New Book | Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
From Chronicle Books:
Bridget Quinn, Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (New York: Chronicle Books, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1797211879, $30.
Discover the story of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard—a long-ignored artist and feminist of eighteenth-century France—in this imaginative and illuminating biography from an award-winning writer.
Summer in Paris, 1783. The Louvre steps, too hot and no breeze, the air electric with the heady anticipation of a coming storm: the year’s Royal Salon. Bewigged and powdered Parisians mill amid pigeons, dogs, and detritus; food and flower sellers; pamphleteers and propagandists. Men and women of every estate (clergy, nobles, commoners) are united under art: to love it, to despise it, to gossip endlessly about it.
Exhibiting at the Royal Salon was not for the faint of heart, and it was never intended for women.
Enter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard . . .
Born in Paris in 1749, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard rose from shopkeeper’s daughter to an official portraitist of the royal court—only to have her achievements reduced to ash by the French Revolution. While she defied societal barriers to become a member of the exclusive Académie Royale and a mentor for other ambitious women painters, she left behind few writings, and her legacy was long overshadowed by celebrated portraitist and memoirist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
But Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s story lives on. In this engaging biography, Bridget Quinn applies her insightful interpretation of art history to Labille-Guiard’s life. She offers a fascinating new perspective on the artist’s feminism, her sexuality, and her vision of the world. Quinn expertly blends close analyses of paintings with broader context about the era and inserts delicately fictionalized interpersonal scenes that fill the gaps in the historical record. This is a compelling and inspiring look at an artist too long overlooked. Despite numerous setbacks, Labille-Guiard built a legacy as an accomplished royal portraitist and a mentor to other young women artists of her era. This tale of solidarity, self-belief, and true passion for painting is sure to inspire contemporary creatives and women today.
Bridget Quinn is a writer, art historian, and critic. She is the author of the award-winning Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order) and She Votes: How U.S. Women Won Suffrage, and What Happened Next. A graduate of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a regular contributor to the arts magazine Hyperallergic, Quinn is a sought-after speaker on women and art. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
Call for Articles | Casting Art
From ArtHist.net:
Casting Art
Volume published by De Gruyter and edited by Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Etienne
Proposals due by 1 September 2024, with full articles due by February 2025
Plaster casts molded from artworks are ubiquitous in museum and university collections. In the art history department at the university of Vienna, for instance, a small vitrine surrounded by plants displays old plaster casts of medieval ivories. The installation functions simultaneously as an educational tool from the past, an archive of the department history, and a decorative ensemble. The German anthropologist Leo Frobenius had multiple plaster casts made of several terracottas he excavated in 1910 in Ife, Nigeria, marked them with his name and donated them to European ethnographic museums. He thus transformed masterpieces of an ancient West African civilization into his own vanity pieces-carte de visite and subjects of scientific research.
As can be seen in many museum storage and gypsotheques, over centuries, plaster casts have been molded on art works, architectural elements, and even human beings. The Italian Renaissance and the 19th century are two contexts often discussed in the framing of the importance of casting as part of broader creative processes but their presence and impact goes beyond. Since the 1990s and the work by Georges Didi-Huberman (e.g. L’empreinte, 1997), plaster casts have stimulated art historical research and have expanded thinking about heritage.
In this edited volume from De Gruyter (new series Traces), we propose to redefine collectively what plaster casts are across different geographies and time periods, focusing mainly on the reproduction of objects. As the use of 3D printing of works of art is becoming common practice as a tool to the current debate on restitution of cultural patrimony, we would like to interrogate how this replication practice differs conceptually from the earlier one. We will explore what plaster casts were upon production and what they have become, what they enable, and how they impact original productions as well as discourses surrounding them.
Topics of interest can include
1. Past: Plaster copies were highly circulated between institutions and continents. How were they traded, commercialized, and commodified? How did plaster cast enable the forging of specific disciplines, in which context and for whose profit? How were plaster casts used in teaching and study collections? How were they produced, circulated, and exhibited?
2. Present: We believe that plaster casts, and casts in general, need to be better defined in a global theoretical framework. Despite the numerous single studies focusing on specific contexts, in both art history and anthropology, the topic per se lacks broader conceptualization. How should this type of object be defined? What do they convey? How do they transform the casted original, be it an artwork (or even sometimes a human being)? Topics can also include the connection between artistic and anthropological castings, as well as the use of casts in contemporary art.
