Enfilade

William Pars, Temple of Poseidon at Sounion, 1764, pen and grey ink with watercolour and bodycolour and some gum arabic
(London: The British Museum)

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From the Soane Museum:

The Romance of Ruins: The Search for Ancient Ionia, 1764
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 3 March – 11 July 2021

Curated by Ian Jenkins

Produced in collaboration with the British Museum, this exhibition showcases a series of powerful and poetic watercolours made on an expedition to discover the ruins of ancient Ionia (modern Turkey) in 1764. The expedition, funded by the Society of Dilettanti, included artist William Pars, antiquary Richard Chandler, and architect Nicholas Revett.

The beauty and fame of the Ionian cities—part of the Greek world from the 8th century BC and ruined in antiquity—lived on in the writings of ancient commentators such as Herodotus and Strabo. This exhibition focuses on the published accounts of the expedition, produced in lavish volumes funded by the Society of Dilettanti, and the evocative images by the brilliant young artist William Pars, placing them in dialogue with the collections and architecture of Sir John Soane, who deeply admired ancient Greek architecture. Pars’ drawings record the classical ruins encountered in Turkey and Greece, and also the living landscape–its flora and fauna, and the customs, manners and dress of the people, bringing to life extracts from Chandler’s diary account. These images represent Enlightenment themes of travel and discovery and embody melancholy reflections on the passing of the great age of antiquity and the reduction of its monuments. They capture the spirit of Edward Gibbon’s reflection on the fall of civilizations and in so doing they portray the romance of ruins.

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the generosity of David and Molly Lowell Borthwick. The accompanying catalogue has been kindly supported by the Society of Dilettanti Charitable Trust.

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Ian Jenkins, ed., The Romance of Ruins: The Search for Ancient Ionia, 1764 (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2021), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1999693244, £40.

The Romance of Ruins: The Search for Ancient Ionia, 1764 focuses on a series of highly finished watercolours by the brilliant young artist William Pars. These were based on sketches and drawings made on the spot during the Society of Dilettanti’s 1764 expedition to Ionia. This remarkable set of pictorial documents has never been fully published in spite of their beauty and cultural significance. The book includes an introduction by the exhibition’s curator, Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator at the British Museum; a series of essays by eminent scholars including Alastair Blanshard, J. Lesley Fitt, Jason M. Kelly, Philip Mansel, and Kim Sloan; and a catalogue of works in the exhibition.

The exhibition is scheduled to open this spring, with the catalogue now available via Paul Holberton Publishing:

Architectural Training and Practice in Paris in the 19th and Early 20th Century:
Selected French Drawings from the Peter May Collection
New-York Historical Society, 9 April — 13 June 2021

Living with Architecture as Art: The Peter May Collection of Architectural Drawings, Models, and Artefacts (London: Ad Ilissum, 2021), 2 vols., 352 pages each, ISBN: 978-1912168194, £260 / $325.

Introduction by the collector peter may; catalogue by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger; essays by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Charles Hind, Basile Baudez, Matthew Wells; afterwords by architect Mark Ferguson and interior designer Bunny Williams.

This stunning two-volume publication introduces readers to one of the largest private collections of architectural drawings in the world. Showcasing drawings and related models and artefacts dating from 1691 to the mid 20th century, this lavish tome includes both a catalogue and new texts by leading authorities and provides a fascinating look at these often very beautiful by-products of architectural training and practice.

One of the largest private collections of architectural drawings in the world has been assembled over 30 years by investor and philanthropist Peter May. Comprising more than 600 sheets that have all been carefully preserved and handsomely framed, the drawings and related models and artefacts date from 1691 to the mid 20th century. This handsome two-volume publication will introduce amateurs and specialists alike to the largely unknown collection. The book includes a catalogue and innovative texts by leading authorities that present the raison-d’être for the production and preservation of these sometimes neglected by-products of architectural training and practice that have been collected off-and-on through history by individuals and institutions.

The architectural sheets acquired for the collection are principally 19th- or early 20th-century competition or certification drawings by design students. Others are presentation drawings for public commissions, reconstruction studies or interior designs. The catalogue is arranged by category, to demonstrate May’s inclination towards specific building types such as commercial or cultural institutions, train stations and spas, landmarks and monuments, private and royal residences, and cast-iron architecture. Also included is a category for landscape designs and garden architecture, reflecting May’s experience as a gentleman farmer with a predilection for building.

Peter May informs the reader about his history as a collector and builder. Maureen Cassidy-Geiger discusses the formation of the collection and with Basile Baudez introduces the French system of architectural education, from which some of the finest drawings come. Charles Hind offers a history of design training in Britain and writes about patterns of collecting and the market for architectural drawings. Matthew Wells’s subject is the history of architectural models.

