Exhibition | Gainsborough’s Landscapes
From the Holburne Museum in Bath . . .
Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations
Holburne Museum, Bath, 24 September 2011 — 22 January 2012
Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 11 February — 10 June 2012
Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with a View of a Distant
Village, ca. 1750 (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland)
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Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations is the first exhibition in fifty years devoted solely to his landscape paintings and drawings, bringing together remarkable works from public and private collections, many of them little known and some not previously exhibited. For Gainsborough, if portraiture was his business, landscape painting was his pleasure, and his landscape paintings and drawings reveal his mind at work, the extraordinary breadth of his invention and the dazzling quality of his technique.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) sold relatively few of his landscape paintings, and none of his drawings, but he regarded them as his most important work. His paintings do not represent real views, but are creations ‘of his own Brain’, as he put it. A limited number of rural subjects exercised his imagination from one decade to the next, changing as he developed an increasingly energetic ‘hand’, or manner of painting, and becoming ever grander in conception.
The exhibition includes some of his most famous and popular works including The Watering Place from the National Gallery (the most famous of all his landscape compositions in his life-time) and less well-known works such as the little-seen but ravishing Haymaking from Woburn. The paintings have been selected to represent six landscape themes; the remarkable drawings and prints show Gainsborough returning to these themes and demonstrate the longevity of each theme and the degree of experimentation that was involved in the search for the perfect composition.
The evolution of Gainsborough’s style is traced from early naturalistic landscapes in the Dutch manner, enlivened with small figures (pictured above), to grand scenery that is dramatically lit and obviously imaginary, such as the Romantic Landscape from the Royal Academy of Arts. In the Girl with Pigs, from the Castle Howard Collection, a rustic figure takes centre stage: fancy figures of this kind are, in Gainsborough’s art, closely integrated with his landscape practice.
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Accompanying publication: Susan Sloman, Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011), ISBN: 9780856676970, £14.99
Exhibition | The Art of German Stoneware
From the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
The Art of German Stoneware
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 5 May — 5 August 2012
Curated by Jack Hinton
Inkstand and Candleholder with Musicians, Animals, and a Griffin, ca. 1740. German Salt-glazed stoneware with painted decoration, roughly 20 x 10 x 7 in. (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
From the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries, stoneware ceramics from Germanspeaking centers in modern-day Germany and the Low Countries were valued and widely traded throughout northern Europe. In the 1600s—the heyday of stoneware production—they found an enthusiastic market in colonial North America. The medium’s success is due to its stonelike durability and imperviousness to liquid, making it perfect for cooking, storage, and drinking vessels. The social aspect of stoneware ceramics explains the crisp relief decoration on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pieces, which feature moralizing images or political figures and their coats of arms; later pieces often eschew such ornament for floral or geometric patterns inspired by Far Eastern porcelains imported to Europe. Inkstand and Candleholder with Musicians, Animals, and a Griffindemonstrates the inventiveness and artistry of stoneware potters, even when faced with a dwindling market for their works in the homes of the well-to-do. This exhibition examines German stoneware from its origins to later revivals in the nineteenth-century and celebrates its long-standing relationship with the city of Philadelphia. It features selections from the Museum, seventeenth-century Dutch pictures demonstrating the high status of stoneware, and a generous promised gift of around forty pieces of German
stoneware from Dr. Charles W. Nichols. The exhibition is accompanied by an
illustrated publication by Jack Hinton, Assistant Curator of European Decorative
Arts and Sculpture.
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From Yale UP:
Jack Hinton, The Art of German Stoneware, 1300-1900 From the Charles W. Nichols Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 60 pages, ISBN: 9780300179781, $20.
Beautiful and eminently useful, stonewares produced in the German-speaking lands from the Middle Ages onward were highly valued for their durability and suitability for a range of domestic and social uses. Widely traded throughout Europe, they were also among the first European ceramics to reach colonial North America. During the Renaissance the addition of brilliant salt glazes—s well as relief imagery that communicated with the user—raised the status of these wares. Later examples introduced abstract floral or geometric decorations and more unusual, original forms, which retained broad cultural significance.
About ninety fine stoneware pieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and a promised private collection testify here to the success, artful decoration, and fascinating variety of this medium. Jack Hinton describes the developments in stoneware through these notable examples, and beautiful color images bring
their details vividly to life.
Exhibition | Animal Beauty in Paris
From the Grand Palais:
Beauté Animale / Animal Beauty
Grand Palais, Galeries Nationales, Paris, 21 March — 16 June 2012
Curated by Emmanuelle Héran
Ever since the Renaissance, artists and naturalists have observed animals closely and represented them as accurately as they could. Nevertheless, naturalism ends where the norm and morality begin: various ethical and aesthetic criteria were established which influenced the artists’ point of view. There is extraordinary variety in the ways the same animal is represented. They reveal our fascination and curiosity for a world whose diversity is far from fully explored.
