Exhibition | Illusion: Dream–Identity–Reality
Now on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle:
Illusion: Dream – Identity – Reality
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 6 December 2024 — 6 April 2025
Curated by Sandra Pisot and Johanna Hornauer
Henry Fuseli, Die Vision des Dichters (The Poet’s Vision), 1806–07, oil on canvas, 61 × 41.5 cm (Winterthur: Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte). The composition served as the frontispiece for William Cowper’s book, Poems (London: J. Johnson , 1808), volume 1.
With a large-scale exhibition spanning several epochs, the Hamburger Kunsthalle looks at the diverse facets of the theme of illusion in art from the Old Masters to the present day. Trompe-l’œil has been widely used in art since antiquity, flourishing in particular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. And this technique continues to fascinate artists today, when the spread of fake news is almost normal, when people are confronted daily with manipulated images on the internet and virtual reality seems to be expanding our cosmos into infinity. We now live in the certainty that we can no longer trust our eyes, that images are deceptive and are used to depict what is desired rather than what is. But the exhibition shows how illusion means far more than merely deceiving the eye. It is manifested in the (illusionistic) self-love of Narcissus as well as in spatial illusions in architecture, in the play of concealing and revealing via the pictorial motifs of the curtain and the mask, in the meaning of the open or closed window onto the world, and in images of visions and dreams. Based on some 150 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations and video works, the show traces the many different forms taken by hyperrealism, reality, fiction, dream, transformation and deception. Among the exhibits are major works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle as well as loans from national and international collections.
Marcel Duchamp remarked succinctly in 1964: “Art is a deception.” And in 1976 Sigmar Polke wondered about the limits of human perception: “Can you always believe your eyes?” Against the backdrop of fake news and artificial intelligence, the exhibition also takes a look at illusion in twenty-first-century society, urging us to sharpen our senses and reflect on what is innately human: our viewing habits, expectations, conventions and vulnerability to visual seduction.
Artists featured in the exhibition
Helene Appel, Hans Arp, Thomas Baldischwyler, Max Beckmann, Paris Bordone, Carl Gustav Carus, Marc Chagall, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Adriaen Coorte, Lovis Corinth, Edgar Degas, Robert Delaunay, Johann Friedrich Dieterich, Gerrit Dou, Wilhelm Schubert von Ehrenberg, Lars Eidinger, Elmgreen & Dragset, James Ensor, Max Ernst, M. C. Escher, Juan Fernández, Charles de la Fosse, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Xaver Fuhr, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Cornelis Gijsbrechts, Nan Goldin, Francisco de Goya, Andreas Greiner, Joachim Grommek, Duane Hanson, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Johann Georg Hinz, David Hockney, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Roni Horn, Gerard Houckgeest, Horst Janssen, Alexander Kanoldt, Howard Kanovitz, Anish Kapoor, Oskar Kokoschka, Jens Lausen, François Lemoyne, Lorenzo Lippi, Simon Luttichuys, Alfred Madsen, René Magritte, Tony Matelli, Stefan Marx, Adolph Menzel, Frans van Mieris d. Ä., Piet Mondrian, Ron Mueck, NEAL, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Joachim Ringelnatz, Jan van Rossum, Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, Godfried Schalcken, Markus Schinwald, Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Schrimpf, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Antonie van Steenwinckel, Theodoor van Thulden, Nikos Valsamakis, Victor Vasarely, Wolf Vostell, Friedrich Wasmann, John William Waterhouse, Jacob de Wit, Francisco de Zurbarán.
From Hatje Cantz:
Sandra Pisot and Johanna Hornauer, eds., Illusion: Traum – Identität – Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2024), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-3775758451, €54. With contributions by Juliane Au, Markus Bertsch, Clara Blomeyer, Laura Förster, Johanna Hornauer, David Klemm, Brigitte Kölle, Kerstin Küster, Sandra Pisot, Jan Steinke, Andreas Stolzenburg, Ifee Tack.
Exhibition | J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality
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J.M.W. Turner, Mer de Glace, in the Valley of Chamonix, 1803, watercolor, graphite, gum, scraping out and stopping out on moderately thick, slightly textured, cream wove paper mounted on thick, smooth wove paper (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, B1977.14.4650)
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Opening next month at the YCBA, which itself reopens after a two-year conservation project:
J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 29 March — 27 July 2025
Dordrechts Museum, Spring 2026
The year 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), possibly the most widely admired and influential British artist of all time.
