New Book | America’s Collection
The entrance hall of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State; completed in 1979, the room includes a rococo ceiling taken in part from Philadelphia’s Powel House, now installed as a period room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Photograph by Durston Saylor). For more information on the book and the history of the reception rooms, see James Tarmy’s August 24th article for Bloomberg.
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From Rizzoli:
Virginia Hart, America’s Collection: The Art and Architecture of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0847873272, $100. With a foreword by John Kerry and contributions by Bri Brophy, Allan Greenberg, Mark Alan Hewitt, Stacy Schiff, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, Elliot Bostwick Davis, Deborah Dependahl Waters, David Rubenstein, Carolyn Vaughan, and Laaren Brown.
The first volume in more than 20 years tells a new and modern story of the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Reception Rooms, one of the top collections of American fine and decorative arts in existence.
The art of United States diplomacy has been conducted over more than two centuries with figures from all over the world, in peacetime and in conflict. For the last six decades, these negotiations have taken place in the rarified environment of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State. Tucked inside the modern Truman Building in the center of Washington, D.C., lies this special suite of rooms transformed by four renowned architects—gems of classical architecture brimming with exceptional American art and artifacts that tell the story of the nation’s founding and represent the singular ideals of the American character.
Housing one of the finest collections in the world, along with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Winterthur, these rooms display more than 5,000 objects, including paintings by John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart; silver and porcelain owned by George Washington and other presidents; fine furniture; maps and documents; prints and drawings, not to mention the very desk the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War was signed on. With all-new photography and essays, this book captures the history of the rooms and explores more than 150 examples of the extraordinary American art that animates the exquisite spaces.
Virginia B. Hart is director and curator of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms and Bri Brophy is deputy chief curator. The Honorable John F. Kerry is U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, and former U.S. Secretary of State. Allan Greenberg is an architect and author. Mark Alan Hewitt is an architect and architectural historian. Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is the Senior Curator for the 2026 Bicentennial at Frederic Chruch’s home Olana and Curator Emerita of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen is the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley is the Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Elliot Bostwick Davis is Senior Editor, Harvard Social Impact Review, Arts and Culture and a former museum curator and director. Deborah Dependahl Waters is an independent decorative arts historian and part-time assistant professor at Parsons, New School University. David M. Rubenstein is a financier and philanthropist. Carolyn Vaughan is a writer and editor of art books and exhibition catalogues. Laaren Brown is a writer and editor for art and natural history topics. Durston Saylor is a photographer of contemporary interior design and architecture. Bruce M. White is a photographer of works of art and historic architecture. Sarah Gifford is an award-winning graphic designer.
New Book | Americana Insights, 2023
From Penn Press:
Robert Shaw, ed., Americana Insights, 2023 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 979-8988533108, $65.
Americana Insights 2023 presents the latest research and discoveries on traditional American folk art and material culture. Groundbreaking essays by leading scholars provide a wealth of new insights on a wide array of artistic traditions. Covering a broad geographic area—including New England, the mid-Atlantic, South, and mid-West—and spanning the colonial era to early twentieth century, these essays enhance our understanding of the diverse American experience. This is the only interdisciplinary publication devoted exclusively to traditional Americana and folk art.
Contributors cover a range of topics including portraiture, furniture, jewelry, textiles, and works on paper. In the first volume, authors share groundbreaking research on the use of hooked rugs in the colonial revival era; revisit the work of a famed Connecticut portrait painter known as the Beardsley Limner and his namesake sitters; Rufus Porter’s work as an artist and entrepreneur; a distinctive group of paint-decorated dressing tables from New Hampshire; delicate cutworks made by an incarcerated inmate in Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary; painted tavern signs; jewelry in folk portraiture; New Jersey schoolmaster and calligrapher Thomas Earl; and signature quilts from the nineteenth century.
Contributors: Deborah M. Child, Pamela and Brian Ehrlich, Cynthia Fowler, Emelie Gevalt, Mark D. Mitchell, Eileen M. Smiles, Laura Fecych Sprague.
