Enfilade

Titian Ramsay Peale, Sunset on Missouri, July 1819
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, NH121 TRP, MSS.B.P31.15d)

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Now on view at the American Philosophical Society Museum:

Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850
American Philosophical Society Museum, Philadelphia, 12 April — 29 December 2024

Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850 explores how William Bartram, Titian Ramsay Peale, and John James Audubon made sense of nature’s complexities through their writings, drawings, and watercolors. It highlights their approaches to capturing the natural world during a time of rapid intellectual, social, and political change.

Bartram, Peale, and Audubon relied on natural knowledge established by European, Euro-American, and Native American experts while balancing changing ideas of how reason and emotion impacted science. As both artists and naturalists, they freely expressed their ideas using science, art, and literature. Through a potent mix of scientific ideas, shifting worldviews, and professional freedom, their works embodied both experimentation and certainty. However, their interpretation of the natural world has also raised questions of national importance. Their world was not just one of intellectual excitement, but one of systematic injustice and a complex national history become visible as we peel back the layers. Sketching Splendor draws on the APS’s extensive holdings. Highlights of the exhibition include William Bartram’s map of the Alachua Savanna, Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Rattlesnake Skeleton, Titian Ramsay Peale’s watercolors from the Long Expedition, and one volume of John James Audubon’s original Birds of America.

Anna Majeski and Michelle Craig McDonald, Sketching Splendor: American Natural History, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-1606180402, $30.

Anna Majeski received a PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2022, where she completed a doctoral dissertation on a remarkable series of astrological fresco cycles completed in Padua between 1300 and 1440. Her research focuses on the intersections of art and science, image and knowledge in the early modern world, and has been supported by pre- and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. She joined the American Philosophical Society, Library & Museum, as Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Natural History Exhibition Research Fellow in October 2022.

Michelle Craig McDonald is the Librarian/Director of the Library and Museum at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 and the oldest learned society in North America. The APS has more than 14 million pages of manuscripts and 300,000 printed volumes, with particular strengths in early American history, the history of science, and Native American and Indigenous cultures. McDonald earned her PhD in history from the University of Michigan where she focused on business relationships and consumer behavior between North America and the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. She is the co-author of Public Drinking in the Early Modern World: Voices from the Tavern (Pickering & Chatto/Routledge Press, 2011), and her current monograph, Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in spring 2025.

The exhibition was on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania this time last year (September 2023 – January 2024); the catalogue is still available from Penn Press:

Joe Baker and Laura Igoe, eds., Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-1879636163, $30.

Through a focus on Lenape art, culture, and history and a critical examination of historical visualizations of Native and European American relationships, Never Broken explores the ways in which art can create, challenge, and rewrite history. This richly illustrated volume features contemporary work by Lenape artists in dialogue with historic Lenape ceramics, beadwork, and other cultural objects as well as re-creations of Benjamin West’s painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians by European American artists. Published in conjunction with the first exhibition in Pennsylvania of contemporary Lenape artists who can trace their families back to the time of William Penn, Never Broken includes essays by Laura Turner Igoe, Joel Whitney, and Joe Baker. Igoe argues that the plethora of prints, paintings, and decorative arts that incorporated imagery from West’s iconic painting over a century after the depicted event attempted to replace the fraught history of Native and Anglo-American conflict with a myth of peaceful coexistence and succession. Whitney’s essay provides an overview of the culture of the Lenape and their forced removal out of Pennsylvania and the northeast to Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Finally, Baker highlights how he and the other contemporary Lenape artists featured in the exhibition, including Ahchipaptunhe (Delaware Tribe of Indians and Cherokee), Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation and Cherokee), and Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe of Indians, Pawnee, and Kiowa), tell their own stories rooted in memory, ancestry, oral history. Their work underscores the continuing legacy and evolution of Lenape visual expression and cross-cultural exchange, reasserts the agency of their Lenape ancestors, and establishes that the Lenape’s ties to the area were—unlike Penn’s Treaty—never broken.

