Enfilade

Now on view at Madrid’s Museo de América:

Miguel Cabrera: Las reglas del arte de un pintor novohispano
Museo de América, Madrid, 31 May — 13 October 2024

Desde 2019 el Museo de América ha liderado el proyecto Estudio y conservación de la serie La vida de la Virgen, de Miguel Cabrera. El proyecto integró numerosos profesionales de diferentes instituciones museísticas y académicas españolas y latinoamericanas. Sus trabajos han aportado importantes avances en el conocimiento de la pintura barroca novohispana y la conservación de la pintura sobre lienzo. Como resultado del extenso trabajo llevado a cabo se presenta esta magna exposición para cerrar con broche de oro este proyecto: La primera exposición en España dedicada a uno de los pintores más importantes del México Virreinal: Miguel Cabrera, a su vida, obra y el estudio técnico de su pintura. El discurso museográfico se sustenta en veintitrés obras pictóricas pertenecientes principalmente a las colecciones del Museo de América, así como préstamos bibliográficos de la Biblioteca Nacional de España.

Objetivos de la exposición
• Dar a conocer en España la obra y técnica de Miguel Cabrera, maestro de la pintura novohispana
• Presentar la magnífica serie de cuadros de La vida de la Virgen, su historia y su llegada a España en el siglo XVIII
• Mostrar al público los trabajos de conservación y de investigación técnica realizados en torno a estas obras
• Poner en valor el trabajo de conservación y restauración del patrimonio histórico-artístico llevado a cabo en los museos e instituciones museísticas

Miguel Cabrera: Las reglas del arte de un pintor novohispano (Madrid: S.G. Museos Estatales, 2024), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-8481818611, €21.

From the press release for the exhibition (7 March 2024) . . .

奪天工 Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 14 September 2024 — 6 January 2025

A new exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens will explore the potential of gardens as spaces that not only delight the senses and nourish the body but also inspire the mind—both intellectually and spiritually. The literati during China’s Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties believed gardens resulted in more ethical connections to all living things. On view in the Chinese Garden’s Studio for Lodging the Mind from 14 September 2024 to 6 January 2025, 奪天工 Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China will exhibit 24 objects, including hanging scrolls, hand scrolls, albums, and books from The Huntington’s collections and those throughout the United States. The exhibition will also feature a participatory artwork by contemporary Chinese artist Zheng Bo that was commissioned by The Huntington.

Growing and Knowing and the Huntington exhibition Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis will run concurrently as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a regional event presented by Getty featuring more than 60 exhibitions and programs that explore the intersections of art and science, both past and present.

Growing and Knowing will present three key themes: ‘Growing’, ‘Knowing’, and ‘Being’.

Growing

The introductory section to the exhibition, ‘Growing’, will focus on historical horticultural practices in China, many of which are still practiced today. Chinese scholars and gardeners experimented with domestication, grafting, and hybridization to create unusual cultivars (new varieties of plants developed through human intervention). Throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties, these techniques were well documented in horticultural manuals. Some of these books—such as The Secretly Transmitted Mirror of Flowers, completed by Chen Hao 陳淏 (1615–1703) in 1688—remained popular instructional guides in China into the 20th century. The well-known chrysanthemum flower exists as a result of hybridization experiments conducted by scholars and gardeners. Visitors will have the opportunity to view chrysanthemums in full bloom just outside of the exhibition walls in The Huntington’s Chinese Garden. Reproductions of gardening tools from the period will also be displayed.

Knowing

The second section, ‘Knowing’, will present a diverse selection of books and paintings from the Ming and Qing dynasties, showcasing the multiple ways that scholars thought about the plants they cultivated. “The works selected for ‘Knowing’ specifically highlight scholars’ understanding of plants as food, sources of emergency sustenance and pharmaceuticals, and keys to classical literature,” said exhibition curator Phillip E. Bloom, The Huntington’s June and Simon K.C. Li Curator of the Chinese Garden and Director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies. A subtheme of the section will touch on the era’s hierarchies of knowledge—specifically how scholars’ intellectual knowledge of plants was valued over gardeners’ direct, physical knowledge. Gardeners’ bodily insights were largely ignored in historical texts, but they were revealed in visual sources. For example, the Ming dynasty painting Garden for Solitary Pleasure (17th century) shows a scholar lying deep in thought among bamboo and other trees, as nearby laborers bend over plants and carry tools to cultivate the scholar’s garden.