Robert Shaw is an independent curator and art historian who has written and lectured extensively on many aspects of American folk art. His many critically acclaimed books include Bird Decoys of North America: Nature History and Art (2010), American Quilts: The Democratic Art (2017), and American Weathervanes: The Art of the Winds (2021). He has curated exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Shelburne Museum, where he served as curator from 1981 to 1994.
Americana Insights is a nonprofit publication dedicated to the study of Americana and American folk art. It was founded in 2021 by Jane Katcher in collaboration with David A. Schorsch, her longtime friend and mentor in the field, founding editor Robert Shaw, and a distinguished advisory board of museum professionals and scholars. In 2023, curator and scholar Lisa Minardi was appointed editor of Americana Insights. More information is available here»
Exhibition | On the Reverse
Installation view of Reversos / On the Reverse, at The Prado in Madrid, 2023.
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Now on view at The Prado:
On the Reverse
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 7 November 2023 — 3 March 2024
Curated by Miguel Ángel Blanco
Until 3 March 2024, the Museo Nacional del Prado and Fundación AXA are undertaking a journey that moves beyond the surface of artistic masterpieces to allow for the contemplation of a fascinating reality: the hidden side of the work of art, its reverse. Alongside works from the Prado’s own collection, On the Reverse includes generous loans from other national and international institutions. They include Assemblage with Graffiti by Antoni Tàpies from Fundación Telefónica, Cosimo I de’Medici by Bronzino from the Abelló Collection, Self-Portrait as a Painter by Van Gogh from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Artist in His Studio by Rembrandt from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Empty Mask by Magritte from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. In all, about a hundred works are on display.
For the exhibition, curated by artist Miguel Ángel Blanco, rooms A and B of the Jerónimos Building have been painted black for the first time. On the Reverse takes the form of an open survey that gives maximum freedom to the spatial relationship between the works, devoid of any hierarchy or chronological ordering and including the presence of creations by contemporary artists such as Vik Muniz, Sophie Calle, and Miguel Ángel Blanco himself, who is represented by three of his box-books from the Library of the Forest. Taking his starting point from a contemplation of Las Meninas—in which the reverse of the vast canvas on which Velázquez is working occupies a large portion of the pictorial surface—Blanco proposes an unusual approach to painting by turning the works around in order to encourage visitors to establish a new and more complete relationship with the artists whose work is included.
Numerous studies have been undertaken to date on individual works that have interesting backs for different reasons, and some museums have explored this aspect in a partial manner through small exhibitions focused on the reverse of works in their collections. However, with the collaboration of Fundación AXA, it is the Museo Nacional del Prado that is now approaching this subject with the necessary ambition. In addition to undertaking a complete reassessment of the backs of works in its collections, the Museum has also located examples in some of the world’s leading museums that reveal how an appreciation of works of art is enriched when their contemplation is not limited to the front.
Structured thematically, the exhibition includes artists never previously seen at the Prado, among them Van Gogh (1853–1890), René Magritte (1898–1967), Lucio Fontana (1899–1968), Pablo Palazuelo (1915–2007), Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012), Sophie Calle (b. 1953), Vik Muniz (b. 1961), Michelangelo Pistoletto (b. 1933), José María Sicilia (b. 1954), Wolfgang Beurer (active 1480–1504), Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845), Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), Martin van Meytens (1695–1770), Wallerant Vaillant (1623–1677), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), and Max Liebermann (1847–1935).
On the Reverse opens with ‘The Artist behind the Canvas’, crossing that dimensional threshold to which Velázquez draws our attention with the enigmatic reverse of the canvas depicted in Las Meninas. Painters frequently portrayed themselves behind a picture, but even when these backs are not so directly associated with the artist’s activity, they acquire a prominent presence as objects of special significance in painters’ studios.
The depiction of the back returns in ‘This Is Not a Reverse’, a section that paraphrases Magritte in order to bring together various trompe l’oeils that represent backs of paintings. This meta-artistic subject reveals the enormous significance that the hidden side of works could acquire for artists, leading them to imitate the annotations, inscriptions, drawings, etc, habitually found on picture backs.