Joe Baker is an artist, educator, curator, and culture bearer who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past thirty years. He is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and co-founder and executive director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numerous other museums and collections in the United States and Canada, including the American Museum of Art and Design.

Laura Turner Igoe is the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. At the Michener, she curated Impressionism to Modernism: The Lenfest Collection of American Art (2019), Rising Tides: Contemporary Art and the Ecology of Water (2020), and she co-curated Through the Lens: Modern Photography in the Delaware Valley (2021) and Daring Design: The Impact of Three Women on Wharton Esherick’s Craft (2021–22).

c o n t e n t s

Foreword and Acknowledgements — Vail Garvin

Introduction — Joe Baker and Laura Turner Igoe
Penn’s Treaty with the Indians: Myth-Making across Media — Laura Turner Igoe
Violence and the Forced Removals of the Lenape — Joel Whitney
Nèk Elànkumàchi Maehëleyok: The Relatives Gathered — Joe Baker

Plates
Contributors

Opening at the Musée Carnavalet:

Paris, 1793–1794: A Revolutionary Year
Musée Carnavalet, Paris, 16 October 2024 — 16 February 2025
Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille, 27 June — 23 November 2025

Curated by Valérie Guillaume, Philippe Charnotet, and Anne Zazzo

For the first time, the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, renowned for its collections on the French Revolution, will single out one key year in the revolution—without a doubt the most complex: ‘Year II’ of the Republican calendar, covering the period from 22 September 1793 to 21 September 1794.

1789, the year of the Storming of the Bastille and The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is often considered to be the glorious year of the Revolution and even to embody the French Revolution in its entirety. It is the year during which Paris established itself as the capital of the Enlightenment and Revolutions. But compared to the clarity of ’89’, ’93’ appears much darker and thornier. As it was just coming to an end, this long political year spanning from the spring of 1793 to the summer of 1794 had already found a name: the ‘Terror’. Fabricated for political reasons, the word points to the authoritarian transition that the republican regime had undergone. And yet, the years 1793–94 are also the years that some, confident in their ability to reinvent history, called ‘Year II’: a year defined by its breaking with the past and its revitalising of revolutionary utopias. The exhibition is a collection of more than 250 works of all kinds: paintings, sculptures, objects of decorative arts, historical and memorial objects, wallpaper, posters, pieces of furniture… And all translate collective histories and incredible individual fates. These varied objects reveal a context imbued with collective fears and state violence, but also with extraordinary daily activities, feasts, and celebrations.

Paris, 1793–1794: Une année révolutionnaire (Paris Musées, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: ‎978-2759605903, €39.

Scientific commission
• Valérie Guillaume, director of the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris
• Philippe Charnotet, assistant curator and head of the numismatic collection at the Musée Carnavalet
• Anne Zazzo, chief curator, head of the historical and memorial objects collection at the Musée Carnavalet

Scientific committee
• Jean-Clément Martin, professor emeritus of History of the French Revolution at the University Paris I
– Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Alain Chevalier, director of the Musée de la Révolution Française – Domaine de Vizille
• Aurélien Larné, archivist at the Ministry of Justice – Department of the Archives, Documentation and Cultural Heritage
• Marisa Linton, professor of Modern History at the University of Kingston – London
• Guillaume Mazeau, senior lecturer of Modern History at the Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Allan Potofsky, professor of Modern History at the Université Paris-Cité
• Charles Eloi Vial, curator of the Libraries for the Department of Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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Note (added 7 July 2025)— The posting was updated to include the second venue, the Musée de la Révolution française, where the exhibition is titled 1793–1794: Un Tourbillon Révolutionnaire. 

Opening next month at the Louvre:

Figures of the Fool: From the Middle Ages to the Romantics
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 16 October 2024 — 3 February 2025

Curated by Élisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam

Fools are everywhere. But are the fools of today the same as the fools of yesteryear? This fall, the Musée du Louvre is dedicating an unprecedented exhibition to the myriad figures of the fool, which permeated the pictorial landscape of the 13th to the 16th centuries. Over the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the fool came to occupy every available artistic space, insinuating himself into illuminated manuscripts, printed books and engravings, tapestries, paintings, sculptures, and all manner of objects both precious and mundane. His fascinating, perplexing and subversive figure loomed large in the turmoil of an era not so different from our own.