Though Turner was trained within the English topographical tradition, his practice was deeply rooted in a wider European heritage of landscape painting. Turner pushed this inheritance to its limits in pursuit of his own expressive ends, astounding contemporaries with his bold and highly original compositions. His unique approach paved the way for a new form of landscape art, one that combined virtuoso brushwork with brilliant color, dazzling light effects, and an almost abstract sensibility. As a result, Turner came to be recognized as the most radical and innovative painter of his time and has continued to be so ever since.
This exhibition, the first show focused on Turner to be held at the Yale Center for British Art in more than thirty years, will showcase the museum’s rich holdings of the artist’s work. Unequaled in North America, this collection includes some of Turner’s most acclaimed oil paintings, notably his masterpiece Dort or Dordrecht: The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed (1818) and his celebrated later painting Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (1831–32). Alongside these major works, the exhibition will also feature outstanding watercolors and prints from the YCBA’s collection, including the artist’s only complete sketchbook outside of the British Isles.
Turner’s works are akin to painted poems, filled with incident, anecdote, and symbolism. Conveying both the beauty and cruelty of nature and human life, they shed fascinating light on the artist’s world and reveal an aesthetic—and moral—complexity that is at once discomforting and strangely modern.
The exhibition is generously supported by the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation.
From Yale UP:
Ian Warrell, with contributions by Gillian Forrester, Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-0300279719, $40.
This book, the inaugural installment in the Yale Center for British Art’s Collection Series, explores the museum’s astonishing Turner holdings—the largest outside the United Kingdom—in a manner that will engage the general reader and expert alike. Six sections of plates provide a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, place the works within their historical and cultural context, and include new discoveries regarding the identification of locations, landscapes, and dates. Gillian Forrester’s supplementary essay offers a novel account of Turner’s innovative printmaking practice, illuminating his fraught collaborations with other printmakers. Complementing an exhibition at the YCBA and a satellite exhibition at the Dordrechts Museum (The Netherlands), both planned for the 250th year of Turner’s birth, this publication celebrates the artist’s unparalleled vision as exemplified in the YCBA’s world-class collection of his work.
Ian Warrell is an independent curator specializing in British art of the nineteenth century. Gillian Forrester is an independent curator specializing in British art from the eighteenth century to the present and former senior curator of prints and drawings at the Yale Center for British Art.
Master Drawings, Winter 2024
In the latest issue of Master Drawings:
Master Drawings 62.4 (Winter 2024)
a r t i c l e s
• Perrin Stein, “The Crown, the City, and the Public: Saint-Aubin’s Images of Paris.”
• Kim de Beaumont, “A Curious Swan Song for Gabriel de Saint-Aubin: The Comte d’Estaing’s New World Naval Exploits.”
• Margaret Morgan Grasselli, “A Drawing by Hubert Robert and Jean Robert Ango: Correcting a Technical Description.”
• Sarah Catala, “Signed ‘Roberti’: Drawings by Hubert Robert and Jean Robert Ango.”
• Kee Il Choi Jr., “Learning to Draw: The Éducation visuelle of Alois Ko and Étienne Yang.”
r e v i e w s
• Aaron Wile, Review of the exhibition catalogue Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reason, by Jennifer Tonkovich.
• Eduoard Kopp, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Promenades on Paper: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, edited by Esther Bell, Sarah Grandin, Corinne Le Bitouzé, and Anne Leonard.
• Ashley E. Dunn, Review of the exhibition catalogue Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec, by Ann Dumas, Leïla Jarbouai, Christopher Lloyd, and Harriet Stratis.
o b i t u a r y
• Perrin Stein, Obituary for Alaster Laing.
Research Seminar | Artists and the East India Company, 1760–1830
Upcoming at the Mellon Centre:
Holly Shaffer and Laurel Peterson | Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1760–1830
Online and in-person, Paul Mellon Centre, London, 5 February 2025, 5pm
In January 2026, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) will open Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1760–1830. This exhibition explores the interactions between artists trained in India, China, and Britain amid the relentless commercial ambitions of the East India Company at key ports and centres of trade in Asia. Featuring over a hundred objects drawn from the YCBA collection in various media—including architectural drafts, opaque watercolours, hand-coloured aquatints and small- and large-scale portraits—the exhibition highlights works by artists who are no longer well known alongside those of well-established ones. Brought together for the first time, these works tell a story of artists compelled by new subjects, styles and materials in expanding markets, profoundly affecting art within and beyond Asia.