Through a set of major works, the exhibition looks at the relationships that artists, often great painters and sculptors, have developed with animals. It shows that there is still a close link between art and science, between our desire to know about animals and our fascination for their beauty. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, famous or unfamiliar… the exhibition brings together about 130 masterpieces of Western art from the Renaissance to the present day, and takes a radical new approach by choosing works in which the animal is shown on its own and for itself, without any human presence. This marvellous menagerie, laid out in a clear design accessible to all audiences, will mingle wild and domestic beasts, the strange and the familiar.
I. Looking at Animals
Just like human beauty, animal beauty must meet specific criteria, which vary with different periods and milieus. A revolution occurred at the Renaissance: outstanding artists such as Dürer, and then the pioneers of zoology studied animals closely and described them in minute detail. This was also when the discovery of the New World revealed new animals, such as parrots and turkeys. Repertoires were soon built up. As soon as they could study animals, painters kept a record of them in their albums, which they dipped into for motifs which had already inspired other works. They also worked on anatomical studies and tried to analyse motion, such as the movements of a galloping horse. But man was not content to represent animal beauty; he modified it, transforming the animals themselves, with all the means that science put at his disposal. New breeds of cows, dogs and cats appear in works of art. And conversely, paintings show us breeds that have gone out of fashion.
II. Aesthetic and Moral Prejudices (more…)
Reviewed | ‘Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn’
Thomas Bender, Laurent Dubois, and Richard Rabinowitz, eds. Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (London: D. Giles Limited in association with the New-York Historical Society, 2011), 287 pages, ISBN: 9780916141240 (softcover), $45 / ISBN: 9781904832942 (hardcover), $65.
Reviewed for Enfilade by Jason Nguyen (Harvard University)
In the lavishly illustrated catalogue for Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (on view at the New-York Historical Society through April 15, 2012), editors Thomas Bender, Laurent Dubois, and Richard Rabinowitz present a collection of eleven essays on the connections between the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. Whereas traditional narratives have tended to treat the three events separately, the fourteen contributors to Revolution focus instead on their political, economic, and social junctures. “The point here is not to abandon or dilute national history,” Thomas Bender suggests in the catalogue’s first essay, “but rather to enrich it by revealing the ways in which historical causation operates across space as well as through time” (40).
The chain of political events linking the three revolutions is offered straightaway by Bender (and subsequently evaluated by his fellow contributors). The financial and military support that France provided to the United States in their War for Independence sent the European kingdom into a crippling debt that led to the calling of the Estates General in May of 1789. This event resulted in the establishment of the National Assembly and, consequently, the onset of the French Revolution. The rhetoric of the Revolution, and in particular the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (1789), helped to ignite abolitionist discourses and revolutionary fervor in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). And the political and military successes by the Haitians in the early years of the nineteenth century resulted in the selling of Louisiana by Napoleon to the United States in 1803, thus providing the young American nation with its first taste of continental expansion.
While each essay addresses at least one component of this transcontinental circuit of events, the scope of the catalogue is hardly limited to the political sphere. Cathy Matson, for example, reveals how the revolutions in France and Haiti nearly destabilized the commercial life among Philadelphia grain merchants in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. And in one of the catalogue’s more emotional contributions, Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard chronicle through a chain of legal documents and personal letters the tumultuous social and family life of Rosalie, an African-born inhabitant of Saint-Domingue who found herself the victim of sexual and racial slavery three times during the course of her life.
Rosalie’s story encapsulates two themes that course through the various essays. First is the focus on the peripheral within the predominant historical narrative, or as Richard Rabinowitz terms it, “history’s silences.” This can be noted by the prominence of the Haitian Revolution in the catalogue, with seven of the eleven contributions centering squarely on the global and local dealings of the Caribbean colony between 1791 and 1804. Of the remaining four essays, two focus on the economic and social situation in America, one addresses the broader global condition linking the revolutionary conflicts in the United States, France, and Haiti, and one presents the aims and intentions of the exhibition. The curatorial decision to cast increased light on the Haitian Revolution serves two purposes. The first concerns the marked absence within the general public consciousness of the social and political insurrections that transformed the former French colony. And the second speaks to its privileged status as the culmination (and, indeed, the ultimate test) of eighteenth-century revolutionary fervor. “As the most thoroughgoing of these upheavals,” Rabinowitz writes in the catalogue’s concluding essay, “at least in its destruction of slavery, imperial dependency, and constitutionally sanctioned inequalities — the Haitian revolution could be viewed as the climax of the entire age of Atlantic revolutions” (255).