The exhibition examines the omnipresence of fools in Western art and culture at the end of the Middle Ages, and attempts to parse the meaning of these figures, who would seem to play a key role in the advent of modernity. The fool may make us laugh, with his abundance of frivolous antics, but he also harbours a wealth of hidden facets of an erotic, scatological, tragic or violent nature. Capable of the best and of the worst, the fool entertains, warns or denounces; he turns societal values on their head and may even overthrow the established order.

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Yard with Madmen, 1794 (Dallas: Meadows Museum).

Within the newly renovated Hall Napoléon, this exhibition, which brings together over 300 works from 90 French, European and American institutions, brings us on a one-of-a-kind journey through Northern European art (English, Flemish, Germanic, and above all French), illuminating the profane aspects of the Middle Ages and revealing a fascinating era of surprising complexity. The exhibition explores the disappearance of the figure of the fool with the Enlightenment and the triumph of reason, and its resurgence at the end of the 18th century and all throughout the 19th. The fool then became a figure with which artists identified, wondering: ‘What if I were the fool?’

The exhibition is curated by Élisabeth Antoine-König, Senior Curator in the Department of Decorative Arts, and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, Senior Curator in the Department of Sculptures, Musée du Louvre.

With the support of the Cercle des Mécènes du Louvre, the Fondation Etrillard and the New York Medieval Society.

Élisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, eds., Figures du Fou: Du Moyen Âge aux Romantiques (Paris: Musée du Louvre éditions / Gallimard, 2024), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-2073073037, €45.

Watteau, Pierrot, also known as Gilles, detail, ca. 1718–19, oil on canvas, 1.84 × 1.56 meters
(Paris: Musée du Louvre).

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This exhibition opens in October at The Louvre in conjunction with the The Fool . . .

A New Look at Watteau: An Actor with No Lines — Pierrot, Known as Gilles
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 16 October 2024 — 3 February 2025

Curated by Guillaume Faroult

Watteau’s Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles, is one of the most famous masterpieces in the Louvre’s collection. This enigmatic work, which has long raised questions for art historians, is currently undergoing conservation treatment at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, after which time it will be the focus of a spotlight exhibition.

Louis Crépy after Antoine Watteau, Self-Portrait (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France).

Nothing is known about the painting before it was discovered by the artist and collector Dominique Vivant Denon (1747–1825), Director of the Louvre under Napoleon. It soon came to be regarded as a Watteau masterpiece and garnered praise from renowned writers and art historians. It has often been seen as reflecting a certain image of the 18th century—mischievous, cynical, or melancholy, depending on the author and the era. Its fame boosted the return to favour of 18th-century art in the age of Manet and Nadar.

The exhibition will present the findings of the conservation project, approaching this wholly original work—whose attribution to Watteau has sometimes been questioned—both as part of the artist’s oeuvre and in the cultural and artistic context of the time. Alongside many other paintings and drawings by Watteau, there will be works by his contemporaries: painters, draughtsmen, engravers (Claude Gillot, Antoine Joseph Pater, Nicolas Lancret, Jean Baptiste Oudry, Jean Honoré Fragonard, etc.), and writers (Pierre de Marivaux, Alain-René Lesage, JeanFrançois Regnard, Evaristo Gherardi), with special emphasis on the rich theatrical repertoire of the time.

As soon as the painting entered the Louvre in 1869, via the bequest of Louis La Caze (1798–1869), it became a favourite with generations of viewers. Its powerful appeal is partly due to its outstanding quality, but also to its originality for the period and to the mystery surrounding its production.

The exhibition will also explore the painting’s rich and varied critical reception and its far-reaching artistic legacy. This powerful, enigmatic image has greatly inspired French writers, including Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, George Sand, the Goncourt brothers, and Jacques Prévert. The painting has also influenced photographers, filmmakers, and musicians (Nadar, Marcel Carné, Arnold Schoenberg), as well as visual artists (Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Juan Gris, James Ensor, Georges Rouault, and Jean-Michel Alberola), driving them to new creative heights.