Maureen Cassidy-Geiger is a curator and scholar with special expertise in European decorative arts, patterns of collecting and display and the history of architecture, court culture, gardening and travel. Her most recent book on architecture was The Philip Johnson Glass House: An architect in the Garden (Rizzoli, 2016). Charles Hind, FSA, is Chief Curator of Drawings at RIBA in London. A Palladio specialist, he was with Sotheby’s, 1986–93, as their expert in architectural drawings and British watercolors. Basile Baudez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, previously at Paris-Sorbonne University, University of Pennsylvania and at the Pratt Institute. Matthew Wells is Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich. His dissertation “Architectural Models and the Professional Practice of the Architect, 1834–1916” was awarded the Theodor-Fischer Prize from the Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Giant Seated in a Landscape (detail), by 1818, burnished aquatint with scraping and strokes of ‘lavis’ added along the top of the landscape and within the landscape; plate: 28.4 × 20.8 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 35.42).

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Opening next month at The Met:

Goya’s Graphic Imagination
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 12 February — 2 May 2021

Regarded as one of the most remarkable artists from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Francisco Goya (1746–1828) is renowned for his prolific activity as a draftsman and printmaker, producing about nine hundred drawings and three hundred prints during his long career. Through his drawings and prints, he expressed his political liberalism, criticism of superstition, and distaste for intellectual oppression in unique and compelling ways. This exhibition will explore Goya’s graphic imagination and how his drawings and prints allowed him to share his complex ideas and respond to the turbulent social and political changes occurring in the world around him. The broadly chronological presentation will follow Goya’s evolution and different phases as a graphic artist as well as his approaches to his subjects. Around one hundred works on display will come mainly from The Met collection—one of the most outstanding collections of Goya’s drawings and prints outside Spain—with other works coming from New York, Boston, and Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado and the Biblioteca Nacional.

The catalogue is distributed by Yale University Press:

Mark McDonald, with contributions by Mercedes Ceron-Pena, Francisco J. R. Chaparro, and Jesusa Vega, Goya’s Graphic Imagination (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art , 2021), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1588397140, $50.

This book presents the first focused investigation of Francisco Goya’s (1746–1828) graphic output. Spanning six decades, Goya’s works on paper reflect the transformation and turmoil of the Enlightenment, the Inquisition, and Spain’s years of constitutional government. Two essays, a detailed chronology, and more than 100 featured artworks illuminate the remarkable breadth and power of Goya’s drawings and prints, situating the artist within his historical moment. The selected pieces document the various phases and qualities of Goya’s graphic work—from his early etchings after Velázquez through print series such as the Caprichos and The Disasters of War to his late lithographs, The Bulls of Bordeaux, and including albums of drawings that reveal the artist’s nightmares, dreams, and visions.

Mark McDonald is curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Accompanying the exhibition Fortune and Folly in 1720 (scheduled to open at the New York Public Library in September), the related publication is now available from Brepols:

Madeleine Viljoen, Nina Dubin and Meredith Martin, Meltdown! Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2020), 157 pages, ISBN: 978-1912554515, $65 / €50.

Meltdown! focuses on the depiction of the first international financial crisis following the 1720 collapse of stock market bubbles in England, France and the Netherlands.

This book tells two parallel stories: one of the spectacular rise and fall of the world’s first bubble economy, and another of the enterprising art industry that chronicled its collapse. The Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, spawning the invention of French banknotes as well as joint-stock companies built on fantasies of New World trade, imposed on everyday Europeans a crash course in new financial products. In turn, a bubbling print market relentlessly caricatured the meltdown of 1720, offering viewers an entertaining primer on the otherwise bewildering realities of modern economic life. Such satirical works—most notably a Dutch compendium titled The Great Mirror of Folly (Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid )—helped to demystify the disaster by deploying familiar theatrical characters and tragic-comic motifs. Likening the speculative mania to an infectious disease, and spoofing the ‘herd behavior’ of a money-crazed public, its prints portrayed malevolent traders, hoodwinked investors, and a chorus of heroes and villains both real and legendary, from the rakish financier John Law to the foolish Harlequin to the goddess Fortuna. Three hundred years later, our current moment offers a uniquely fitting vantage point from which to reconsider the significance of the bubbles and of the artworks that channeled the fears and desires they unleashed.

Nina L. Dubin is an associate professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Specializing in European art since 1700, she has published widely on the production of art within an economy of risk.