As the power of the British empire waned in the twentieth century, ‘Company painting’ became a prevalent umbrella term to describe works made for Company officials, specifically by Indian artists, and ‘Export art’ became a descriptor for works created by Chinese artists for a European market. Painters, Ports, and Profits challenges and critically rethinks these terms while also putting the arts into dialogue. It presents an expanded conception of arts made under the auspices of the Company by focusing on artists trained in different ways who worked for Company patrons as well as commercial markets in India, China, and Britain; the types of subjects in which they specialised; and the artistic materials with which they experimented. By examining the range of arts and relationships developed during the Company’s relentless pursuit of profits, the exhibition sheds light on aesthetic and colonial discourses that were formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and persist today. Co-curators Laurel Peterson and Holly Shaffer will preview the themes and objects explored in the exhibition and the related catalogue.
Book tickets here»
Holly Shaffer is Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities in the department of history of art and architecture at Brown University. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arts in Britain and South Asia, and their intersections. Her first book, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre with Yale University Press, 2022), was awarded the Edward C. Dimock Jr. Prize in the Indian Humanities and an Historians of British Art Book Award. In 2011, she curated Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770–1830 at the YCBA, and in 2013, Strange and Wondrous: Prints of India from the Robert J. Del Bontà Collection at the National Museum of Asian Art. She has published essays in Archives of Asian Art, The Art Bulletin, Art History, Journal 18, Modern Philology, and Third Text, and recently edited volume 51 of Ars Orientalis on the movement of graphic arts across Asia and Europe.
Laurel O. Peterson is the Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art. She specialises in British works on paper produced during the long eighteenth century. She served as the organising curator of John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal in 2019 and as co-curator of Architecture, Theater, and Fantasy: Bibiena Drawings from the Jules Fisher Collection in 2021, both at the Morgan Library and Museum. She received her PhD in the history of art from Yale and her research has been supported by the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Lewis Walpole Library. She has held positions at the British Museum and the Morgan Library.
Image: Unknown artist (Company style), Breadnut (Artocarpus camansi), ca. 1825, watercolor, gouache, and graphite (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B2022.5).
Exhibition | Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie
Opening in March at The Met:
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 25 March — 17 August 2025
Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy, Monstrous Beauty adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment.
Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works spanning from 16th-century Europe to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates chinoiserie through a conceptual framework that brings the past into active dialog with the present. In demand during the 1700s as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East, porcelain accumulated strong associations with female taste over its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a resonant metaphor for women, who became the protagonists of new narratives around cultural exchange, consumption, and desire.
The catalogue is distributed by Yale University Press:
Iris Moon, ed., Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (New York: The Metroplitan Museum of Art, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1588397928, $35. With additional contributions by Marlise Brown, Patty Chang, Anne Anlin Cheng, Elizabeth Cleland, Patricia Ferguson, Eleanor Hyun, Cindy Kang, Ronda Kasl, Joan Kee, Pengliang Lu, Lesley Ma, David Porter, Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Chi-ming Yang, and Yao-Fen You.
Exhibition | Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900
Incense Burner in the Form of a Goose, Ming dynasty (1368–1644), early 15th century, bronze
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
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From the press release (9 January) for the exhibition:
Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 28 February — 28 September 2025
Shanghai Museum, 3 November 2025 — 8 March 2026
Curated by Pengliang Lu
In ancient China, bronze vessels were emblems of ritual and power. A millennium later, in the period from 1100 to 1900, such vessels were rediscovered as embodiments of a long-lost golden age that was worthy of study and emulation. This ‘return to the past (fugu) was part of a widespread phenomenon across all the arts to reclaim the virtues of a classical tradition. An important aspect of this phenomenon was the revival of bronze casting as a major art form. Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on 28 February 2025, Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 aims to be the most comprehensive study of Chinese bronzes during this period. This exhibition, co-organized by The Met and the Shanghai Museum, where it will open following its display in New York, will present the new aesthetic represented by these creative adaptations of the past, while exploring their cultural and political significance throughout China’s long history.
“While bronze as an art form has long held a significant role throughout China’s history, this exhibition explores an often-overlooked time period when a resurgence of craftsmanship and artistic achievements revitalized the medium,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Bringing together major loans from institutions in China alongside works from The Met collection, this exhibition offers viewers an important opportunity to better understand the lasting aesthetic and cultural impact of bronze objects.”
