstrate the dynamic interplay of artistic production at this time. This largely overlooked period is explored in thought-provoking essays by a panel of distinguished scholars of Indian art, history, and literature to present an engaging look at this dynamic artistic culture in the midst of rapid change.
William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer, historian, and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Yuthika Sharma received a PhD in South Asian art and architecture from Columbia University and a doctorate in design from Harvard University.
Call for Nominations | Marc Raeff Book Prize
Marc Raeff Book Prize for Outstanding Work on Imperial Russia
Nominations due by 30 June 2012
The Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies Association, an affiliate organization of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), is now accepting submissions for the second annual Marc Raeff Book Prize. The prize is awarded annually for a publication that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for understanding Imperial Russia, particularly during the long eighteenth-century. The recipient of the award will be recognized with a cash prize, which will be presented in November 2012, during the ASEEES annual convention. The award is sponsored by the ECRSA and named in honor of Marc Raeff (1923-2008), historian, teacher, and dix–huitièmiste par excellence. (more…)
New Title | ‘Icons of Longevity’
Icons of Longevity appeared at the end of 2010, but I learned of it only recently, at the book fair for the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles. The University Press of Southern Denmark wasn’t at the meeting, but this curious title was represented by The Scholar’s Choice, a company specializing in book displays at academic conferences (over 160 each year). During the past few years, I’ve gotten to know the company’s founder, Tom Prins, who usually attends CAA and often ASECS. It seems to me that at a time when academic publishing faces one new obstacle after another, The Scholar’s Choice provides a valuable service for the humanities. If you’re an author, you might consider having the company represent you when your publisher won’t be attending a conference (check with your publisher), and the next time you see The Scholar’s Choice table at a book fair, buy something! I was delighted to pick up a copy of Icons of Longevity. I told Tom I was buying it out of a spirit of wishful thinking. . . wishful thinking for myself and for the book business generally. -CH
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Lise-Lotte B. Petersen and Bernard Jeune, Icons of Longevity: Luxdorph’s Eighteenth Century Gallery of Long-Livers (University Press Of Southern Denmark, 2010), 330 pages, ISBN: 9788778387417, $65.
Bolle Willum Luxdorph, who lived from 1716-1788, was the first Dane known to have studied the phenomenon of old age. Luxdorph was a high-ranking Danish civil servant, a leader of the Danish Chancellery, as well as a scholar and poet. In the last years of his life, Luxdorph created an art collection of paintings of older people (“long-livers”). The exact date at which Luxdorph began taking an interest in the phenomenon of old age is not known, but it must have happened sometime in the late 1770s. At this point, Luxdorph began systematically collecting data concerning very old people (i.e. persons who had reached the age of 80 and over). This book examines Luxdorph’s collection, which has a triple-source value in terms of the history of art, the history of civilization, and the history of science. Both the reconstruction and the availability of the collection hold specific contemporary and general importance for: the illustration of very old men and women, the development of research on aging, and the associated socio-cultural topics. Moreover, the collection represents an encyclopedic interest, the passion to collect, and the origin of science-orientated collections, as they became characteristic in 18th-century Europe.
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Note (added 7 March): The Scholar’s Choice works directly with publishers to coordinate displays. While they’re happy to speak with individual authors, that’s not typically how decisions are made about what gets included at the table. So talk to your publisher!
Exhibition | ‘Waxing Eloquent: Italian Portraits in Wax’
From the Fondazaione Musei Civici Venezia:
Avere una Bella Cera: Le Figure in Cera a Venezia e in Italia
Fortuny Museum, Venice, 10 March – 25 June 2012
Curated by Andrea Daninos
Francesco Orso, "Vittoria di Savoia Soisson," ca. 1785 (Castello di Agliè)
The exhibition aims to analyse a field that is little explored in the history of art, that of life-size wax figures; it is a fascinating subject and one that in recent years has stimulated interest from many contemporary artists, but until now no exhibition had been dedicated to this theme. The exhibition project arises from two fortunate coincidences: the existence of a series of wax portraits in the public collections and churches of Venice, and the centenary of the first study dedicated to the history of waxwork portraiture, Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs, written by the famous Viennese art historian, Julius von Schlosser. The first Italian edition of this work has recently been published, edited by Andrea Daninos.
The exhibition will for the first time bring together the few existing examples of this genre in Italy, presenting them in an itinerary that begins with the theme of the cast and funeral mask. The first section will display a series of wax funeral masks of Venetian doges (eighteenth century), an all but unique example of the use of wax “doubles” in funeral ceremonies. The visitor will then be able to admire the only visual example to have survived of life-size votive figures, Vincenzo Panicale’s Libro dei miracoli, an early seventeenth-century manuscript documenting the votive figures in the Sanctuary of S. Maria della Quercia in Viterbo.
This is followed by the faces of saints and criminals, two recurrent subjects in the tradition of wax portraiture. The former are represented by 12 busts of Franciscan saints dating from the eighteenth century; made of wax, with glass eyes and real hair, these works constitute a complete group in this unusual religious iconography. In contrast, the visitor will also come face to face with a series of portraits of criminals made at the end of the nineteenth century by the pupil of Cesare Lombroso, Lorenzo Tenchini.
