New Title | ‘London in the Eighteenth Century’
From the Random House Group:
Jerry White, London in the Eighteenth Century: ‘A Great and Monstrous Thing’ (London: Bodley Head, 2012), 704 pages, 9781847921802, £25.
London in the eighteenth century was very much a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire. With thousands of homes and many landmark buildings destroyed, it had been brought to the brink. But the following century was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. Society was fractured by geography, politics, religion and history. And everything was complicated by class. As Daniel Defoe put it, London really was a ‘great and monstrous Thing’.
Jerry White’s tremendous portrait of this turbulent century explores how and to what extent Londoners negotiated and repaired these open wounds. We see them going about their business as bankers or beggars, revelling in an enlarging world of public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small – amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy.
In the long-awaited finale to his acclaimed history of London over 300 years, Jerry White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama of life in eighteenth-century London.
Forthcoming | Hanneke Grootenboer’s ‘Treasuring the Gaze’
As noted in Heidi Strobel’s review of The Look of Love from yesterday, Hanneke Grootenboer’s book on eye miniatures is scheduled for release in November. Here’s the description from the University of Chicago Press:
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Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), ISBN: 9780226309668, $45.
The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one’s hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures—and their abrupt disappearance—reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision.
Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject’s gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures—including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures—Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience.
With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.
Reviewed | Heidi Strobel on ‘The Look of Love’
Graham Boettcher, ed., with essays by Graham Boettcher, Elle Shushan, and Jo Manning, The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection (London: D. Giles Limited in association with the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama, 2012), 208 pages, ISBN: 9781907804014, $35.
Reviewed for Enfilade by Heidi Strobel
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine.
– Ben Jonson, “Song to Celia” (1616)
In the sumptuously illustrated catalogue for The Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection (on at the Birmingham Museum of Art from 7 February to 10 June 2012 ), Graham Boettcher, Elle Shushan, and Jo Manning highlight the world’s largest collection of eye pictures: small, often jewel-encrusted, paintings of individual eyes of lovers or beloved family members. These synecdochal portraits enjoyed a brief heydey between 1790 and 1850, in large part due to the patronage of the Prince of Wales (later George IV) who famously commissioned several lover’s eye portraits for his forbidden amour, Maria Fitzherbert. Although the best known of such commissions, these were not the first. In antiquity, the Romans and Etruscans produced similar images and, more recently, according to Horace Walpole, the French did so in the eighteenth century (18).
In “The Artist’s Eye,” Elle Shushan describes the evolution of the eye miniature and introduces its practitioners, portraitists such as Richard Cosway, who produced the aforementioned miniatures in his role as Miniature Painter to the Prince of Wales, and George Engleheart, Miniature Painter to the prince’s father, George III. In addition to the latter’s prolific output (4853 portrait miniatures between 1775 and 1813), Engleheart trained several relatives to paint eye miniatures, including his cousin Thomas Richmond and nephew John Cox Dillman Engleheart, whose work is also included in the catalogue. Shushan explains the initial modern popularity of the genre (in England and on the Continent) and describes patrons who later resuscitated the genre, including Queen Victoria who requested eye pictures of her closest friends and relatives from her Royal Miniaturist, Sir William Charles Ross. In closing, Shushan attributes the genre’s demise to its hybrid status — “part portrait, part jewelry, and part decoration” (27).
In “Symbol & Sentiment: Lover’s Eyes and the Language of Gemstones,” Graham Boettcher demonstrates how the jewels that often surrounded an eye portrait provided additional information about the qualities and features of the sitter and its wearer. Since many of these portraits were memorials to a deceased loved one, Boettcher’s discussion of these items as mourning jewelry is particularly useful.
In the third section of the catalogue, Jo Manning contributes five fictional vignettes inspired by items in the Skier Collection, an inclusion stimulated by the lost identities of most of the sitters and artists. Interspersed amid the catalogue entries are brief biographies of specialists George Engleheart and his family protégés, Cosway, Richmond, William Grimaldi, as well as George IV. Some of the entries also supply information about inscriptions and particular sitters.
