The Burlington Magazine, February 2012
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 154 (February 2012)
• Sophie Raux, “Carel Fabritius in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” pp. 103-06. This article establishes, among other things, that Carel Fabritius’s Mercury and Argus (c.1645–47; Los Angeles County Museum of Art) was in the collection of François Boucher, where it was seen by Fragonard.
Reviews
• Christian Tico Seifert, Review of Vadim Sadkov, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts: Netherlandish, Flemish, and Dutch Drawings of the XVI-XVIII Centuries. Belgian and Dutch Drawings of the XIX-XX Centuries (Amsterdam: Foundation for Cultural Inventory, 2010), pp. 128-29.
• Xander Van Eck, Review of Lyckle de Vries, How to Create Beauty: De Lairesse on the Theory and Practice of Making Art (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2011), pp. 129-30.
• Kate Retford, Review of the exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to
Sarah Siddons (London: National Portrait Gallery), pp. 134-35.
• Xavier F. Salomon, Review of the exhibition Il Settecento a Verona: Tiepolo,
Cignaroli, Rotari — La Nobilità della Pittura (Verona: Palazzo della Gran
Guardia), pp. 146-48.
Call for Book Proposals: New Series from Ashgate
As noted at Richard Woodfield’s site at Academia.edu:
Monographs in Art Historiography
A New Series from Ashgate Publishing Edited by Richard Woodfield
The aim of this series is to support and promote the study of the history and practice of art historical writing focusing on its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the past to the present day in all areas and all periods. Besides addressing the major innovators of the past it also encourages re-thinking ways in which the subject may be written in the future. It ignores the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the Anglophone expression ‘art history’ and allows and encourages the full range of enquiry that encompasses the visual arts in its broadest sense as well as topics falling within archaeology, anthropology, ethnography and other specialist disciplines and approaches. It welcomes contributions from young and established scholars and is aimed at building an expanded audience for what has hitherto been a much specialised topic of investigation. It complements the work of the Journal of Art Historiography. Proposals should take the form of either
1) a preliminary letter of inquiry, briefly describing the project; or
2) a formal prospectus including: abstract, table of contents, sample chapter, estimate of length (in words, not pages), estimate of the number and type of illustrations to be included, and a c.v.
Please send a copy of either type of proposal to both the series editor and to the publisher:
Professor Richard Woodfield, Editor of the Journal of Art Historiography, http://arthistoriography.wordpress.com,
r.woodfield@bham.ac.uk and Erika Gaffney, Publishing Manager, Ashgate Publishing Company, 101 Cherry Street, Suite 420, Burlington VT 05401-4405, USA, egaffney@ashgate.com
New Title: ‘Mapping India’
Press release from Kodansha Europe:
Manosi Lahiri, Mapping India (London: Kodansha Europe, 2012), 320 pages, ISBN: 9788189738983, £90.
It began five hundred years ago when the very first modern maps of India were drafted. Travellers, wanderers, explorers and traders came overland from the West and carried hack tales about the India of their perception. The first maps of India were drawn based on the accounts of these men. When the sea route to India opened, sailors ferried hack information about the ports they touched on their way to India. Marine charts of the routes along the ocean coasts and artistic representations of port cities followed. As Europeans came in large numbers to trade and conquer, new territories further inland were mapped. The British surveyed and mapped India under their rule to settle borders, calculate tributes, assess taxes and record defence positions. Later, as scientific knowledge and instruments improved, extensive terrestrial surveys and compilation of their results into maps took place. At the end of the colonial period, once again maps identified the boundary between the new nations of India and Pakistan on maps of the sub-continent.
Mapping India presents an overview of important maps that eloquently reflect the changing social and political fortunes of India. These maps speak of the commercial interests and wars that led to the colonisation of India, and show territories the size of countries that were conquered, ceded or controlled through treaties. They also record changed courses of rivers, routes taken by armies, people living in communities in new cities, places where famines occurred, how the highest peak was discovered and named, when native royalty gathered to pay respect to the British Emperor, and the destination to which Mahatma Gandhi marched with his supporters for the salt satyagraha. From the earliest chronicles of India to its post-Independence strides, Mapping India is the story of India recounted through its maps.