One of the elements that makes up the pictorial support is the subject of ‘The Stretcher as Cross’, the exhibition’s third section. This concealed structural element normally takes the form of a wooden cross that can be used to carry the painting from one place to another. When—in a habitual, everyday action that also emphasises the three-dimensional status of the work which this exhibition analyses—an artist picks up the cross of the stretcher in order to move the work in the studio or take it outside for the purpose of painting outdoors he/she is performing a type of ‘Via Crucis’ that symbolises the effort and difficulties of artistic endeavour.
Martin van Meytens, Kneeling Nun, obverse and reverse, ca. 1731, oil on copper, 28 × 21 cm (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, NM 7036; purchased in 2006 with the Axel och Nora Lundgren Fund). The painting was also included in the 2017–18 exhibition Casanova: The Seduction of Europe.
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The exhibition’s central section, ‘B-Sides’, focuses on works that can be termed ‘two-sided’. Here the back has its own artistic status and complements the principal image in various ways. It may feature the back of a figure seen from the front on the other side, a landscape or allegorical scene that modifies the meaning of the principal representation, heraldic information, associated religious themes, portraits, and more. Continuing this theme, the section ‘The Hidden Side’ includes works in which the back reveals traces of the creative process in the form of drawings, geometrical designs, or expressive whimsies.
‘More Information on the Back’ looks at a classic problem in painting. Although word and image coexisted relatively easily until the Middle Ages, a moment arrived when artists entrusted all the weight of the narrative to the latter. Furthermore, when they needed to convey information, identify subjects or individuals, or include additional information or commentaries on the execution of the work, they almost invariably wrote on the back. In some cases information has been added to backs at a later date in the form of labels and stamps or seals that help us to trace the history of the works: the collections they belonged to, the palaces they adorned, their changes of location, and any restoration undertaken on them.
Zacarías González Velázquez, Reverse of Two Fishermen, One with a Rod and the Other Seated, 1785, oil on canvas (Madrid, Cuartel General del Ejército, depósito del Museo Nacional del Prado). The back of the painting reveals a strip of canvas that was folded over the stretcher at some date in order to fit the work into a narrower space.
In other cases, as seen in ‘Ornaments and Ghosts’, the backs reveal stories contained in the works’ actual materials: textiles that had domestic uses or patterned weaves that contain unintentional ghosts which appear when oil soaks into the cloth. In addition, the section ‘Folds, Cuts, and Cutouts’ shows how old restorations and alterations made to adapt paintings to new locations or functions are visible on reverses that include repairs, cuts, and folds that result in part of the image being relegated to facing the wall.
It is easy to simplify the experience of ‘facing’ a painting to a question of fronts: the work’s and the viewer’s. Looking at a painting implies locating ourselves before it with our ‘front side’, where our eyes are located. However, for some time now, the experience of art has been understood as something more physical; our entire body in all its dimensions participates in it. In fact, in both depictions of artists working in their studios and in images of the public looking at art in museums and exhibitions these figures are often seen ‘From behind, In front of the Painting’.
Finally, ‘Nature in the Background’ investigates the unusual or less common materials that have been used over the centuries as the supports for paintings in the Museum’s collection. This research has identified copper, tin, slate, alabaster, cork, brick, porcelain, and ivory. Furthermore, dust is always present. Regular cleaning is, of course, undertaken at the Museum, but the largest and heaviest works are less frequently moved. A short time ago the Museo del Prado removed The Transfiguration by Giovanni Francesco Penni from the wall, allowing Miguel Ángel Blanco to collect some of the dust accumulated on its reverse, which he has used to make three box-books for his Library of the Forest.
Miguel Ángel Blanco, ed., Reversos (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2023), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-8484806042, €38. With additional contributions by Ramón Andrés, Ana González Mozo, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Victor I. Stoichita.