3. Future: Plaster is a very sensitive material prone to degradation. What are the specific challenges of exhibiting and preserving plaster cast today? Should they be preserved at all as parts of the museums’ collections? Does today’s proliferation of 3D printing of works of art, and their possible use in the context of restitution practices, present similar challenges and should these processes be submitted to better control?
Guest editors: Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Etienne
Publisher: De Gruyter
In the New Series: Traces. Public History and Cultural Heritage Studies
Publication date: 2026
Abstracts expected (c. 300 words): September 1st 2024
Please send your abstracts to: yaellebiro@gmail.com and noemie.etienne@univie.ac.at
Full articles (if abstracts are accepted): February 2025
A peer-reviewed evaluation will take place
Final versions of the articles are expected for April 2025
New Book | John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities
Forthcoming from Yale UP:
Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0300275698, £35 / $45.
An in-depth study that sheds a fascinating new light on Sir John Soane (1753–1837) and his world-renowned collection
Sir John Soane’s architecture has enjoyed a revival of interest over the last seventy years, yet Soane as a collector—the strategy behind and motivation for Soane’s bequest to the nation—has remained largely unexplored. While Soane referred to the display of objects in his house and museum as “studies for my own mind,” he never explained what he meant by this, and the ambiguity surrounding his motivation remains perennially fascinating. This book illuminates a side of Soane’s personality unfamiliar to most students of his life and work by examining key strands in his collection and what they reveal about Soane and the psychology of collecting. Topics include the display of antiquities; his fascination with ruins, both literal and figurative; his singular response to Gothic architecture; and his investment in modern British painting and sculpture. These aspects are bookended by an introductory biographical chapter that highlights the ways in which his family and career informed his collecting habits as well as an epilogue that analyses the challenges of turning a private house and collection into a public museum.
Bruce Boucher is an art historian and curator who served as director of Sir John Soane’s Museum from 2016 to 2023. Specializing in Italian Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-classical art and architecture, he is the author of a number of books, including The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea Palladio: The Architect in his Time, and Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova.
New Book | Libertine London
Forthcoming from Reaktion, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:
Julie Peakman, Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (London: Reaktion Books, 2024), 352 pages, £25 / $40.
An eye-opening and richly detailed history of women’s sexuality that upends entrenched perceptions of the long eighteenth century.
Libertine London investigates the sex lives of women throughout the period 1680 to 1830, known as the long eighteenth century. The book uncovers the various experiences of women, whether as mistresses, adultresses, or as participants in the sex trade. From renowned courtesans to downtrodden streetwalkers, it examines the multifaceted lives of these women within brothels, on stage, and even behind bars. Based on new research in court transcripts, asylum records, magazines, pamphlets, satires, songs, theater plays, and erotica, Libertine London reveals the gruesome treatment of women who were sexually active outside of marriage. Julie Peakman looks at sex from women’s points of view, undercutting the traditional image of the bawdy eighteenth century to expose a more sordid side, which often left women distressed, ostracized, and vilified for their sexual behavior.
Julie Peakman is a historian and author of many books on the history of sexuality, including Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Cultures. She lives in London.
c o n t e n t s
Prologue
1 Rambles through London
2 Street-Walkers
3 Brazen Bawds
4 Courtesans
5 Public Opinion: The Way with Whores
6 Stage Strumpets
7 Libertines and Their Fashions
8 Quacks, the Pox, and the New Sexual Predators
9 Mad about the Boy
10 Rape on Trial
11 Seduction, Abduction, and Adultery
12 Royal Mistresses
References
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
New Book | Lady Caroline Lamb
From Simon & Schuster:
Antonia Fraser, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (New York: Pegasus Books, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1639364053, $29.
The vivid and dramatic life of Lady Caroline Lamb, whose scandalous love affair with Lord Byron overshadowed her own creativity and desire to break free from society’s constraints.