Manosi Lahiri is a professional geographer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geography from the University of Calcutta and Master’s degree in Human Geography from University of Delhi. As a Ford Foundation scholar, she took a course in Urbanisation at Centre for Urban Studies, University College, London and read for a Master’s degree in Geography of Monsoon Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She completed her PhD in Geography at University of Delhi. Manosi was lecturer at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi and undertook consulting work for several UN agencies. Her interest in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) started when she was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Durham in 1986. She founded ML Infomap, a pioneering GIS company, in 1993 to propagate GIS technology. In the intervening years the company has grown as a leader in the field and is accepted as a standard bearer in geographic information on India. Manosi received the Lifetime Achievement Award from GIS Development at MapIndia 2010.
Manosi has several publications to her credit: The Bihar GIS, and the series Understanding Geography for Middle Schools and Exploring Geography. Her widely acclaimed travelogue, Here Be Yaks: Travels in Far West Tibet, describes the source of the Sutlej and her journeys to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar. Mapping India has been an area of interest that she has pursued for several years. Manosi has travelled extensively and is a keen reader. She has two daughters and lives in Gurgaon, India.
Happy President’s Day! — Washington on Civility
The text isn’t a new release, but I only recently learned of it, thanks to Courtney Barnes of Style Court, who pointed me to this version. Washington’s rules themselves, from a manuscript in the Library of Congress, are widely available for free at a variety of websites, including NPR (which featured a story on Brookhiser’s book in 2003) and Colonial Williamsburg.
On a more personal note, I recall that my mother, a school teacher for much of her life, would observe the holiday by taking chocolate-covered cherries in for her third-graders. Given that a large number (if not most) of the students were none too fond of these treats, it seemed like the perfect way to underscore the bittersweet component of national myth-making. -CH
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From the University of Virginia Press:
Richard Brookhiser, ed., Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts that Guided Our First President in War and Peace (Charlotttesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 96 pages, ISBN: 9780813922188, $18.
As a young man, George Washington admired and copied into a little notebook 110 rules for civil behavior that originated from a Jesuit textbook. Washington took these rules very much to heart, and that handwritten list remained with him throughout his life, serving as inspiring guidance from his military days at Valley Forge and Yorktown to his two terms as president. Guidance that at first sounds archaic, it is in fact just as relevant as — indeed, possibly more necessary than — it was nearly three hundred years ago. Richard Brookhiser makes clear the pertinence of these rules for modern readers and proposes that now more than ever we will be wise to follow the modest example of such a great man. Witty and insightful, Brookhiser’s commentary offers real-world instruction in the lost art of self-discipline, and his new preface provides a compelling and timely context in which to employ these guidelines today.
Richard Brookhiser, senior editor of the National Review and a columnist for the New York Observer, is the author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington; Alexander Hamilton, American; and America’s First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918.
New Title: Facing Beauty, Painted Women and Cosmetic Art
From Yale UP:
Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women and Cosmetic Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 256 pages, ISBN: 9780300124866, $45.
Throughout the history of the Western world, countless attempts have been made to define beauty in art and life, especially with regard to women’s bodies and faces. Facing Beauty examines concepts of female beauty in terms of the ideal and the real, investigating paradigms of beauty as represented in art and literature and how beauty has been enhanced by cosmetics and hairstyles.
This thought-provoking book discusses the shifting perceptions of female beauty, concentrating on the period from about 1540 to 1940. It begins with the Renaissance, when a renewed emphasis on the individual was reflected in the celebration of beauty in the portraits of the day. The fluid, sensual lines of the Baroque period initiated a shift toward a more “natural” look, giving way in the 18th century to a more stylized and artificial face, a mask of ideal beauty. By the late 19th century, commercial beauty preparations had become more readily available, leading to new technological developments within the beauty industry in the early 20th century. Beauty salons and the wider availability of cosmetics revolutionized the way women saw themselves.