Being

Chinese scholars did not grow and learn about plants just for knowledge’s sake. Growing and knowing were means for them to better understand their place in the world and learn to interact more ethically with other creatures. The last section of the exhibition, ‘Being’, will explore these practices of self-cultivation. “In order to truly understand how nature works, scholars not only contemplated plants but also engaged with and learned from them,” Bloom said. “Caring for plants, observing their habits, taking pleasure in their forms, and ultimately recognizing their commonalities with humans were, in essence, practices whereby people may perfect themselves.” Pursuits of a Scholar, an 18th-century Qing dynasty painting album, dedicates several leaves to the different ways that scholars interacted with plants. One leaf shows a scholar writing observations of a bamboo plant in his study, while another depicts a scholar caring for chrysanthemums.

Ecosensibility Exercise: Fragrant Eight-Section Brocade 生態感悟練習： 聞香八段錦 by Zheng Bo

To invite visitors to develop their own meaningful relationships with their natural surroundings, The Huntington has commissioned the participatory artwork Ecosensibility Exercise: Fragrant Eight-Section Brocade by Hong Kong–based artist Zheng Bo. Fragrant Eight-Section Brocade is inspired by the traditional Chinese mind-body practice qigong 氣功. Building on exercises that date back nearly 900 years and remain widely practiced today, Zheng’s work includes eight exercises that combine simple full-body movements and deep breathing to activate the mind and body. Each exercise is performed with a fragrant plant, encouraging the participants to develop a human-plant connection. Visitors to the exhibition can perform the exercises on their own throughout The Huntington’s gardens at marked stops chosen by the artist. A film documenting the eight exercises will be shown in the gallery. The Huntington is also planning a series of public programs in which the artist will guide visitors through his reinterpreted movements.

Exhibition Catalog

The Huntington will publish an open-access digital catalog edited by Phillip E. Bloom, Nicholas K. Menzies (research fellow in The Huntington’s Center for East Asian Garden Studies), and Michelle Bailey (assistant curator for the Center for East Asian Garden Studies). The book will include seven essays, 16 catalog entries by various scholars, and a conversation with artist Zheng Bo. A paperback version of the catalog will be available at the Huntington Store.

This exhibition is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

From the press release for the exhibition:

Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520–1920
Tate Britain, London, 16 May — 13 October 2024

Tate Britain presents Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920. This ambitious group show charts women’s road to being recognised as professional artists, a 400-year journey that paved the way for future generations and established what it meant to be a woman in the British art world. The exhibition covers the period in which women were visibly working as professional artists, but went against societal expectations to do so.

Featuring over 100 artists, the exhibition celebrates well-known names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Gwen John, alongside many others who are only now being rediscovered. Their careers were as varied as the works they produced. Some prevailed over genres deemed suitable for women like watercolour landscapes and domestic scenes. Others dared to take on subjects dominated by men like battle scenes and the nude, or campaigned for equal access to training and membership of professional institutions. Tate Britain will showcase over 200 works, including oil painting, watercolour, pastel, sculpture, photography, and ‘needlepainting’ to tell the story of these trailblazing artists.

Now You See Us begins at the Tudor court with Levina Teerlinc, many of whose miniatures are brought together for the first time in four decades, and Esther Inglis, whose manuscripts contain Britain’s earliest known self-portraits by a woman artist. The exhibition then looks to the 17th century. Focus is given to one of art history’s most celebrated women artists: Artemisia Gentileschi, who created major works in London at the court of Charles I, including the recently rediscovered Susanna and the Elders 1638–40, on loan from the Royal Collection for the very first time. The exhibition also looks to women such as Mary Beale, Joan Carlile, and Maria Verelst who broke new ground as professional portrait painters in oil.