Meredith Martin is an associate professor of Art History at New York University and the Institute of Fine Arts. Specializing in European art of the long eighteenth century, she has published widely on gender and architectural patronage as well as maritime art, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world.

Madeleine C. Viljoen is Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection at The New York Public Library. Responsible for the Library’s collection of prints and rare illustrated books, she has published widely on early modern printed images, with special attention to the goldsmith-engraver, the reproductive print, and ornament.

Alexander Nasmyth, Dumbarton Castle and Town with Ben Lomond, 1816, oil on canvas, 33 × 55 cm
(Glasgow: The Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow GLAHA_51732)

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Scheduled to open in January, the exhibition will instead be moved online with related programming soon to be announced (stay tuned); from The Hunterian:

Old Ways New Roads: Travels in Scotland, 1720–1832
(Online) The Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, 29 January — 9 May 202

Curated by John Bonehill, Anne Dulau Beveridge, and Nigel Leask

Old Ways New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720–1832 addresses the impact of Scotland’s new transport infrastructure on the development of travel, tourism and topographical descriptions of the nation between 1720 and 1832. Old Ways New Roads features paintings, prints, drawings, maps, manuscript tours, and other associated objects from The Hunterian and other public and private collections.

The laying out of new routes in the aftermath of the 1707 Act of Union and the 1715 Jacobite Uprising opened up Scotland (and especially the Highlands) not only to military occupation, but to the forces of commerce and trade and philosophical and scenic tourism. As a recent war zone, Scotland became imbued with aesthetic and topographical significance. Sites and places, old and modern, ruinous and thriving, were brought into view by travel along the military roads constructed by General George Wade and Major William Caulfield. Later, those designed by Thomas Telford under the aegis of the Commission for Highland Roads and Bridges, as well as canals and steam-boat routes, further opened up Scotland’s more inaccessible regions in the Romantic period. Old Ways New Roads traces how these dramatic ‘improvements’ to the Scottish landscape were variously documented, evaluated, planned, and imagined in word and image and more especially ‘framed up’ in terms of the experience of travel.

From Birlinn:

John Bonehill, Anne Dulau Beveridge, and Nigel Leask, eds., Old Ways New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720–1832 (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2021), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1780276670, £20.

In 1725 an extensive military road and bridge-building programme was implemented by the British crown that would transform 18th-century Scotland. Aimed at pacifying some of her more inaccessible regions and containing the Jacobite threat, General Wade’s new roads were designed to replace ‘the old ways’ and ‘tedious passages’ through the mountains. Over the next few decades, the laying out of these routes opened up the country to visitors from all backgrounds. After the 1760s, soldiers, surveyors, and commercial travellers were joined by leisure tourists and artists, eager to explore Scotland’s antiquities, natural history, and scenic landscapes and to describe their findings in words and images. Here, a number of acclaimed experts explore how the Scottish landscape was variously documented, evaluated, planned, and imagined in words and images. As well as a fascinating insight into the experience of travellers and tourists, the book also considers how they impacted on the experience of the Scottish people themselves.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  Writing the Scottish Tour 1720–1830, Nigel Leask
SECTION 1 | The Theatre of War, John Bonehill
2  The Ethnology of the ‘Old Ways’ in Gaelic Scotland, Hugh Cheape
SECTION 2 | Antiquities, Nigel Leask
3  Natural History, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
SECTION 3 | Custom and Improvement, John Bonehill
4  Roads, Bridges and Designed Landscapes on the Highland Circuit, Christopher Dingwall
5  Scotland’s Prospects, John Bonehill
SECTION 4 | Picturesque Prospects and Literary Landscapes, John Bonehill and Nigel Leask
6  Portable Knick-knacks or the Material Culture of Travel, Viccy Coltman
7  Panoramas and Landscape, Christina Young
8  Picturesque Tours of Wales and Ireland, Mary-Ann Constantine and Finola O’Kane

Bibliography
Photograph Credits
Index

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Note (added 6 January 2021) — The original posting did not include the contents.

Carmontelle, Self-Portrait, ca. 1762; graphite, watercolor, red chalk, and gouache on paper
(Chantilly: Musée Condé)

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From the Domaine de Chantilly:

Carmontelle (1717–1806), ou la Douceur de Vivre / And the Age of Pleasures
Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, 5 September 2020 — 28 March 2021

Curated by Nicole Garnier

A playwright, draughtsman, and landscape architect, Louis Carrogis— known as Carmontelle—was a brilliant connoisseur whose many talents reflect the cultivated and cosmopolitan world in which he lived. The organizer of festivities for the Duke of Orléans, famous for his portraits and improvised comedies called Proverbes, Carmontelle designed the Parc Monceau in Paris for the Duke of Chartres and perfected transparencies or long rolls of paper depicting delightful landscapes.