Although most recent publications on miniatures include a section on eye miniatures, The Look of Love is the first publication devoted to this fleeting genre. While the liminal status of the eye miniature as part jewelry, part decoration, and part portrait may have contributed to the genre’s transience, we might ask whether such images should be considered portraits at all, a point made by Hanneke Grootenboer in her 2006 Art Bulletin article, “Treasuring the Gaze: Eye Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision.”[1] Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe these small paintings as ‘eye pictures’ (rather than portraits) since they work so differently from traditional portrait conventions grounded in personal identification. And, given that more typical portrait miniatures were also commonly hybrids (part portrait, part jewelry, and part decoration), why was their popularity more enduring than that of the eye pictures? Were eye pictures – often profusely decorated – more expensive than standard portrait miniatures? And if so, did this factor contribute to the genre’s demise?
Notwithstanding such questions, this generously illustrated catalogue marks a significant addition to the study of miniatures and should appeal to a broad audience with its combination of scholarly scrutiny and fictional narratives.
[1] Hanneke Grootenboer, “Treasuring the Gaze: Eye Miniature Portraits and the Intimacy of Vision,” The Art Bulletin 88 (September 2006): 496-507; also see her forthcoming book from the University of Chicago Press, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (November 2012).
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Heidi Strobel is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Evansville, in Indiana. Her dissertation research, focused on the promotion of eighteenth-century female artists by female patrons such as Charlotte, wife of King George III of England, is published as The Artistic Matronage of Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011). Other recent publications include articles on twentieth-century topics such as British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, American folklore artist Howard Finster, World War II icon Rosie the Riveter, and women’s scholarship on women.
Reviewed | Davis’s ‘A General Theory of Visual Culture’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 432 pages, ISBN: 9780691147659, $55.
Reviewed by James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; posted 18 May 2012.
Along with David Summers’s ‘Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism’ (New York: Phaidon, 2003) (click here for review), Whitney Davis’s ‘A General Theory of Visual Culture’ is one of the most ambitious and potentially foundational books on art history in recent decades. It is unusually dense in logical argumentation, so it is more than a convention to say that it cannot helpfully be summarized. Because longer reviews will be needed to assess the book’s arguments, I want to use the generally shorter review length here in caa.reviews to raise two points about the book as a whole. But first I will evoke, as succinctly as possible, the book’s content, purpose, and significance.
Davis’s book ranges widely across the central examples of art-historical methodology, from Heinrich Wölfflin to Michael Baxandall, including discussions of writers as different as T. J. Clark, Arthur Danto, Ernst Cassirer, Nelson Goodman, and Giovanni Morelli. There are extended readings of texts by Erwin Panofsky, Richard Wollheim, E. H. Gombrich, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and critiques of formal analysis (chapter 3), style analysis (chapter 4), and iconography (chapter 7). The book’s visual examples range from prehistory to Renaissance art to modernism and Warhol.
Davis’s principal purpose is to provide a “general theory of visual culture,” by which he means an account of the relation between what is cultural about vision, and what is visual about culture. He has many ways of putting this difference, and the variety is itself significant. (More on that later.) To ask about what is cultural about vision is to note that “styles of depiction . . . have materially affected human vision,” and to ask about what is visual about culture entails the possibility that “some things,” but not all, “are visual in culture, or visible as culture” (6; see also p. 8).
As a conceptual reorganization of art history’s fundamental terms of engagement with objects, the book is exemplary, and it is difficult to imagine a reader who is engaged with the discipline for whom this book is optional reading. . .
The full review is available here» (CAA membership required)
Forthcoming | ‘The Materiality of Color’
From Ashgate this fall:
Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400-1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 350 pages, ISBN: 9781409429159, £65.
Although much has been written on the aesthetic value of color, there are other values that adhere to it with economic and social values among them. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, this volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing onthe diverse social and cultural meanings of color; the trouble, pain, and suffering behind theproduction and application of these colors;the difficult technical processes for making and applying color; and the intricacy of commercial exchanges and knowledge transfers as commodities and techniques moved from one region toanother. By emphasizing color’s materiality, the way in which it was produced, exchanged, and used by artisans, artists, and craftspersons, contributors draw attention to the disjuncture between the beauty of color and the blood, sweat, and tears that went into its production, circulation, and application as well as to the complicated and varied social meanings attached to color within specific historical and social contexts.
This book captures color’s global history with chapters on indigo plantations in India and the American South, cochineal production in colonial Oaxaca, the taste for brightly colored Chinese objects in Europe, and the thriving trade in vermilion between Europeans and Native Americans. To underscore the complexity of the technical knowledge behind color production, there are chapters on the ‘discovery’ of Prussian blue, Brazilian feather techné, and wallpaper production. To sound the depths of color’s capacity for social and cultural meaning-making, there are chapters that explore the significance of black ink in Shakespeare’s sonnets, red threads in women’s needlework samplers, blues in Mayan sacred statuary, and greens and yellows in colored glass bracelets that were traded across the Arabian desert in the late Middle Ages.