Maria Cosway, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’, 1781–82, oil on canvas (The Devonshire Collection).

In the 18th century, women took part in Britain’s first public art exhibitions; these artists included overlooked figures such as Katherine Read and Mary Black; the sculptor Anne Seymour Damer; and Margaret Sarah Carpenter, a leading figure in her day but little heard of now. The show looks at Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, the only women included among the Founder Members of the Royal Academy of Arts; it took 160 years for membership to be granted to another woman. Women artists of this era are often dismissed as amateurs pursuing ‘feminine’ occupations like watercolour and flower painting, but many worked in these genres professionally: needlewoman Mary Linwood, whose gallery was a major tourist attraction; miniaturist Sarah Biffin, who painted with her mouth, having been born without arms and legs; and Augusta Withers, a botanical illustrator employed by the Horticultural Society.

The Victorian period saw a vast expansion in public exhibition venues. Now You See Us showcases major works by critically appraised artists of this period, including Elizabeth Butler (née Thompson)’s monumental The Roll Call 1874 (Butler’s work prompted critic John Ruskin to retract his statement that “no women could paint”), and nudes by Henrietta Rae and Annie Swynnerton, which sparked both debate and celebration. The exhibition will also look at women’s connection to activism, including Florence Claxton’s satirical ‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley 1861, which will be on public display for the first time since it was painted; and an exploration of the life of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, an early member of the Society of Female Artists who is credited with the campaign for women to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. On show will be the student work of women finally admitted to art schools, as well as their petitions for equal access to life drawing classes.

The exhibition ends in the early 20th century with women’s suffrage and the First World War. Women artists like Gwen John, Vanessa Bell and Helen Saunders played an important role in the emergence of modernism, abstraction and vorticism, but others, such as Anna Airy, who also worked as a war artist, continued to excel in conventional traditions. The final artists in the show, Laura Knight and Ethel Walker, offer powerful examples of ambitious, independent, confident professionals who achieved critical acclaim and—finally—membership of the Royal Academy.

The exhibition guide is available here»

Tabitha Barber, Tim Batchelor, Carol Jacobi, eds., Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920 (London: Tate Publishing, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1849769259, £40.

Opening this month at the Pasquale Paoli Museum in Merusaglia:

Maria Cosway (1760–1838): A strada eccezziunale di un’artista
Museu Pasquale Paoli, Merusaglia (Corsica), 18 May — 30 October 2024

Curated by Amandine Rabier

Maria Cosway (1760–1838): A Strada eccezziunale di un’artista (L’itinéraire singulier d’une artiste), présentée au Musée Maison natale de Pasquale Paoli raconte le cheminement d’une femme brillante que tout prédestinait à une grande carrière d’artiste dans la High Society anglaise et qui, contre toute attente, trouvera sa véritable émancipation en renonçant à sa première vocation pour se consacrer à l’éducation des jeunes filles. Ami fidèle, Pasquale Paoli (1725–1807) fut présent à chaque étape de cette vie singulière. Ses lettres à l’attention de Maria Cosway, tel un fil rouge, ponctuent les différentes sections de cette exposition. Fruit de deux années de travail en collaboration avec des institutions britanniques et italiennes reconnues, l’exposition s’accompagne d’un catalogue édité en français et en anglais, richement illustré et documenté par des historiens d’art réputés, spécialistes du XVIIIe siècle, sous la direction d’Amandine Rabier, commissaire de l’exposition. Cette exposition est aussi pour le musée de Merusaglia, l’occasion de s’extraire de son enracinement local pour rayonner sur la scène internationale, conformément à son Projet Scientifique et Culturel.

Introduction
• L’apprentissage en Italie
• Maria Hadfield devient Maria Cosway

Salle 1 | Maria Cosway dans la société anglaise
• La reine de Pall Mall
• À propos des femmes artistes
• Pasquale Paoli et Maria Cosway

Salle 2 | Maria Cosway peintre
• L’influence du cercle romain
• L’amitié avec David
• Exposer à la Royal Academy

Salle 3 | Rupture

Salle 4 | Émancipation: Maria Cosway pédagogue

Amandine Rabier, ed., Maria Cosway (Ghent: Snoeck Publishers, 2024), ISBN: 978-9461619051, €30.