Ravishing images of some of the most beautiful women in history, both real and ideal, accompanied by illustrations from costume books, fashion plates, advertisements, caricatures, and cosmetics, bring the evolving story of beauty to life.
Aileen Ribeiro is Professor Emeritus in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
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Kimberly Chrisman Campbell recently interviewed Ribeiro for Worn Through (15 February 2012). A sampling:
KCC: Was it a natural progression from writing about dress to writing about beauty?
AR: Beauty and cosmetics are intimately linked with clothing. In the Renaissance, the word “cosmetic” was defined in the broadest way as the enhancing of body and face. Painting the face can be equated with dressing the body, and both are about appearances and their meanings. . . .
The full interview is available here»
New Title: ‘The Perfect Foil’
From the U of Minnesota Press:
Elizabeth C. Mansfield, The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 320 pages, ISBN 9780816675814 (paper, $35) / ISBN 9780816675807 (cloth, $105).
Art history is haunted by the foil: the dark star whose diminished luster sets off another’s brilliance. Relegated to this role by modern historians of Revolutionary-era French art, François-André Vincent (1746–1816) is chiefly viewed in the reflection of his contemporary, Jacques-Louis David. The Perfect Foil frees Vincent from this distorting mirror. Offering a nuanced and historically accurate account of Vincent’s life and work, Elizabeth C. Mansfield reveals the artist’s profound influence on the visual culture of the French Revolution—and, paradoxically, on the art historical narrative that would consign him to obscurity.
The Vincent of The Perfect Foil is an artist whose life and work responded to cultural conditions—religious difference, emotional bonds, institutional pressures—only now finding their way into art historical accounts of the period. A successful academician despite his status as a member of the Protestant minority, a leading reformer of arts institutions during the Revolution, the progenitor of French Romanticism, and the husband of one of the period’s most celebrated women artists, François-André Vincent emerges in these pages as an embodiment of the ambivalences and contradictions of life in France in the wake of the Enlightenment.
By giving us a detailed and faithful portrait of this artist poised at the turning point of history, Mansfield restores a critically important body of work to its rightful place in the story of French art and reorients Revolutionary-era French art history toward a broader, more inclusive understanding of the period.
Elizabeth Mansfield’s The Perfect Foil is a remarkable piece of scholarship that both transcends and transforms the genre of the art historical monograph. It is a sophisticated work that expands the way we conceive of how the visual arts and politics interacted during the French Revolution. Mansfield’s provocative and methodological surefootedness will make readers aware of the contingencies that inform their own thinking.
—Julie Anne Plax, author of Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth Century France
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Elizabeth C. Mansfield is associate professor of art history at New York University. Her publications address topics ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch printmaking and the history of modernism to contemporary obscenity laws governing digital artworks and the surgical performances of Orlan. She has edited two volumes of essays on the institutional history of the discipline of art history and is coediting an anthology on eighteenth-century satire and visuality. Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis, published by the University of Minnesota Press, received the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Reviewed: ‘Picturing Art History’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Ingrid R. Vermeulen, Picturing Art History: The Rise of the Illustrated History of Art in the Eighteenth Century (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 359 pages, ISBN: 9789089640314, $69.50.
Reviewed by Pamela J. Warner, University of Rhode Island; posted 9 February 2012.
Ingrid Vermeulen undertakes an important self-reflexive task in ‘Picturing Art History’: the examination of the transition from unillustrated to illustrated texts about art. Surprisingly, that transformation had little to do with technological changes. Using three specific publications as examples, she argues that eighteenth-century scholars increasingly came to conceive of the artistic past not as a series of biographies of artists, but rather as a seamless “chain” of artworks in which historical progress can, and indeed must, be seen to be fully understood. Vermeulen tracks her topic through four related questions: What types of images were considered appropriate to the study of art history? How should we understand the notion that drawing and reproductive print collections, along with illustrated art books, embody the artistic past? How did collecting traditions relate to art-historigraphic traditions? And to what extent did eighteenth-century scholars believe that works on paper were faithful representations of the artworks they studied? (12–13) She organizes her answers into three chapters dedicated to case studies of individual projects by Giovanni Bottari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Jean-Baptiste Séroux d’Agincourt, each of whom mobilized a different type of visual resource, namely prints, drawings, and book illustrations. . . .