Exhibition | Amber: Treasures from the Baltic Sea
On view at Galerie Kugel:
Amber: Treasures from the Baltic Sea, 16th–18th Century
Galerie Kugel, Paris, 18 October — 16 December 2023
From Roman times to the 18th century, many recognised the inherent value of amber and hypothesised its origin, some assuming it to be whale sperm, others, solidified lynx urine. Its mystery endowed it with medicinal virtues. Amber was recommended as a powder to cure melancholy, toothache, and epilepsy, among other ailments, and as a love filter. The occasional inclusions of insects and small animals found trapped in amber have also made it a symbol of immortality. Pliny the Elder was the first to unveil its nature as the result of plant resin, but it wasn’t until 1757 that the Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonossov determined its true origin.
Amber is a fossilised resin originating, in the case of the objects exhibited, from a prehistoric forest dating back to some 30 to 40 million years, located under the Baltic Sea, between the towns of Danzig (today Gdansk in Poland) and Königsberg (today Kaliningrad in Russia), then, in East Prussia. In the 16th century, Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1490–1568) converted to Protestantism and transformed the territories of the Order of the Teutonic Knights in the Duchy of Prussia. This marked the beginning of a tremendous expansion in the trade and production of amber works of art. They became Prussia’s diplomatic gifts par excellence and were sought after to adorn the ‘Kunstkammern’ of Europe’s sovereigns and princes. It took nearly 20 years to collect the fifty pieces on display in this exhibition. Combining sculptures, caskets, tankards, and game boards, the wide variety of objects presented illustrate the fascination for amber through the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.
Alexis Kugel and Rahul Kulka, Amber: Treasures from the Baltic Sea, 16th to 18th Century / Ambre: Trésors de la mer Baltique du XVI au XVIIIe siècle (Saint-Remy-en-l’Eau: Éditions Monelle Hayot, 2023), 376 pages, €85. Available in French and English.
Exhibition | Drawing on Blue
Opening in January at The Getty:
Drawing on Blue
Getty Center, Los Angeles, 30 January — 28 April 2024
Curated by Edina Adam and Michelle Sullivan
Made from blue rags, blue paper has fascinated European artists from its earliest use in Renaissance Italy to Enlightenment France and beyond. Through new technical examination of drawings in the Getty’s collection, this exhibition offers fresh insight into the physical properties of blue paper and its unique contribution to artistic practice from the 15th through 18th centuries.
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From Getty Publications:
Edina Adam and Michelle Sullivan, eds., Drawing on Blue: European Drawings on Blue Paper, 1400s–1700s (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1606068670, $35. With contributions by Mari-Tere Álvarez, Thea Burns, Marie-Noelle Grison, Camilla Pietrabissa, and Leila Sauvage.
This engaging book highlights the role of blue paper in the history of drawing. The rich history of blue paper, from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, illuminates themes of transcultural interchange, international trade, and global reach. Through the examination of significant works, this volume investigates considerations of supply, use, economics, and innovative creative practice. How did the materials necessary for the production of blue paper reach artistic centers? How were these materials produced and used in various regions? Why did they appeal to artists, and how did they impact artistic practice and come to be associated with regional artistic identities? How did commercial, political, and cultural relations, and the mobility of artists, enable the dispersion of these materials and related techniques? Bringing together the work of the world’s leading specialists, this striking publication is destined to become essential reading on the history, materials, and techniques of drawings executed on blue paper.
Edina Adam is assistant curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Michelle Sullivan is associate conservator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
New Book | Four Centuries of Blue and White
Published by Paul Holberton and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Becky MacGuire, with essays by William Sargent and Angela Howard, Four Centuries of Blue and White: The Frelinghuysen Collection of Chinese and Japanese Export Porcelain (London: Ad Ilissvm, 2023), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-1915401090, £90 / $110.
This beautifully illustrated book presents the Frelinghuysen Collection of Chinese and Japanese export porcelain. It is the first major publication to consider Chinese and Japanese blue and white together.