Francesco Guardi, The Feast of the Ascension in the Piazza San Marco, detail, ca. 1775, oil on canvas
(Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum)

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Opening this fall at Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum:

Splendor in Venice: Canaletto and Guardi in 18th-Century Painting
Veneza em Festa: Canaletto e Guardi na Pintura do Século XVIII
Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 24 October 2024 — 13 January 2025
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 3 February — 12 May 2025

In 2024, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum welcomes the masters of 18th-century Venetian painting in an exhibition organised in collaboration with the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. After working together on a 2009 exhibition devoted to the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza are joining forces once again to promote an encounter between the works of their respective collections, based on their characteristic affinities. This new project, which starts in Lisbon in autumn 2024 and continues in Madrid in early 2025, takes as its theme 18th-century Venetian painting, with each museum contributing works that echo and complement one another. Canaletto, Guardi, Bellotto, and Tiepolo—creators of some of the most brilliant compositions of their time—will be brought together with other artists for the exhibition. The display will focus on the feste (the celebrations held in La Serenissima), vedute (panoramic views of a specific location), and capricci (fantastical architectures dreamt up by local artists), all of which are naturally festive motifs.

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Note (added 16 August 2025) — The posting was updated to include the dates in Madrid. Also, note that the catalogue is distributed by ACC Art Books and Simon & Schuster.

Now on view at The Wallace Collection:

Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King
The Wallace Collection, London, 10 April — 20 October 2024

Explore the life of the great Sikh leader Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) in this major exhibition

With an unwavering sense of destiny, Ranjit Singh conquered the Punjab, an area that today encompasses Pakistan, following a period of anarchy caused by decades of Afghan invasions. By the early 19th century, he emerged as the undisputed Maharaja, establishing the influential Sikh Empire. Ranjit Singh’s leadership led to a golden age marked by thriving trade, flourishing arts, and a formidable army. Discover his story through nearly 100 stunning artworks, including jewellery and weaponry from the Sikh Empire drawn from major private and public collections. The exhibition also features historic objects from his court, courtiers, and family, including items owned by the Maharaja and the most famous of his 30 wives, Maharani Jind Kaur. Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King is a unique opportunity to see our remarkable collection of Sikh arms and armour alongside other Sikh artworks for the first time.

From Bloomsbury Press:

Davinder Toor, Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2024), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1781301265, £20 / $30.

This book, published to coincide with the exhibition at the Wallace Collection, features historic artworks, jewellery, and weaponry from Ranjit Singh’s court, courtiers, and family members. Also highlighted are objects intimately connected with his son, Maharaja Duleep Singh—the deposed boy-king turned country squire who was a favourite of Queen Victoria and father of the prominent suffragette Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. Richly illustrated, this catalogue also reveals the achievements of Ranjit Singh’s European and American officials. Acknowledging Ranjit Singh’s remarkable feat of holding back the threat of a British invasion for four decades, these ‘Firangis’ would nickname their esteemed Sikh sovereign ‘The Napoleon of the East’.

Davinder Toor is a leading figure among a new generation of Sikh, Indian, and Islamic art collectors. He has acted as a consultant to major private collectors, auction houses and institutions such as the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Wallace Collection. He currently lectures on the ‘Arts of the Royal Sikh Courts’ and ‘Sikh Painting and Manuscripts’ for the V&A’s prestigious Arts of Asia course. Both he and objects from the Toor Collection of Sikh Art were featured on the BBC’s Lost Treasures of the Sikh Kingdom (2014) and The Stolen Maharajah: Britain’s Indian Royal (2018) documentaries. The Toor Collection, comprising more than 1,500 works, acts as a lasting legacy to the empire of the Sikhs.

c o n t e n t s

Maps
Foreword
Preface

Prelude to Power — Davinder Toor
Masters of War — Davinder Toor
The Lahore Durbar — Davinder Toor
Firangis — William Dalrymple
Legacies — Davinder Toor

Notes
Bibliography
Image credits

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.

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

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.