The exhibition will be divided into five thematic and chronological sections that explicate over 200 works of art—an array of bronze vessels complemented by a selection of paintings, ceramics, jades, and other media. Some 100 pieces from The Met collection will be augmented by nearly 100 loans from major institutions in China, Japan, Korea, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States to present the most comprehensive narrative of the ongoing importance of bronzes as an art medium throughout China’s long history. Featured in the exhibition are around 60 loans from institutions in China, including major works such as a monumental 12th-century bell with imperial procession from the Liaoning Provincial Museum, documented ritual bronzes for Confucian temples from the Shanghai Museum, and luxury archaistic vessels made in the 18th-century imperial workshop from the Palace Museum, Beijing.
The exhibition begins with the section “Reconstructing Ancient Rites,” which introduces how emperors and scholar-officials commissioned ritual bronzes from the 12th to the 16th century as part of an effort to restore and align themselves with antique ceremonies and rites. The exhibition continues with “Experimenting with Styles,” illustrating how the form, decoration, and function of ancient bronzes were creatively reinterpreted from the 13th to the 15th century. The next section, “Establishing New Standards,” will explore further transformations in both the aesthetic and technical direction of bronze making from the 15th to the 17th century. The fourth section, “Living with Bronzes,” will feature a display in the Ming Furniture Room (Gallery 218) to demonstrate how bronzes were used in literati life from the 16th to the 19th century. The last section, “Harmonizing with Antiquity,” will examine how the deep scholarly appreciation of archaic bronzes during the 18th and 19th centuries led to a final flourishing of bronze production.
Pengliang Lu, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art at The Met, said: “This exhibition attempts a long-overdue reevaluation of later Chinese bronzes by seeking to establish a reliable chronology of this art form across the last millennium of Chinese history. The exhibition will also distinguish outstanding works from lesser examples based on their artistic and cultural merits.”
Later Chinese bronzes have long been stigmatized as poor imitations of ancient bronzes rather than being seen as fundamentally new creations with their own aesthetic and functional character. This exhibition redresses this misunderstanding by showcasing their artistic virtuosity, innovative creativity, and wide cultural impact. Through archaeologically recovered examples and cross-medium comparisons to a wide range of objects, the exhibition demonstrates the ongoing importance and influence of bronzes as well as how they inspired the form and function of works in other media. Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 is curated by Pengliang Lu, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The catalogue is distributed by Yale University Press:
Pengliang Lu, Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100–1900 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1588397904, $65.
Exhibition | Luisa Roldán: Royal Sculptor
Adam Busiakiewicz noted the exhibition at Art History News a few weeks ago:
Luisa Roldán: Escultora Real
Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, 29 November 2024 — 9 March 2025
Curated by Miguel Ángel Marcos Villán and Pablo Amador Marrero
Luisa Roldán, Virgen con el Niño (Sevilla, Convento de San José).
Esta exposición permitirá al visitante adentrarse en una vida apasionante. Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) aunó excelencia, versatilidad y habilidad para romper las barreras de género y llegar a lo más alto como artista: fue nombrada escultora del rey por Carlos II, cargo que mantuvo con Felipe V. Además, fue la primera artista española en ingresar en la Academia de San Lucas en Roma, un hito nunca antes alcanzado por escultores hispanos.
Pero Luisa Roldán: Escultora real también es el producto de una reivindicación y de una necesidad de hacer presente la trayectoria de una de las más destacadas artistas españolas. De hecho, nunca cayó en el olvido y autores como Antonio Palomino (quien la conocería personalmente), Antonio Ponz o Juan Agustín Ceán Bermúdez alabaron su obra. Sin embargo, el hecho de que fuera considerada por muchos como autora de menor calidad que su padre, identificando con él buena parte de su producción, ha pesado en algunos de los estudios que se realizaron sobre su figura. Como también que se le adjudicaran sobre todo obras de devoción, delicadas y de pequeño formato en barro cocido, «más propias de su condición y sexo», según autores como el propio Ceán Bermúdez, dejando en un lugar secundario su rica y extraordinaria producción de obras en madera y de mayor formato.