The full review is available here» (CAA membership required)
Exhibition: The Look of Love, Eye Miniatures
From the Birmingham Museum of Art:
The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection
Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama, 7 February — 10 June 2012
University of Georgia, Athens, 6 October 2012 — 6 January 2013
This stunning exhibition explores the little-known subject of “lover’s eyes,” hand-painted miniatures of single human eyes set in jewelry and given as tokens of affection or remembrance. In 1785, when the Prince of Wales secretly proposed to Mrs. Maria Fitzherbert with a miniature of his own eye, he inspired an aristocratic fad for exchanging eye portraits mounted in a wide variety of settings including brooches, rings, lockets, and toothpick cases. With over 100 examples, the collection of Dr. and Mrs. David A. Skier of Birmingham is the largest in the world. This exhibition offers an unprecedented look at these unusual and intriguing works of art.
Visitors can also interact with the exhibition in a new way: the Museum’s very first iPad app! The Look of Love app allows visitors to see these tiny, intricate objects at up to twenty times their actual size. They can also see images of the backs of objects or short videos of how the objects open. Twenty iPad devices are available for check-out and use in the Arrington Gallery, and
volunteers are on hand to show how the devices and the app
work.
ISBN: 9781907804014, $35
The exhibition is accompanied by a full color, hardbound catalogue of the same name, edited by Dr. Graham C. Boettcher, The William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art, and published by D Giles Ltd., London. An essay by Elle Shushan sets the historical scene and examines the role of lover’s eyes in the broader context of Georgian and early Victorian portrait miniatures. Boettcher looks at the language and symbolism of these tokens and their jeweled settings. Additionally, novelist and biographer Jo Manning offers five fictional vignettes imagining the circumstances surrounding the creation of these extraordinary objects.
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N.B. — Notice of the exhibition at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens was added on 24 October 2012
The Progress of Love
From D. Giles publishing:
Colin B. Bailey, Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection (London: D. Giles, 2011), 192 pages, ISBN: 9781904832607, £30 / $45.
This richly illustrated volume reveals the intriguing story behind the commission, rejection, and rehousing of Jean- Honoré Fragonard’s Progress of Love, a series of 14 paintings considered by many to be the artist’s masterpiece. Fragonard (1732–1806) completed four large canvases for the comtesse du Barry’s chateau at Louveciennes, but they were replaced and returned to the artist. In 1790 Fragonard moved them to his cousin’s house in Grasse, and over the course of the year painted two further large-scale works and 18 additional panels.
With 140 colour images of the Fragonard paintings, details, shots of the room, plans, original sketches, and other comparative images, author Colin Bailey explores the commission of the four main panels, their original arrangement at Louveciennes and the possible reasons for their rejection. Equally enthralling is the history of how the paintings were rediscovered in
the late 19th century and how they eventually came to The Frick Collection.
Colin B. Bailey is Associate Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection, New York. Recent publications include Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection (2009); Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780) (2007); and The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of 18th-century French Genre Painting (2003).
Exhibition: Colorful Realm in Washington
Thanks to Courtney Barnes at Style Court for noting this one. From the National Gallery of Art:
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Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 30 March — 29 April 2012
Celebrating the centennial of Japan’s gift of cherry trees to the nation’s capital, this exhibition features one of Japan’s most renowned cultural treasures, the 30-scroll set of bird-and-flower paintings by Itō Jakuchū. Titled Colorful Realm of Living Beings (J. Dōshoku sai-e; c. 1757–1766), these extraordinary scrolls are being lent to the National Gallery of Art by the Imperial Household. Their exhibition here—for one month only—provides a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: not only is it the first time all 30 paintings will be on view in the United States, but it is also the first time any of the works will be seen here after their six-year-long restoration.