The revolutionary quest for “freedom” rarely followed a straight path, however: it is this concern that serves as the second theme of the catalogue. Robin Blackburn, for example, carefully unpacks the means by which the slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue during the early 1790s mobilized the Enlightenment trope of “utility” in order to achieve social and economic liberty. The first clause of the Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, she notes, clearly stated that, “Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility” (118). The Haitian rhetoric of freedom, therefore, served an instrumental purpose in broadening the social, cultural, and political conceits that made the revolutionary ideology in France possible in the first place. Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott press the significance of figurative speech further, examining how the Haitian revolutionaries deployed a host of linguistic symbols, often in conflict with one another. Sometimes Royalist and sometimes Republican, their words and texts eventually turned toward the possibility of national sovereignty, a declaration ultimately claimed in 1804. Yet, as the early decades of Haiti’s independence reveal, this situation too presented profound struggles, including local forms of political tyranny and crippling trade embargoes by both Napoleon’s French Empire and Jefferson’s United States.
The attention paid to verbal and textual rhetoric, however, marks the limit of the authors’ interest in representation, as the images within the catalogue serve mostly an illustrating function. Yet, as art historical contributions by Tim Barringer, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and Jennifer L. Roberts, among others, have made clear, colonial and revolutionary images are profoundly complex, embodying in their very form the geo-political and ideological rupturing that marked the events of this period. “To paint is, at the most fundamental level, to incorporate,” noted Grigbsy in her groundbreaking 2002 analysis of Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (1797), which serves as the cover image for the Revolution catalogue. “Formal description reenacts that deceptively transparent act of inclusion … constituting Belley as picturing’s object (paint) and aggrandizing him as social subject (portraiture’s sitter) were deeply bound up with one another …”[1] Dubois and Scott acknowledge (while not specificing by name) contributions by Grigsby and others in their essay, “An African Revolution in the Atlantic World.” For them, however, Girodet’s painting – on loan for the exhibition from the Musée National du Château de Versailles – serves not as a problematic in and of itself. Instead, it stands as an optimistic visual prolepsis, demarcating through imagery a future that was never to be realized fully.
Such a critique should hardly detract from the merits of the catalogue, which lucidly present for a general audience the social, political, and economic connections linking the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Timely and provocative, it suggests that the each historical event carries with it profound global ramifications. And by tracing these connections (through texts, objects, and images), we might begin to understand better the universal aspirations for human equality and freedom.
[1] Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Painting Empire in Post Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 13.
Exhibition | Treasures of Kenwood House
Press release (9 December 2011) from the MFAH:
Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 3 June — 3 September 2012
Milwaukee Art Museum, 4 October 2012 — 6 January 2013
Seattle Art Museum, 14 February — 19 May 2013
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, 6 June — 8 September 2013
Curated by Susan Jenkins
Thomas Gainsborough, "Portrait of Mary, Countess Howe," ca. 1764 (London: Kenwood House, English Heritage, Iveagh Bequest)
On June 3, 2012, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will debut the exhibition Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London, whose four-venue national tour was announced today by the American Federation of Arts in New York. An exhibition of forty-eight masterpieces, this will be the first tour of this important group of works from the Iveagh Bequest and will provide a unique opportunity to see these superb paintings outside the United Kingdom. Most of these paintings have never traveled to the States before, and many of them have rarely been seen outside Kenwood.
Donated to the nation by Edward Cecil Guinness (1847–1927), 1st Earl of Iveagh and heir to the world’s most successful brewery, the Iveagh Bequest resides at Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa in London that was remodeled by Robert Adam in the eighteenth century. The collection was shaped by the tastes of the Belle Epoque—Europe’s equivalent to America’s Gilded Age—when the earl shared the cultural stage and art market with other industry titans such as the Rothschilds, J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick. Acquired mainly from 1887 to 1891, the earl’s purchases reveal a penchant for the portraiture, landscape and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works typically found in English aristocratic collections. While the majority of the paintings in the exhibition are from the Iveagh Bequest, several are drawn from the works acquired specifically for display at Kenwood. Pauline Willis, AFA’s Director, remarked, “We are extremely proud to be able to give greater exposure to this magnificent selection of paintings while Kenwood undergoes a major refurbishment.” Simon Thurley, Chief Executive for English Heritage, commented, “The collection of works of art on display at Kenwood is one of the most important in England, and we are thrilled that works from this collection will travel across the Atlantic for the first time and find new audiences in the United States.”