The purpose of this book is to recover color’s complex–and sometimes morally troubling–past, and in doing so, to restore a sense of wonder and appreciation for our colorful world. With its nuanced and complex depiction of how color operated within local contexts and moved across the globe, this book will appeal to art historians, social and cultural historians, museum curators, literary scholars, rhetoric scholars, and historians of science and technology.
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C O N T E N T S
Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin — Introduction: The Value of Color
Part I: Color’s Social and Cultural Meanings
Jason LaFountain — Colorizing New England’s Burying Grounds
Maureen Daly Goggin — The Extraordinary Powers of Red in 18- and 19th-Century English Needlework
Molly H. Basset and Jeanette Favrot Peterson — Coloring the Sacred in 16th-Century Central Mexico
Mitchell Harris — The Expense of Ink and Wastes of Shame: Poetic Generation, Black Ink, and Material Waste in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding — ‘Luscious Colors and Glossy Paint’: The Taste for China and the Consumption of Colors in 18th-Century England
Part II: Producing and Exchanging Pigments and Dyes
Jeremy Baskes — Seeking Red: The Production and Trade of Cochineal Dye in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1750–1821
J.-F. Lozier — Red Ochre, Vermilion and the Transatlantic Cosmetic Encounter
Padmini Tolat Balaram — Indian Indigo
Andrea Feeser — The Exceptional and the Expected: Red, White, and Black Made Blue in Colonial South Carolina
Sarah Lowengard — Prussian Blue: Transfers and Trials
Part III: Making Colored Objects
Stéphanie Karine Boulogne — Glass Bracelets in the Medieval and Early Modern Middle East: Design and Color as Identity Markers
Éva Deák — The Colorful Court of Gabriel Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg
Richard Blunt — The Evolution of Blackface Cosmetics on the Early Modern Stage
Amy Buono — Crafts of Color: Tupi Tapirage in Early Colonial Brazil
Elaine Gibbs — Colors and Techniques of 18th-Century Chinese Wallpaper: Blair House as Case Study
Beth Fowkes Tobin — Butterflies, Spiders, and Shells: Coloring Natural History Illustrations in Late 18th-Century Britain
Bibliography and Index
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Editors: Andrea Feeser is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Theory, and Criticism at Clemson University. Maureen Daly Goggin is Associate Chair in the Department of English, Arizona State University. Beth Fowkes Tobin is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.
Exhibition | ‘Fashioning Fashion’
This exhibition from LACMA (on display there from 2 October 2010 to 6 March 2011) is currently on view in Berlin and will travel to Paris in the fall. From the German Historical Museum:
Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, 27 April — 29 July 2012
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 13 December 2012 — 14 April 2013
With Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915 the German Historical Museum is presenting – exclusively in Germany – a unique collection of historical garments and accessories from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. More than 200 years of European fashion history are on display. The renowned Belgian scenographer Bob Verhelst has specially designed the exhibition architecture for Berlin. Glamorous women’s costumes and elegant men’s suits are adorned with elaborately fashioned trimmings. Luxurious clothing of the wealthy haute-bourgeoisie and nobility are shown, including such highlights as the gold-embroidered dress of a Portuguese queen and the turban of the designer Paul Poiret. Fascinating fabrics, exquisitely tailored raiments and precious décor are all to be seen in the museum’s show.
This spectacular exhibition takes us through four chapters focusing on the aesthetic and technical developments of fashion history:
Timeline shows in chronological sequence the changes in the silhouette of women’s dresses and the evolution of men’s suits from brightly coloured to their traditional dark hue.
Textiles informs us about the variety of surfaces that come about through complex weaving, colouring and printing techniques.
Tailoring deals with the process of turning plain material into clothing, with special emphasis on forming, bracing and constricting techniques.
Trim presents the finery of fashionable clothes: delicate laces, magnificent fine-wire embroidery, artful silk trimmings and colourfully patterned and sequined accessories.