This extraordinary collection, assembled carefully over fifty years, features an exceptionally wide array of Asian blue and white porcelain—the most ubiquitous and influential of all ceramics. Ranging from Chinese pieces specially made for Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century to late nineteenth-century commissions for the Thai royal court, the collection also includes numerous Chinese classics from the era of the European trading companies and a notable selection of Japanese export porcelain. In its vast scope, it speaks of the diverse impulses and historical forces that propelled the trade in Asian porcelain and provides a lens to view the interaction of East and West from the early modern age to the dawn of the twentieth century. More than 300 pieces from the collection are illustrated and discussed in full and another 250 are illustrated in a compendium, all divided into thematic chapters that reflect the many ways Chinese and Japanese porcelain has been traded, collected, and used around the world.
Essays by William R. Sargent, former Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and noted armorial porcelain authority Angela Howard, precede the thirteen chapters, which include Faith, Identity, For the Table, To European Design, and Made in Japan. Great rarities are featured alongside small, amusing pieces and the many export porcelains made to elevate the practices of daily life.
With its strict adherence to blue and white porcelain, the collection intensifies our focus on forms, patterns, and designs, gathering together wares that are often considered only separately for study while also covering areas of little recent scholarship, such as the Thai market material. The specialized reader will find references to the latest research while the more general reader will appreciate a comprehensive overview of Asian export porcelain. There has not been a significant survey of either Chinese or Japanese blue and white since the 1990s, and they have never been considered together in a major publication.
Becky MacGuire is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Study Centre for the Fine & Decorative Arts at the Victoria & Albert Museum. She was the longtime Asian export art specialist at international auction house Christie’s.
New Book | Decay and Afterlife
From The University of Chicago Press:
Aleksandra Prica, Decay and Afterlife: Form, Time, and the Textuality of Ruins, 1100 to 1900 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0226811314 (hardcover), $105 / ISBN: 978-0226811598, $35. Also available as a PDF.
Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins.
Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.
Aleksandra Prica is associate professor of German literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
c o n t e n t s
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
I | Foundations
1 Among Ruins: Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud
2 Afterlife: Hans Blumenberg and Walter Benjamin
II | The Propitious Moment
3 Petrarch and the View of Rome
4 Poliphilo and the Dream of Ruins
III | Living On
5 Ferdinand Gregorovius, Hildebert of Lavardin, and the Rupture of Continuity
6 Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Martin Opitz, and the Overcoming of Vanity
IV | The Battleground of Time
7 Johann Jacob Breitinger, Andreas Gryphius, and the Reconsideration of Allegory
8 Thomas Burnet, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the Realignment of Discourses
V | Futures and Ruins
9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Georg Simmel, and the Provisionality of Forms
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
New Book | Staging ‘The Mysterious Mother’
From Yale UP:
Cynthia Roman, Jill Campbell, and Jonathan Kramnick, eds., Staging ‘The Mysterious Mother’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263657, $65.
Horace Walpole’s five-act tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1768), a sensational tale of incest and intrigue, was initially circulated only among the author’s friends. Walpole never permitted it to be performed during his lifetime except as a private theatrical. He described his play as a “delicious entertainment for the closet” and claimed that he “did not think it would do for the stage.” Yet the essays in this volume trace a history of private readings, amateur theatricals, and even early public performances, demonstrating that the play was read and performed more than Walpole’s protests suggest. Exploring a wide variety of topics—including the play’s crypto-Catholicism, its treatments of incest, guilt, motherhood, orphans, and scientific spectacle, and the complex relations between print and performance—the essays demonstrate the rich relevance of The Mysterious Mother to current critical discussions. The volume includes the proceedings of a mini-conference hosted at Yale University in 2018 on the occasion of a staged reading of the play. Also included are the director’s reflections, an abridged script, a facsimile of Walpole’s own copy of the full-length play, and reproductions of the illustrations he commissioned from Lady Diana Beauclerk.
Cynthia E. Roman is curator of prints, drawings, and paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library. Jill Campbell is professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University. Jonathan Kramnick is the Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University and the director of the Lewis Walpole Library.
The Burlington Magazine, October 2023
Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Coriolanus Taking Leave of His Family, 1786, oil on canvas, 114 × 146 cm
(National Gallery of Art, Washington)
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The eighteenth century in the October issue of The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 165 (October 2023)
a r t i c l e
• Aaron Wile, “Girodet’s Coriolanus Taking Leave of His Family Rediscovered,” pp. 1094–1105.