Colorful Realm stands as the most dynamic and comprehensive—yet meditative and distilled—expression of the natural world in all of Japanese art. Synthesizing numerous East Asian traditions of bird-and-flower painting, the set depicts each of its 30 subjects in wondrously meticulous detail, but in such a way as to transcend surface appearances and capture the otherwise ineffable, vital essence of the cosmos, the Buddha nature itself. To present the full significance of Colorful Realm, the exhibition and its catalogue reunite this masterpiece with Jakuchū’s triptych of the Buddha Śākyamuni from the Zen monastery Shōkokuji in Kyoto. Jakuchū had donated both works to the monastery, which displayed them in a large temple room during Buddhist rituals.
Recent conservation of Colorful Realm has generated an entirely new awareness of the material profile of the set and the technical means by which Jakuchū created each scroll. Drawing upon these findings as well as the most recent research on Jakuchū’s life and cultural environment, this exhibition offers a multifaceted understanding of the artist’s virtuosity and experimentalism as a painter—one who not only applied sophisticated chromatic effects but also masterfully rendered the richly symbolic world in which he moved.
The earliest of the 30 scrolls, Peonies and Butterflies, combines two subjects that enjoyed great popularity in East Asian pictorial traditions. On the one hand, the peony flower was likened to both feminine beauty and prosperity. It became the preferred garden flower of the imperial and aristocratic elite during China’s Tang dynasty (618–907) and at the court of Emperor Xuanzong in particular; in East Asian literary traditions Li Bai’s verse likening the beauty of Xuanzong’s favorite consort Yang Guifei (719–756) to a peony cemented the flower’s association with feminine beauty. Meanwhile, its full and gorgeous appearance lent itself to uncomplicated associations with affluence and good fortune. The butterfly also served as an auspicious symbol, though its popularity was equally attributable to its appearance in one of the most famous parables in early Chinese thought: Zhuangzi’s dream of a butterfly. According to this parable, the legendary sage Zhuangzi dreams that he is a carefree yellow butterfly. Upon awakening, however, “he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.” Paintings of butterflies inevitably invoked the oneiric setting and queried selfhood of the Zhuangzi anecdote in most East Asian contexts and particularly in Jakuchū’s circle of erudite Sinophile monks, scholars, and merchants. While visually opulent, Peonies and Butterflies also suggests the uncertainty of a just-awoken dreamer who momentarily confuses reverie with reality.
Careful study of the painting’s pigmentation points to Jakuchū’s remarkable distillation and intensification of traditional East Asian coloration techniques. Different grades of opacity and transparency are achieved in the butterflies, flowers, stems, and leaves by varying the use of mineral and vegetal pigments, occasionally layering them one on top of another and adding a sublayer of color on the back of the silk. This complex stratigraphy of colors results in a convincing imbrication of the motifs in their surroundings. Indeed, when Jakuchū’s cultural and spiritual mentor Daiten (1719–1801) encountered the painting in 1760, he titled it “Beautiful Mist and Fragrant Wind” (Enka kōfū), suggesting that the real subject here was not the peonies and butterflies, but the conceptual atmosphere that enveloped them, the invisible ether within which they swayed and glided.
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Exhibition catalogue: Yukio Lippit, with Ota Aya, Oka Yasuhiro, and Hayakawa Yasuhiro, Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 224 pages, ISBN: 9780226484600, $50.
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Public Conference: The Art of Itō Jakuchū
National Gallery, East Building Concourse, Auditorium, 30 March 2012, 10:00 to 5:00
Illustrated lectures by noted scholars and conservators of Japanese art. This program is co-organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, and the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Presented in honor of the National Cherry Blossom Festival.
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