The show will explore the fascinating conversations between these great creative minds and Watteau’s enigmatic painting, even as it resonates harmoniously with the Figures of the Fool exhibition scheduled for the same dates in the Hall Napoléon.

Guillaume Faroult, Revoir Watteau: Un comédien sans réplique. Pierrot, dit le Gilles (Musée du Louvre Éditions and Liénart Éditions, 2024), 240 pages, €40.

Closing soon at the Musée Condé:

André Charles Boulle
Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, 8 June — 6 October 2024

Curated by Mathieu Deldicque, with Sébastien Evain and William Iselin

Writing Table of the Prince of Condé, long-term lease from the Château de Versailles to the Condé Museum (RMN-Grand Palais / A. Didierjean)

The collection of the Condé Museum in Chantilly features two desks by one of the greatest French cabinetmakers of all time, André Charles Boulle. From June to October 2024, the Grands Appartements of the Princes of Condé at the Château de Chantilly will host the first-ever exhibition in France to explore Boulle’s life and work.

The show brings together this ingenious designer’s most significant pieces, commissioned by the most illustrious patrons in France—the King, the Grand Dauphin, the Prince of Condé, and the Duchess of Burgundy—in a celebration of French furniture-making excellence, its techniques, and unrivalled grace. The life and long career of André Charles Boulle (1642–1732) need little introduction. Cabinetmaker, artist, and artisan, Boulle worked for the Bâtiments du roi, the department of the King’s Household responsible for building works, for more than half a century, and he and his workshop produced pieces for the Royal Family and the French nobility. He achieved high technical perfection, particularly in metal-and-tortoiseshell marquetry, which he raised to new heights. An ingenious bronzesmith, Boulle established the use of gilt-bronze in furniture and gave his creations a unique look. He was also a curious collector and a talented draughtsman who took pains to bring his production to a broader audience, notably through engravings. Synonymous with the sumptuousness of French art under Louis XIV, he achieved recognition in his lifetime, and his name has been celebrated ever since.

André Charles Boulle was a leading figure in the development of French furniture in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Besides the commode, one of his most influential designs at the end of Louis XIV’s reign was the flat-topped writing table (bureau plat). Besides producing desks on six legs and desks with several drawers on each side supported by eight legs, Boulle invented a new type of desk, with a single row of three drawers in the frieze, resting on four legs. This flat writing table made his reputation, and brass-and-tortoiseshell marquetry, rich gilt-bronze mounts, and slender, curved shapes became the hallmark of elegance in furniture and the ultimate symbol of power. They were produced in increasingly large numbers from the second decade of the eighteenth century until the early years of the Régence. The innovations made by Boulle defined the shape of the French writing table for more than half a century.

The exhibition charts developments in desk design, shape, and decoration through a large and varied display of desks by Boulle, each with a long-established provenance. Furniture with ‘part’ and ‘counterpart’ marquetry is presented side by side in a way that reveals their beauty and helps visitors learn more about them. Key pieces produced by the same workshop will complete this fascinating survey and put this unparalleled production into its broader context. Bookcases, consoles, stands, torchères, caskets, chandeliers, medal cabinets, and bookbindings—all of illustrious provenance—remind us of this ingenious artist’s versatile talent and creativity.

The exhibition is curated by Mathieu Deldicque, Lead Heritage Conservator, Director of the Conde museum, in collaboration with Sébastien Evain, conservator and independent expert, a specialist in French 18th-century furniture and objets d’art, and William Iselin, an expert in French 18th-century furniture and objets d’art. In partnership with the Château de Versailles, the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Mathieu Deldicque, ed., André Charles Boulle (Saint-Rémy-en-l’Eau: Éditions d’art Monelle Hayot, 2024), 304 pages, ISBN: 979-1096561452, €39.