In 2019 Girodet’s lost entry for the 1786 Grand prix de peinture came to light and was acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The painting, which depicts a rarely represented incident from the story of Coriolanus—a subject that may have had contemporary political relevance—was not awarded the prize, probably because Girodet was regarded as being too close to Jacques-Louis David, a relationship to which the work may allude.
s h o r t e r n o t i c e
• Antoinette Friedenthal, “Image of a Connoisseur: An Unknown Portrait of Pierre Jean Mariette,” pp. 1106–10.
Among the unpublished miniatures in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (V&A), is an eighteenth-century bust-length portrait of a middle-aged gentleman. A basic unillustrated inventory sheet for this work appeared in 2020 on the museum’s website. It stated that the portrait represents Pierre Jean Mariette (1694–1774) but gave no reasons for this identification and did not provide any information on the object’s provenance. It will be argued here that a combination of visual and documentary evidence confirms the identification.
r e v i e w s
• Mark Bill, Review of the exhibition Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration (The Box, Plymouth, 2023), pp. 1124–27.
• Stephen Lloyd, Review of the refurbished Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque galleries at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, pp. 1130–33.
• Beth McKillop, Review of the exhibition China’s Hidden Century (The British Museum, London, 2023), pp. 1136–38.
• Satish Padiyar, Review of the exhibition Sade: Freedom or Evil (CCCB, Barcelona, 2023), pp. 1143–46.
• Malcolm McNeill, Review of Anne Farrer and Kevin McLoughlin, eds., Handbook of the Colour Print in China, 1600–1800 (Brill, 2022), pp. 1150–52.
• Edward Cooke, Review of Elisa Ambrosio, Francine Giese, Alina Martimyanova, and Hans Bjarne Thomsen, eds., China and the West: Reconsidering Chinese Reverse Glass Painting (De Gruyter, 2022), pp. 1152–53.
• David Ekserdjian, Review of the catalogue, Denise Allen, Linda Borsch, James David Draper, Jeffrey Fraiman, and Richard Stone, eds., Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022), pp. 1156–58. The book is available as a free PDF The Met’s website.
• Rowan Watson, Review of Christopher de Hamel, The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club (Allen Lane, 2022), pp. 1160–62.
• Stefan Albl, Review of Francesco Lofano, Un pittore conteso nella Napoli del Settecento: L’epistolario e gli affari di Francesco de Mura (Istituto Italiano Studi Filosofici, 2022), pp. 1163–64.
New Book | David Rittenhouse
Distributed by Yale University Press:
Donald Fennimore and Frank Hohmann, David Rittenhouse: Philosopher-Mechanick of Colonial Philadelphia and His Famous Clocks (Winterthur, Delaware: Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, 2023), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0300272956, $75.
A lush and in-depth celebration of the clocks of David Rittenhouse, one of eighteenth-century America’s greatest scientists and engineers.
David Rittenhouse: Philosopher-Mechanick of Colonial Philadelphia and His Famous Clocks brings a completely new focus on the life and works of the American astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, and inventor David Rittenhouse (1732–1796). A brilliant autodidact who would become the first director of the United States Mint, Rittenhouse was a pivotal figure of the cultural scene in Colonial Philadelphia. This publication expands the body of knowledge surrounding Rittenhouse and his brother Benjamin, as well as the era in which they lived. His masterful clocks are the principal subject matter, but the book also addresses Rittenhouse’s broader works, such as orreries, telescopes, surveying compasses, and other scientific equipment. These objects are all lushly illustrated with new photography, including rarely seen pieces in private collections. Providing a more complete and accurate view of Rittenhouse’s genius, this volume highlights the breadth of his talent and importance to both science and art in early America.
Donald L. Fennimore, curator emeritus, served as metalwork specialist at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware for 34 years. Frank L. Hohmann, a retired Wall Street executive, is a collector of eighteenth-century furniture, with a concentration on brass dial clocks.
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