With sitters ranging from Mozart to Buffon, from Rameau to Baron Grimm, Carmontelle created a faithful portrait of mid-18th century Parisian society: princes of the blood, writers, philosophers, musicians, scientists, and elegant beauties of the ‘age of pleasures’—words coined by Talleyrand to describe the Ancien Régime. Thanks to Henri d’Orléans, Duke of Aumale (1822–1897), descendant of the Orléans who acquired the majority of this ensemble, the Condé museum at Chantilly has the best collection in the world of Carmontelle’s works with 484 drawn portraits and one transparency.

The son of a master cobbler, Louis Carrogis took the name ‘Carmontelle’ in 1744 after studying geometry. A topographer during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), he spent his spare time making portraits of the officers and organizing improvised comedies. In 1759, he entered the service of the Duke of Orleans as tutor to the young Duke of Chartres (1747–1793), the next Duke of Orléans and future Philippe Egalité; and from 1755 to 1784, he created ‘bad but accurate likenesses’ (Grimm) in gouache and watercolour of the entire court of the Orléans family at the Palais-Royal, Saint-Cloud, and Villers-Cotterêts. As an amateur draughtsman, Carmontelle preferred profile portraits for their ease of execution.

Nicole Garnier-Pelle, Carmontelle (1717–1806) ou le Temps de la Douceur de Vivre: Collection les Carnets de Chantilly n11 (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2020), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-2878442779, €20.

Note: The exhibition, originally scheduled to close in January, has been extended until the end of March.

Now on view at SAAM:

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, 18 September 2020 — 3 January 2021

Organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey

Renowned Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt was one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. He lived for 90 years, published more than 36 books, traveled across four continents, and wrote well over 25,000 letters to an international network of colleagues and admirers. In 1804, after traveling four years in South America and Mexico, Humboldt spent exactly six weeks in the United States. In these six weeks, Humboldt—through a series of lively exchanges of ideas about the arts, science, politics, and exploration with influential figures such as President Thomas Jefferson and artist Charles Willson Peale—shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment.

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture places American art squarely in the center of a conversation about Humboldt’s lasting influence on the way we think about our relationship to the natural world. Humboldt’s quest to understand the universe—his concern for climate change, his taxonomic curiosity centered on New World species of flora and fauna, and his belief that the arts were as important as the sciences for conveying the resultant sense of wonder in the interlocking aspects of our planet—make this a project evocative of how art illuminates some of the issues central to our relationship with nature and our stewardship of this planet.

Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait with Mastodon Bone, 1824, oil on canvas, 26 × 22 inches (New-York Historical Society, Purchase, James B. Wilbur Fund).

This exhibition will be the first to examine Humboldt’s impact on five spheres of American cultural development: the visual arts, sciences, literature, politics, and exploration, between 1804 and 1903. It centers on the fine arts as a lens through which to understand how deeply intertwined Humboldt’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity. The exhibition includes more than 100 paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts as well as a video introduction to Humboldt and his connections to the Smithsonian through an array of current projects and initiatives.

Artworks by Albert Bierstadt, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Frederic Church, Eastman Johnson, Samuel F.B. Morse, Charles Willson Peale, John Rogers, William James Stillman, and John Quincy Adams Ward, among others, will be on display. The installation features a digital exploration of Frederic Church’s famous landscape, Heart of the Andes (1859), enabling visitors to engage with the painting’s details in new ways. The wealth of detail is a painterly extrapolation of Humboldt’s plant geography map. The mountain at the center of the work, Chimborazo, was referred to as ‘Humboldt’s Mountain’. The narrated, 2.5D animated projection enables visitors to appreciate the connections between Church’s painting and Humboldt’s ideas.

The exhibition also includes the original ‘Peale Mastodon’ skeleton, on loan from the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, with ties to Humboldt, Peale and an emerging American national identity in the early nineteenth century. Its inclusion in the exhibition represents a homecoming for this important fossil that has been in Europe since 1847, and emphasizes that natural history and natural monuments bond Humboldt with the United States.

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture is organized by Eleanor Jones Harvey, senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A major catalogue, written by Harvey, accompanies the exhibition. The book shows how Humboldt inspired a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans and extol America’s wilderness as a signature component of the nation’s sense of self. Harvey traces how Humboldt’s ideas influenced the transcendentalists and the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, and laid the foundations for the Smithsonian, the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service.

Eleanor Jones Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0691200804, £62 / $75.