La dedicación de Luisa Roldán al oficio de la escultura sólo fue posible por su nacimiento en el seno de una familia dedicada a esta disciplina. Su padre, Pedro Roldan fue el gran artista del mercado sevillano y de buena parte del andaluz durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVII. La artista, cuyas dotes para el oficio se desvelaron en época muy temprana, heredó de él la inquietud por el mejor conocimiento del arte. Tras dejar el taller paterno se estableció en Sevilla junto a su marido, Luis Antonio de los Arcos. De allí se trasladaron a Cádiz, metrópoli comercial del momento, y posteriormente el matrimonio y sus hijos fijaron su residencia en Madrid. Allí la escultora pudo entrar al servicio de la Corte, alcanzando el mayor éxito y reconocimiento al que cualquier artista de la época podía aspirar.
Miguel Ángel Marcos Villán and Pablo Amador Marrero, Luisa Roldán: Escultora Real (Valladolid: Museo Nacional de Escultura, 2024), €40.
The Burlington Magazine, December 2024
The long 18th century in the December issue of The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 166 (December 2024)
e d i t o r i a l
• “A ‘Grand Life’: Belle da Costa Greene,” pp. 1203–04.
New York’s Morgan Library & Museum was founded as a public institution in 1924 and its centenary this year has been celebrated in style. The most substantial project to form part of the anniversary is the exhibition (25th October–4th May 2025) on Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950), the museum’s inaugural Director. This is an exercise in fascinating institutional storytelling, but at the same time also considerably more, as Greene was an extraordinary and accomplished figure.
l e t t e r
• Elizabeth Cropper, “Further Notes on boîtes à portrait’,” p. 1205.
A response to Samantha Happé’s article in the October issue of The Burlington: “Portable Diplomacy: Louis XIV’s ‘boîtes à portrait’,” pp. 1036–43.
r e v i e w s
• Richard Rand, Review of the exhibition Revoir Watteau: Un comédien sans réplique. Pierrot, dit le ‘Gilles’ (Louvre, 2024–25), pp. 1238–40.
• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Review of the exhibition Paris through the Eyes of Saint-Aubin (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024-25), pp. 1249–50.
• Denise Amy Baxter, Review of the exhibition The Legacy of Vesuvius: Bourbon Discoveries on the Bay of Naples (Meadows Musem, 2024), pp. 1251–53.
• Camilla Pietrabissa, Review of the exhibition catalogue L’arte di tradurre l’arte: John Baptist Jackson incisore nella Venezia del Settecento, ed. by Orsola Braides, Giovanni Maria Fara, and Alessia Giachery (Biblioteca Marciana, 2024), pp. 1270–72.
The British printmaker John Baptist Jackson was active in Venice from 1731 to 1745.
• Tom Stammers, Review of Oliver Wunsch, A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024), pp. 1285–86.
o b i t u a r y
• Simon Jervis, Obituary for Georg Himmelheber (1929–2024), pp. 1287–88.
A pioneering historian of furniture and a curator at Karlsruhe and Munich, Georg Himmelheber was also a founder member of the Furniture History Society; although his expertise encompassed many periods and styles, he was perhaps best known for his work on ‘Biedermeier’ furniture.
s u p p l e m e n t
• “Acquisitions by Public Collections across the UK (2013–23) Made Possible by the Acceptance in Lieu of Tax and Cultural Gifts Schemes,” pp. 1289ff.
Exhibtion | John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature
John Smart | Left: Portrait of a Woman, 1772, watercolor on ivory, framed: 5.1 × 3.8 cm, F65-41/13. Center: Portrait of Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, Nawab of Arcot and the Carnatic, 1788, watercolor on ivory, framed: 5.4 × 4.5 cm, F71-32. Right: Portrait of Mr. Holland, 1806, watercolor on ivory, framed: 11.1 × 7.8 cm, F65-41/47.
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From the press release for the exhibition:
John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 21 December 2024 — 4 January 2026
Curated by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan with Blythe Sobol and Maggie Keenan
A stunning array of jewel-like portrait miniatures by English artist John Smart (1741—1811), including signed and dated examples from nearly every year of his career, are being featured at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in the exhibition John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature. Included is a rare self-portrait of the artist, one of only nine known examples. It was made in 1793 while the artist was living in India. Timed to coincide with the final launch in spring 2025 of the digital Starr Catalogue of Portrait Miniatures—a groundbreaking resource dedicated to John Smart that reveals fresh discoveries across his career— this exhibition presents his work chronologically, showcasing new additions to the collection for the first time in nearly six decades. Presented to the Nelson-Atkins by Mr. and Mrs. John W. Starr in two major gifts in 1958 and 1965, and numerous additional gifts throughout the years, the Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures illustrates the history of European miniatures across more than 250 objects.