Exhibition | 1740, Un Abrégé du Monde
On at the INHA in Paris this summer, as noted by Hélène Bremer:
1740, Un Abrégé du Monde: Savoirs et Collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, 4 May — 27 July 2012
Alexandre Isidore Leroyde Barde (1777-1828), Choix de coquillages, encre noire et gouache, 125cm × 90cm (Paris: Musée du Louvre)
Naturaliste et historien de l’art, Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville (1680-1765) fut membre de nombreuses académies scientifiques, auteur d’une théorie du jardinage, de traités sur les pierres et les coquillages (1742), et de l’Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres de toutes les écoles… (1745-1752). Il fut aussi un grand collectionneur qui possédait plus de cinq cents dessins et de rares spécimens naturels. Pour interroger cette figure symptomatique de la dynamique entre arts et savoirs au XVIIIe siècle, l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art a voulu retrouver la fonction première de l’un des espaces-clefs de la Galerie Colbert, une ancienne boutique, car les savants-collectionneurs du siècle des Lumières étaient étroitement liés aux marchés de l’art et des curiosités naturelles.
L’exposition s’organise donc autour d’un comptoir qui évoque non seulement le long meuble à surface plane sur lequel les marchands échangeaient coquillages, estampes, tableaux et dessins, mais aussi les implantations commerciales sur les côtes des colonies d’où provenaient ces étranges objets naturels, lesquels manifestaient à la fois la soif de découverte du monde et l’ambition encyclopédique de ces amateurs.
Les curieux français du XVIIIe siècle furent avant tout des collectionneurs d’objets, que leur goût portait indistinctement sur les produits de l’Art ou de la Nature. Ils prêtaient également une attention remarquable à l’arrangement, la disposition dans l’espace des choses naturelles et artificielles constituant leurs cabinets. À cet égard, il faut noter que Dezallier fut l’un des premiers auteurs français à théoriser, dans un article de 1727, l’arrangement idéal d’un cabinet de curiosités, tout comme il fut le premier à employer en français le terme muséographie, en 1742.
Les années 1740 sont celles de la métamorphose des lieux de savoirs, puisque l’on passe alors des salles dédiées, dans les demeures privées, à la présentation d’objets de collection, à la création de musées, autrement dit de salles publiques d’exposition, où les visiteurs sont invités à s’instruire. C’est aussi l’époque de la mutation des savoirs livresques, dont les formes et les structures sont alors repensées dans le but de dresser des inventaires totalisants, comme l’Encyclopédie ou les catalogues raisonnés illustrés.
The exhibition press release is available (as a PDF) here»
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From Fage éditions:
Anne Lafont, ed., 1740, Un Abrégé du Monde: Savoirs et Collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville (Paris: Fage éditions) 304 pages, ISBN: 9782849752609, 35€.
Contributeurs: Nebahat Avcioglu, Lise Bicart-Sée, Sarah Boyer, Sabine Cartuyvels, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, Jennifer Ferng, Isabelle Flour, Catherine Girard, Martial Guédron, Charlotte Guichard, Pierre-Yves Lacour, Anne Lafont, Gaëtane Maës, Marie-Pauline Martin, Dominique Morelon, Aline Pelletier, Jessica Priebe, Chiara Savettieri, Anke Te Heesen, Isabelle Tillerot
1740 un abrégé du monde traite des modalités de présentation des objets naturels et artificiels au sein des cabinets de curiosités, des relations entre les marchands et les collectionneurs de coquillages, estampes, tableaux, dessins, et des systèmes de classification en vigueur au temps de l’Encyclopédie et de Linné…
Rédigé par vingt spécialistes sous la direction d’Anne Lafont, conseillère scientifique à l’INHA, l’ouvrage gravite autour de la figure du naturaliste, historien de l’art et collectionneur français Dezallier d’Argenville (1685-1765), pivot de la dynamique nature/culture au XVIIIe siècle.
Il est organisé sous la forme d’un abécédaire de vingt-sept articles illustrés abordant des concepts qui sont au cœur de cette enquête sur les arts et les savoirs naturalistes : Abrégé, Amateur, Basseporte, Cabinet, Dessein, École, Fossiles, Grotesque, Histoire naturelle, Illustration, Jardin, Kiosque, Laboratoire, Manière, Numérotation, Ornement, Parterre, Plume, Quartz, Rocaille, Système, Table, Unique, Vernis, Vie, Watteau, Zoomorphose.
New Title | ‘Japanned Papier Mâché and Tinware c.1740-1940’
From the Antique Collector’ Club:
Yvonne Jones, Japanned Papier Mâché and Tinware c.1740-1940 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2012), 336 pages, ISBN: 9781851496860, £45.
As one of the few decorative arts about which little has been written, japanning is today fraught with misunderstandings. And yet, in its heyday, the japanning industry attracted important commissions from prestigious designers such as Robert Adam, and orders from fashionable society across Europe and beyond.