From the press release for the exhibition:

Peintre de courre: Jean-Baptiste Oudry et les Chasses royales de Louis XV
Château de Fontainebleau, 12 October 2024 — 27 January 2025

Cette exposition valorisera des trésors méconnus du château : les cartons préparatoires au tissage de la tenture des Chasses de Louis XV, dont quatre cartons tout récemment restaurés.

À l’automne 2024, le château de Fontainebleau mettra en lumière le travail du peintre Jean-Baptiste Oudry, célèbre pour ses représentations des chasses du roi Louis XV et ses portraits animaliers. Peintures, ouvrages, porcelaines, dessins, habits et tapisseries plongeront les visiteurs dans l’univers de la chasse, activité favorite du roi, qu’il souhaita fixer pour l’éternité en passant la commande à Oudry à partir de 1733 d’un ensemble de tapisseries. Cette exposition présentera pour la première fois, côte à côte, les dessins préparatoires, les cartons d’Oudry (œuvres préparatoires à l’échelle réelle qui servent ensuite au lissier à tisser les tapisseries), conservés à Fontainebleau et dont quatre ont été récemment restaurés et les tapisseries qui en sont issues, tissées par la manufacture royale des Gobelins.

Par ailleurs, l’exposition illustrera le goût pour les scènes de chasse dans la peinture et le décor intérieur des demeures royales et aristocratiques du XVIIIe siècle , ainsi que l’« Oudrymania », c’est-à-dire la diffusion des créations de l’artiste dans divers domaines des arts décoratifs, tels que les illustrations de beaux livres, la porcelaine et l’orfèvrerie. L’exposition invite les visiteurs à (re)découvrir la résidence de chasse favorite des rois de France que fut le château de Fontainebleau au fil des siècles.

Un colloque Jean-Baptiste Oudry et la peinture animalière sera co-organisé avec la Fondation François Sommer et se tiendra à Paris et à Fontainebleau mi-décembre 2024.

Vincent Cochet et Oriane Beaufils, eds., Peintre de courre: Jean-Baptiste Oudry et les Chasses royales de Louis XV (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2024), 229 pages, ISBN: 978-2711880423, €49.

The full press release is available here»

Now on view at the Château de Chantilly:

Oudrymania: Fables, Hunts, Fights
Musée Condé, Château de Chantilly, 8 June — 6 October 2024

Curated by Baptiste Roelly with Oriane Beaufils

Depicted in hunting scenes, portraiture, and combat, animals feature among the most striking images produced by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755). A gifted artist with an unrivalled mastery of his technique, he brings us face-to-face with the animal repertoire as it existed in the 18th century, including in a series of three hunting scenes painted for the Château de Chantilly, works that were scattered after the French Revolution but which have now been brought back together.

Animal scenes were extremely popular with the leading collectors of the 18th century, including the princes of Condé, who commissioned them from the artist. A set of exquisite drawings by Oudry loaned from a private collection feature in the exhibition alongside works from Chantilly’s collections, allowing visitors to see pieces never before displayed in public. These include a large number of illustrations for La Fontaine’s fables, showing how the fabulist and the artist use the animal kingdom to help us laugh at and reflect on human nature. These illustrations were so effective they were copied by the arts and crafts industry and included in their decorative production, examples of which can also be admired in the exhibition. Through paintings, drawings, objets d’art, and rare books, this show shines a light into every corner of the Oudrymania that has gripped art lovers for centuries.

The exhibition is organized by Baptiste Roelly, curator at the Condé museum, in collaboration with Oriane Beaufils, curator and director of collections at the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild.

Baptiste Roelly and Oriane Beaufils, eds, Oudrymania: Fables, Chasses, Combats (Éditions Faton, 2024), 128 pages, ISBN: ‎978-2878443585, €22. With contributions by Oriane Beaufils, Claire Betelu, Lucile Brunel-Duverger, Laurence de Viguerie, Juliette Debrie, Mathieu Deldicque, Nicole Garnier-Pelle, François Gilles, Maxime Georges Métraux, Roberta J.M. Olson, and Baptiste Roelly,

The press release (in French) is available here»