John Smart, Self-Portrait, 1793, pencil on laid paper, oval image 19.8 × 17.5 cm (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024.10).
“Visitors will be able to see Smart’s progression of style and technique and also explore themes of self-presentation,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, Director & CEO of the Nelson-Atkins. “The Starr family’s dedication to collecting the work of John Smart reflects their commitment to preserving the legacy of one of the most skilled portrait miniaturists of the eighteenth-century.”
Martha Jane Phillips and John W. ‘Twink’ Starr assembled one of the most comprehensive collections of works by English artist John Smart, including signed and dated examples from nearly every year of the artist’s career. Despite their persistent efforts, acquiring a self-portrait remained elusive. In 1954, they learned of the potential availability of a self-portrait in private hands, but they were too late; it was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Relentless in their pursuit, they appealed to successive Boston museum directors to sell or trade for the work, but they were unsuccessful. They ultimately acquired an oil painting of Smart by his near-contemporary Richard Brompton (English, 1734–1783), which they later donated to the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Starrs’ quest for a self-portrait, initiated on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, remained unrealized in their lifetime due to the rarity of such works.
“None of John Smart’s contemporaries painted as many self-portraits, which suggests Smart’s conscious understanding of what the vehicle of portraiture played in self-promotion,” said Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Louis L. and Adelaide C. Ward Senior Curator, European Arts, and co-curator of this exhibition, along with Starr researchers Blythe Sobol and Maggie Keenan. “Smart was incredibly ambitious and self-confident, and this is the largest known self-portrait that he made. We are unbelievably thrilled to have been able to make this strategic acquisition.”
This self-portrait was acquired by a private London collector, who kept it until fall 2023, when it was consigned to a London dealer. With support from Starr family descendants, the Nelson-Atkins purchased this remarkable work in the year marking John and Martha Jane Starr’s 95th wedding anniversary—a fitting tribute to their enduring legacy.
John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature facilitates a greater understanding of the artist’s stylistic evolution, working methods, and impact across two continents, while exploring the impact of British colonialism and the changing fashions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Print Quarterly, December 2024
The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 41.4 (December 2024)
a r t i c l e s
Nicholas de Courteille, presumably after Jean Pierre Bouch, Jean Charles Pierre Lenoir, 1779, soft-ground etching, 308 × 235 mm (Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris).
• Dorinda Evans, “Jean Pierre Bouch, A Rediscovered Polymath”, pp. 394–407. This article attempts to compile the real identity and life story of the French artist Jean Pierre Bouch (1765–1820), whose diverse career included being a balloonist and pyrotechnician as well as portrait artist.
n o t e s a n d r e v i e w s
• Christian Rümelin, Review of Jean-Gérald Castex, ed., Graver pour le Roi: Collections Historiques de la Chalcographie du Louvre (Louvre éditions and Lienart éditions, 2019), pp. 434–37.
• Evonne Levy, Review of Bettina Wassenhoven, Gravuren nach Skulpturen – Skulpturen nach Gravuren (Konigshausen & Neumann, 2021), pp. 437–38.
• Simon McKeown, Review of Rosa de Marco and Agnès Guiderdoni, eds., Eliciting Wonder: The Emblem on the Stage (Librairie Droz, 2022), pp. 438–41.
• Clarissa von Spee, Review of Anne Farrer and Kevin McLoughlin, eds., The Handbook of the Colour Print in China, 1600–1800 (Brill, 2022), pp. 441–45.
• Nicholas JS Knowles, “The First British Caricature in Aquatint?,” pp. 445–47.
• Bénédicte Maronnie, Reviews of Chiara Casarin and Pierluigi Panza, eds., Giambattista Piranesi: Architetto senza tempo / An Architect out of Time (Silvana Editoriale, 2020); Moritz Wullen and Georg Schelbert, eds., Das Piranesi-Prinzip (E.A. Seeman Verlag, 2020); and Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor, Piranesi Unbound (Princeton University Press, 2020), pp. 469–73.
b o o k s r e c e i v e d
• Jennifer Milam and Nicola Parsons, eds., Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press, 2021), p. 460.
• Ian Haywood, Queen Caroline and the Power of Caricature in Georgian England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), p. 460.
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