From the outset, Caroline Lamb had a rebellious nature. From childhood she grew increasingly troublesome, experimenting with sedatives like laudanum, and she had a special governess to control her. She also had a merciless wit and talent for mimicry. She spoke French and German fluently, knew Greek and Latin, and sketched impressive portraits. As the niece of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, she was already well connected, and her courtly skills resulted in her marriage to the Hon. William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne) at the age on nineteen. For a few years they enjoyed a happy marriage, despite Lamb’s siblings and mother-in-law detesting her and referring to her as “the little beast.” In 1812 Caroline embarked on a well-publicised affair with the poet Lord Byron—he was 24, she 26. Her phrase “mad, bad and dangerous to know” became his lasting epitaph. When he broke things off, Caroline made increasingly public attempts to reunite. Her obsession came to define much of her later life, as well as influencing her own writing—most notably the Gothic novel Glenarvon—and Byron’s. Antonia Fraser’s vividly compelling biography animates the life of ‘a free spirit’ who was far more than mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
Antonia Fraser is the author of many widely acclaimed historical works which have been international bestsellers. She was awarded the Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2000 and was made a DBE in 2011 for services to literature. Her previous books include Mary Queen of Scots; King Charles II; The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England, which won the Wolfson History Prize; Marie Antoinette: The Journey; Perilous Question; The King and the Catholics; and The Wives of Henry VIII. Must You Go?, a memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, was published in 2010, and My History: A Memoir of Growing Up in 2015. Fraser’s The Case of the Married Woman is available from Pegasus Books. She lives in London.
Byron 200 Years after His Death
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) died 200 years ago on Friday (19 April). Writing this week for The Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews two new books about the poet (noted below), while Benjamin Markovits, in a New York Times essay, grapples with how (and whether) people still read him. A Byron Festival is being held at Trinity College, Cambridge (yesterday and today) while the Keats-Shelley House presents the exhibition, Byron’s Italy: An Anglo-Italian Romance, along with a series of talks and other events throughout the year. Finally (for now), Liverpool UP has discounted some of its Byron books.
The Byron Festival at Trinity
Trinity College Cambridge 19–20 April 2024
Trinity College Cambridge will host a two-day festival to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death on 19 April 1824, in Missolonghi, Greece. Byron was a student at Trinity College and is one of its most celebrated alumni. While enrolled as an undergraduate, Byron published his collection of poetry, Hours of Idleness, and began the satirical poem that would become English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a scathing provocation of the literary establishment.
Described by the College’s Senior Tutor of the time as a “young man of tumultuous passions,” Byron became one of the most controversial, celebrated, and influential poets of his age. When Westminster Abbey declined to accept the magnificent statue of Byron, created after his death by the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, Trinity gave it a home in the Wren Library, where the poet still stands—an impressive presence for students, scholars, and visitors.
But what kinds of presence does Byron have now? This question is the focus of an exciting programme of talks, readings, music, and exhibited work, which will address, and mediate, the legacy and status of Byron now, within the contexts of today’s culture and scholarship. The Byron Festival Conference programme includes talks about Byron, by academics and writers including Bernard Beatty, Drummond Bone, Clare Bucknell, Will Bowers, Christine Kenyon Jones, Mathelinda Nabugodi, Seamus Perry, Diego Saglia, Dan Sperrin, Jane Stabler, Fiona Stafford, A.E. Stallings, Andrew Stauffer, Corin Throsby, Clara Tuite, Ross Wilson.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Fiona Stafford, ed., Byron’s Travels: Poems, Letters, and Journals (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2024), 728 pages, ISBN: 978-1101908426, $35.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was one of the leading figures of British Romanticism. The Byronic hero he gave his name to—the charming, dashing, rebellious outsider—remains a powerful literary archetype. Byron was known for his unconventional character and his extravagant and flamboyant lifestyle: he had numerous scandalous love affairs, including with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his lovers, famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
His letters and journals were originally published in two volumes; this new one-volume selection includes poems and provides a vivid overview of his dramatic life arranged to reflect his travels through Scotland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Albania, Switzerland, and of course Greece, where he died. It contains a new introduction by scholar Fiona Stafford highlighting Byron’s enduring significance and the ways in which he was ahead of his time.
Fiona Stafford is a professor of English literature at Oxford University. The author of many books, including a biography of Jane Austen, she also wrote and presented the highly acclaimed The Meaning of Trees for BBC Radio 3’s The Essay. Her book The Long, Long Life of Trees, published in 2017, was a Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Andrew Stauffer, Byron: A Life in Ten Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-1009200165, $30.
Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography. Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Byron’s death, and adopting a fresh approach, it explores his life and work through some of his best, most resonant correspondence. Each chapter opens with Byron’s own voice—as if we have opened a letter from the poet himself—followed by a vivid account of the emotions and experiences that missive touches. This gripping life traces the meteoric trajectory of a poet whose brilliance shook the world and whose legacy continues to shape art and culture to this day.
Andrew M. Stauffer is a professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in nineteenth-century literature, especially poetry.
New Book | Antiquity in Print
Forthcoming from Bloomsbury:
Daniel Orrells, Antiquity in Print: Visualizing Greece in the Eighteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1350407763 (hardback), $95 / ISBN: 978-1350407770 (paperback), $31.
Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts. With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians, and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture—theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.
Daniel Orrells is Professor of Classics at King’s College London. He is author of Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2015) and Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (2011), and is co-editor of The Mudimbe Reader (2016) and African Athena: New Agendas (2011).
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: Historicity, Disciplinarity, and Materiality
1 Achilles’ Shield and Vico’s Frontispiece
2 Visualising Philhellenism
3 Putting Ancient Greece into the Picture
Epilogue: From Lessing to Kauffmann: Awaiting the Return of Ancient Greece
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | The Tiepolos: Invention and Virtuosity in Venice
Now on view at the Beaux-Arts de Paris:
The Tiepolos: Invention and Virtuosity in Venice
Beaux-Arts de Paris, 22 March — 30 June 2024
Curated by Hélène Gasnault and Giulia Longo
This exceptional exhibition brings together drawings and etchings by Giambattista Tiepolo and his two sons, Giandomenico and Lorenzo Tiepolo, a family of virtuoso artists in 18th-century Venice.
The Beaux-Arts de Paris owns a remarkable collection of ten works by Giambattista Tiepolo (1696–1770), making it the second-largest public collection of the artist’s drawings in France. Above all, this collection is the only one in France to include drawings not only by Giambattista, but also by his two painter sons, Giandomenico (1727–1804) and Lorenzo (1736–1776), as well as another of Tiepolo’s assistants in the 1730s, Giovanni Raggi. This collection alone provides an overview of graphic practices within the family and the studio.
The study of these sheets and prints, combined with works by other artists—sources of inspiration such as Rembrandt, masters such as Piazzetta, and contemporaries such as Canaletto, Guardi, and Novelli—highlights the great modernity of their art. This is particularly evident in their ability to produce variations on the same theme, both in traditional religious and mythological subjects and in figure studies, particularly caricatures, as well as scenes from Venetian life. The exhibition also explores the relationship between the father and his sons, and the work within a family of artists.
The exhibition opens with a series of studies of heads and faces that raise the question of training in the Tiepolo studio. It then moves on to religious paintings and large-scale secular decors produced by the Tiepolos and their contemporaries in Venice, followed by autonomous graphic works conceived outside of any painted project, as pure graphic exercises or pleasures, based on iconographic themes repeated almost obsessively, in multiple variants. It is the exceptional inventiveness of Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo, one of the most fascinating facets of their artistic personalities, that these drawings and prints allow us to rediscover.
Curated by Hélène Gasnault, curator of drawings at Beaux-Arts de Paris, and Giulia Longo, curator of engravings and photos at Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Hélène Gasnault, ed., with additional texts by Catherine Loisel and Giulia Longo, Les Tiepolo: Invention et virtuosité à Venise (Paris: Beaux-Arts de Paris éditions, 2024), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-2840568780, €25.
Exhibition | Disegno Disegni
This exhibition of over 100 Italian drawings closed on Sunday, though there is a catalogue:
Disegno Disegni
Musée Jenish, Vevey, Switzerland, 8 December 2023 — 14 April 2024
Curated by Emmanuelle Neukomm et Pamella Guerdat
Pietro Palmieri, Trompe-l’oeil with eight copied engravings and study drawings stacked on top of each other, 1783, pen, black and brown inks, brown wash, and blue watercolor on paper, 45 × 60 cm (Vevey: Musée Jenish; photo by David Quattrocchi).
Avec Guerchin, Novelli, Piola, Tiepolo ou encore Zuccari, le dessin italien ancien et moderne est au coeur de l’exposition Disegno disegni.