The central section of the exhibition is dedicated to the tradition of wax portraiture in Italy. It is introduced by two life-size portrait figures of eighteenth-century Venetian children. These two works, mentioned by Schlosser and Mario Praz, who compared them to the protagonists in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, are kept in the storerooms of Palazzo Mocenigo and have not been put on public display for decades. They will certainly astonish the visitor for the quality of the execution and their disturbing realism.
The school of Bologna, the only town in Italy in which the art of life-size wax portraiture became widespread, will be represented by some of the specialists in the genre, including Anna Morandi Manzolini, Luigi Dardani and Angelo Gabriello Piò. In its last section, the exhibition will present the works of two artists who worked outside Italy, and who specialised in waxwork exhibitions. The first of these is Joseph Müller-Deym, a mysterious Austrian aristocrat who owned a famous waxworks museum in Vienna in the eighteenth century, and who will be represented here by his portrait of Maria Carolina of Austria. The other is a Piedmontese artist, Francesco Orso, who opened an analogous waxworks show in Paris during the years of the French Revolution. The present exhibition will display the works he produced for the Savoy court.
The rich and exceptional nature of the works on show is the result of the generosity of the loans from churches, scientific universities and museums, including the Museo del Dipartimento di Anatomia Umana, Farmacologia e Scienze Medico-Forensi of the Università di Parma, and the Palazzo Reale in Naples.
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From ACC Distribution:
Catalogue: Andrea Daninos, ed., Waxing Eloquent Italian Portraits in Wax (Officina Libraria, 2012), 160 pages, ISBN: 9788889854839, $28.
This catalogue analyses a field of art history that only recently has been given renewed attention with the translation in French (1997), English (2008) and Italian (2011) of Julius von Schlosser’s History of Portraiture in Wax, originally published in German a century ago. The exhibit and the catalogue will present all life-size figures in wax present in Italy starting with the death masks in wax of the Venetian dogi (XVIII century), which were used as funeral effigies. The Book of Miracles, a XVII century manuscript illustrated in watercolours, documents the use of wax statues as ex-voto in churches. The heads of saints (12 Franciscan saints from the church of the Redentore in Venice) and criminals (8 manufactured in the late XIX century in Turin) will constitute another section. But the main section is dedicated to portraiture in wax and will see the presence of 7 busts and 2 full-size portraits of children, all from the XVIII and XIX century.
C O N T E N T S
Andrea Daninos, Wax Figures in Italy: A Brief History
Guido Guerzoni, Aureae Cerae: Production, Distribution and Consumption of Wax Artefacts in Modern Europe
Giovanni Ricci, Masks of Power: Funeral Effigies in Early Modern Europe
Emanuele Trevi, Written Waxes: Figures in Wax as Inspiration in Modern Literature
Catalogue Entries
Index of Names
Andrea Daninos has studied ceroplastic – the art of modelling in wax – for many years. He recently held a course on the subject at the University of Milan and he has edited and annotated the Italian translation of Julius von Schlosser’s History of Portraiture in Wax (Milan: Officina Libraria 2011), the seminal book on the argument.
Guido Guerzoni teaches Cultural Heritage and Art Markets at the Università Lugi Bocconi in Milan. His research interests are focused on the cultural and arts markets and his latest book has been translated into English in 2011 (Apollo and Vulcan: The Art Markets in Italy, 1400-1700, Michigan State University Press).
Giovanni Ricci is professor of Modern History at the University of Ferrara. He is the author of several books on urban history, the real and perceived presence of the Turks in Europe, marginal strata of society and social mobility, and funereal rites and their political use.
Emanuele Trevi is a literary critic and writer. He writes on a number of daily newspapers and has collaborated with RAI-3 Radio, one of Italy’s national radio stations. He lives in Rome.
Forthcoming Title | ‘William Burton Conyngham’
From Yale UP:
Peter Harbison, William Burton Conyngham and His Irish Circle of Antiquarian Artists (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, June 2012), 288 pages, ISBN: 9780300180725, $85.
In the midst of a resurgence of pride in Ireland’s history during the 18th century, William Burton, later Conyngham (1733-1796), strove to emulate his British counterparts in producing albums of engravings illustrating the beauties of the country’s heritage. To further his aims, he formed the Hibernian Antiquarian Society, which lasted only four years due to internal strife. Nevertheless, Burton Conyngham began acquiring drawings of antiquities, and then commissioned Gabriel Beranger and his fellow artists Angelo Bigari and John James Barralet to make sketches of dolmens, churches, abbeys, and castles in areas which were not represented in existing works.
In its day, Burton Conyngham’s was regarded as the most significant collection of such drawings in Ireland. This volume reconstructs that collection, cataloguing more than 600 drawings, which he was known to have secured by about 1780. Also presented in this monograph is the considerable number of copies that were made of the original works as security against damage to the collective whole or the death of its owner.
Peter Harbison is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and its honorary academic editor.
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