This book is a long overdue history of the industry which centred on three towns in the English midlands: Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Bilston. It is as much about the workers, their skills, and the factories and workshops in which they laboured, as it is about the goods they made. It tells of matters of taste and criticism, and of how an industry which continued to rely so heavily upon hand labour in the machine age reached its natural end in the 1880s with a few factories lingering into the late 1930s. Richly illustrated, it includes photographs of mostly marked, or well-documented, examples of japanned tin and papier mâché against which readers may compare – and perhaps identify – unmarked specimens.
Japanned Papier Mâché and Tinware draws predominantly upon contemporary sources: printed, manuscript and typescript documents, and, for the period leading up to the closure of the last factories in the 1930s, the author was able to draw on verbal accounts of eyewitnesses. With a chapter on japanners in London, other European centres, and in the United States, together with a directory of japan artists and decorators, this closely researched and comprehensive book is the reference work for collectors, dealers and enthusiasts alike.
Contents
From Imitation to Innovation; Enter the Dragon!; The Lion of the District; Japanning & Decorating; Not a Bed of Roses!; Clever Accidents?; Decline of the Midlands Japanning Industry; The Birmingham Japanners; The Wolverhampton Japanners; The Bilston Japanners; Japanners in London and Oxford; Products; Other Western Japanning Centres; Appendices.
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With a degree in Fine Art, Yvonne Jones taught art in schools and colleges before joining Wolverhampton Art Galleries and Museums in 1971, serving first as Keeper of Applied Art, and then as Head of Arts & Museums. Researching, documenting and extending the town’s collection of japanned papier mâché and tinware, she became aware of the breadth and importance of this field in the decorative arts. She left her post in 1994 to concentrate on a programme of original research, and is now an international authority on the subject and continues to lecture widely in both Britain and the United States.
Exhibition | Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber
From The Frick:
Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court
Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden, 3 March — 2 May 2012
The Frick Collection, New York, 30 May — 19 August 2012
Galerie J. Kugel, Paris, 12 September — 10 November 2012
Coordinated by Dirk Syndram, Jutta Kappel, Ian Wardropper, and Charlotte Vignon
Johann Christian Neuber, Breteuil Table, Dresden, 1779–80, wood, gilded bronze, semiprecious stones, faux-pearls, and Meissen porcelain plaques, H: 32 inches, collection of the Marquis de Breteuil, Chäteau de Breteuil (Choisel/Chevreuse); photo: © Georges Fessy
Johann Christian Neuber was one of Dresden’s most famous goldsmiths. Sometime before 1775 he was named court jeweler to Friedrich Augustus III, elector of Saxony, and in 1785 he was appointed Curator of the Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault), the magnificent royal collection of Augustus the Strong, the founder of the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory. For more than thirty years, Neuber created small gold boxes, chatelaines, and watchcases decorated with local semiprecious stones such as agate, jasper, and carnelian. He fashioned enchanting landscapes, complex floral designs, and geometric patterns with tiny cut stones, often incorporating Meissen porcelain plaques, cameos, and miniatures. These one-of-a-kind objects, which reflect the Saxon court’s interest in both luxury items and the natural sciences, remain prized treasures today, but have never before been shown together in a monographic exhibition.
In 2012, the public will have their first comprehensive introduction to this master craftsman’s oeuvre through a traveling exhibition that is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated publication (Paul Holberton publishing, London, and Editions d’Art Monelle Hayot, under the direction of Alexis Kugel). The exhibition began in Dresden at the Grünes Gewölbe on March 3, remaining there through May 2, 2012, when it travels to the United Sates for an exclusive engagement at The Frick Collection (May 30 through August 19, 2012). It concludes at Galerie J. Kugel in Paris in the fall (September 12 through November 10, 2012).
Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court includes some thirty-five boxes and other decorative objects from the Grünes Gewölbe and the Porcelain Collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private collections in Europe and the United States. The exhibition also features Neuber’s masterpiece, the Breteuil Table. This small table is regarded as one of the most extraordinary pieces of eighteenth-century furniture ever made, distinguished not only by the materials used in its construction and for the remarkable skill of its creator, but also for its prestigious history. It was presented in 1781 by Friedrich Augustus III to Baron de Breteuil, a French diplomat, as recognition for the role Breteuil played in the negotiation of the Treaty of Teschen, which officially ended the war of Bavarian Succession fought between the Habsburg monarchy and a Saxon-Prussian alliance to prevent the Habsburg acquisition of the Duchy of Bavaria. The table features a mosaic top of 128 semiprecious stones and Meissen porcelain plaques. Still owned by the family who received it nearly 250 years ago, this stunning object has almost never been exhibited outside the Château de Breteuil (some twenty-five miles west of Paris) and has never before crossed the Atlantic. The Frick exhibition also reunites for the first time two bases designed and crafted by Neuber for the display of Meissen porcelain groups. One is now in the collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, while the other is from a private collection in Paris. These bases were part of a much larger diplomatic gift from Friedrich Augustus III to Nicolai Wasilijewitsch Repnin, the Russian emissary who helped to negotiate the Treaty of Teschen. The gift originally included a Meissen porcelain service and an enormous centerpiece composed of seven stands of varying heights, each supporting an allegorical group made of Meissen porcelain. Of this extravagant gift, only these two bases have been definitively identified.
The exhibition is co-organized by the Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, The Frick Collection, and Galerie J. Kugel, Paris. The exhibition in Dresden will be shown in a slightly different form as Johann Christian “Neuber à Dresde”: Schatzkunst des Klassizismus für den Adel Europas. It is coordinated by Dirk Syndram, Director of the Grünes Gewölbe and the Armoury, and Jutta Kappel, Senior Curator of the Grünes Gewölbe. The presentation of the exhibition at The Frick Collection is coordinated by Director Ian Wardropper and Charlotte Vignon, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts.
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From Paul Holberton Publishing:
Alexis Kugel, ed., Gold, Jasper and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court (London: Paul Holberton, 2012), 400 pages, ISBN: 9781907372360, £100.
Johann Christian Neuber (1736–1808) was a goldsmith and mineralogist at the Saxon Court. In 1769 he became director of the Grünes Gewölbe, the magnificent State Treasury, and was appointed court jeweler in 1775. He specialized in creating small gold boxes, chatelaines and watchcases decorated with semiprecious stones, such as agate, jasper and carnelian. Neuber fashioned enchanting landscapes, complex floral designs and geometric patterns out of tiny cut stones, often incorporating Meissen porcelain plaques, cameos and miniatures. These one-of-a-kind objects are treasured in public and private collections all over the world today, but have never been brought together.
This book is the first comprehensive introduction to this master craftsman’s oeuvre, presenting boxes and other decorative objects from the Grünes Gewölbe, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as public and private collections in Germany, France and New York. One of its highlights is the ‘Breteuil Table’, still owned by the family for which it was made as a diplomatic gift nearly 250 years ago.
Beautiful photographs of all Neuber’s creations adorn this extraordinary book – well over 500 in number. The context and history of the growing interest in mineralogy and its celebration in these works of art are fully investigated. Its distinguished authors include Dr Jutta Kappel, Head of Conservation at Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden; art historians and specialists Sophie Mouquin and Philippe Poindront; marquis de Breteuil, Henri-François Le Tonnelier; and the editor of the book, Alexis Kugel, of the famous Parisian gallery.
There is also a French edition of this book: Le luxe, le goût, la science: Neuber, orfèvre minéarologiste à la cour de Saxe (ISBN 9782903824808).
New Title | Quatremère de Quincy’s ‘Letters to Miranda and Canova’
From The Getty:
Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, introduction by Dominique Poulot, translation by Chris Miller and David Gilks, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiquities from Rome and Athens (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012), 208 pages, ISBN: 9781606060995, $50.
In the 1790s and early 1800s, the art world experienced two big events: First came the military confiscation of masterpieces from Italy and northern Europe in order to build a universal museum in Paris’s Louvre. Then famous marble sculptures were prised from the Parthenon and sent to London. These events provoked reactions ranging from enthusiastic applause to enraged condemnation.
The French art critic, architectural theoretician, and political conservative Quatremère de Quincy was at the center of the European debates. In his pamphlet Letters to Miranda, he condemns the revolutionary hubris of putting “Rome in Paris” and urges the return of the works. In the Letters to Canova, however, Quatremère celebrates the British Museum for making the Parthenon sculptures accessible. Quatremère’s writing was highly controversial in its time. This book offers the first English translation of the two series of letters, as well as a new critical introduction.
Antoine Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) was a French archaeologist, architectural theoretician, arts administrator, and influential writer. Dominique Poulot is professor of the history of art at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Chris Miller is a translator specializing in the fine arts. David Gilks is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.
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