Dans le sillage du legs de René de Cérenville en 1968, qui faisait la part belle à la création graphique de la Péninsule, les fonds italiens du Musée Jenisch Vevey n’ont cessé de s’enrichir au fil des années, constituant aujourd’hui l’un des noyaux essentiels du patrimoine veveysan. Plus de 100 feuilles issues d’une collection particulière déposée au musée depuis 2003 sont mises en lumière pour l’occasion, dans un dialogue fécond avec les propres fonds de l’institution. Les pièces ainsi réunies invitent à voyager à travers les grands centres artistiques d’Italie, de Venise à Rome, en passant par Bologne et Florence. Autant d’écoles à l’origine d’une production dessinée placée sous le signe de la diversité technique et matérielle. Sujets religieux et profanes, pages d’études et dessins autonomes célèbrent la pluralité qui caractérise le médium et ses multiples fonctions, entre la fin du XVe siècle et les premières décennies du XIXe siècle.
Une exposition sous le commissariat de Emmanuelle Neukomm et Pamella Guerdat, conservatrice et conservatrice adjointe Beaux-Arts, assistées de Leïla Thomas, collaboratrice scientifique.
Marcantonio Franceschini, Allegory of Fame, before 1696 (Private Collection).
Pamella Guerdat et Emmanuelle Neukomm, eds., Disegno disegni: Dessins italiens de la Renaissance au XIXe siècle (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), 340 pages, ISBN: 978-8836654727, €45.
Préface — Nathalie Chaix
Le dédale des provenances — Ètienne Dumont
Connoisseurship et marché de l’art — Frédéric Elsig
Avertissement
Catalogue: Dessins italiens de la Renaissance au XIX siècle
Du dessin, la part maudite — Jérémie Koering
Index
Bibliographie sélective
Remerciements
Impressum
Exhibition | Pocket Luxuries
Now on view at the Cognacq-Jay:
Pocket Luxuries: Small Precious Objects in the Age of Enlightenment
Luxe de poche: Petits objets précieux au siècle des Lumières
Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, 28 March — 29 September 2024
Curated by Sixtine de Saint Léger and Gabrielle Baraud
L’exposition Luxe de poche au musée Cognacq-Jay présente une collection exceptionnelle de petits objets précieux et sophistiqués, en or, enrichis de pierres dures ou de pierres précieuses, couverts de nacre, de porcelaine ou d’émaux translucides, parfois ornés de miniatures. Les usages de ces objets varient, mais ils ressortent tous des us et coutumes d’un quotidien raffiné, signe de richesse, souvenir intime. Au siècle des Lumières comme aux suivants, ils suscitent un véritable engouement en France d’abord puis dans toute l’Europe. Luxe de poche a pour ambition de renouveler le regard que l’on porte sur ces objets, en adoptant une approche plurielle, qui convoque à la fois l’histoire de l’art et l’histoire de la mode, l’histoire des techniques, l’histoire culturelle et l’anthropologie en faisant résonner ces objets avec d’autres œuvres : des accessoires de mode, mais aussi les vêtements qu’ils viennent compléter, le mobilier où ils sont rangés ou présentés et enfin des tableaux, dessins et gravures où ces objets sont mis en scène. Ce dialogue permet d’envisager ces objets dans le contexte plus large du luxe et de la mode au XVIIIe et au début du XIXe siècle.
Point de départ de cette nouvelle exposition, la remarquable collection d’Ernest Cognacq est enrichie de prêts importants—d’institutions prestigieuses comme le musée du Louvre, le musée des Arts décoratifs de Paris, le Château de Versailles, le Palais Galliera, les Collections royales anglaises ou le Victoria and Albert Museum à Londres—afin d’offrir une nouvelle lecture de ces accessoires indispensables du luxe.
Commissariat scientifique
• Vincent Bastien, collaborateur scientifique au Château de Versailles
• Ariane Fennetaux, professeure des universités, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
• Pascal Faracci, conservateur en chef du patrimoine
Sixtine de Saint-Léger, ed., Luxe de poche: Petits objets précieux au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Musée Cognacq-Jay, 2024), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-2759605798, €19. With contributions by Gabrielle Baraud, Vincent Bastien, Ariane Fennetaux, and Alice Minter.
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