The collection is particularly strong in works by such Golden Age eighteenth-century English portraitists as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney, whose depictions of society beauties of the Georgian era, also known as England’s “Age of Aristocracy,” held a great appeal for Lord Iveagh. Among the several fine Gainsboroughs in the exhibition is the sumptuous full-length portrait Mary, Countess Howe (c. 1764), an image of both aristocratic elegance and of a landowner among her properties. Such full-length portraits of ladies in nature were very popular during this period, owing to a great admiration for the aristocratic portraits of Van Dyck. Along with such aristocratic women, the collection’s “virtual harem” of English portraits features celebrity demimondes, among them Emma Hart—later Lady Hamilton—who served as Romney’s muse, and Kitty Fisher—one of the most celebrated courtesans in London society. (more…)
New Gallery at Greenwich | Traders: The East India Company and Asia
From the National Maritime Museum:
Traders: the East India Company and Asia
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, gallery opened in September 2011
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Established by a group of London merchants, the East India Company was given its first royal charter by Elizabeth I. By the time it was abolished 250 years later, Queen Victoria was on the throne. The East India Company took on pirates, princes and rival traders in its pursuit of profit – changing the world in the process. This new gallery at the National Maritime Museum explores the history and continuing relevance of Britain’s trade with Asia, looking at this compelling story through the lens of the East India Company. Traders: the East India Company and Asia examines the commodities that the company traded, the people that shaped its tumultuous career and the conflicts and rebellions that were its ultimate undoing.
The exotic spices the company imported brought exciting flavours to Britain. The calicos, muslins and silks carried on its ships shaped fashions, clothing rich and poor alike. But its greatest success was tea, which it helped transform from an expensive luxury to a national pastime. However, the British cup of tea had a darker side: opium. This illegal drug trade was interwoven with the company’s business, resulting in war with China on two separate occasions.
ISBN: 9781857596755, $60
The company can be seen as a forerunner of the modern multinational. But its power and global reach were unique. At its height, the company minted its own currency and ruled over a sixth of humanity. It had its own navy, the Bombay Marine, and had 250,000 soldiers at its command. Regarded by the British establishment as too big to fail, the Company was repeatedly bailed out and ended its days shrouded in controversy.
Traders: the East India Company and Asia showcases the museum’s world-famous collection of objects relating to Asia and the Indian Ocean, including: Japanese, Chinese and Burmese swords; beautifully crafted ship models and navigational instruments; Nelson’s Japan-pattern breakfast service; Victoria Crosses awarded during the Indian Mutiny; and journals kept by Company sailors.
The gallery also contains portraits of key figures from throughout the East India Company’s history including: Sir James Lancaster, commander of the first Company voyage; Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia, master shipbuilder at Bombay Dockyard; the ship-wrecked and imprisoned Robert Knox, said to be the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; the appropriately named Money brothers, who made their fortunes in Asia; and Commodore Sir William James, a poor Welsh miller’s son who ran away to sea, and rose to become commodore of the Bombay Marine and Chairman of the Company.
To celebrate the opening of Traders the National Maritime Museum staged a festival of events throughout autumn and winter 2011. Traders Unpacked, sponsored by Sharwood’s, explored the complex legacy of the EIC and its contemporary significance though events including a textile-themed walking tour of London’s East End; an alternative East India Company pub quiz; an evening of Japanese psychedelia; Singaporean deep house and sea shanties; the Curry and a Pint nights, which explored the origins of the great British curry; a series of international tea parties; and a night of nautical games for grown-ups.
The gallery is accompanied by an illustrated history of the Company, which draws extensively on the collections of the Museum. Monsoon Traders: the Maritime World of the East India Company is published by Scala and written by Robert J. Blyth and John McAleer, curators of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum and H. V. Bowen, Professor of Modern History, Swansea University.
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Writing for The New York Times (4 November 2011), Roderick Conway Morris provides a review of the exhibition.
Exhibition | Goya: Lights and Shadows
From ArtDaily.com (16 March 2012):
Goya: Lights and Shadows / Luces y Sombras
The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 22 October 2011 — 29 January 2012
CaixaForum Barcelona, 15 March — 24 June 2012
Curated by Manuela B. Mena and José Manuel Matilla
Francisco de Goya, The Clothed Maja, ca. 1800
(Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado)
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Nearly two hundred years after his death, Francisco de Goya continues to exercise a universal attraction that very few others in the history of art have equalled. Not only is Goya enveloped in the greatness of his art and his genius, he is also shrouded in mystery and popular legend in a way that makes him doubly attractive and accessible. Now, almost thirty-five years after the last major exhibition devoted to the Spanish master in Barcelona, Goya. Lights and Shadows brings a large selection of great works the collection of El Prado National Museum, the most important in the world. The show features nearly one hundred pieces – oils, drawings, prints and letters – in a chronological journey through the main periods in the career of this Aragón-born artist. From the early years, in which Goya’s realism contrasted with the over-refined Rococo style favoured by his contemporaries, to the intimate works he produced towards the end of his life in Bordeaux, not forgetting the drama of the Peninsular War, which marked a turning-point in his artistic development. The exhibition is the fruit of a cooperation agreement signed between ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Prado National Museum 2011 under which the Catalan organisation became a Benefactor of the museum. Under the terms of the agreement, three more joint exhibitions will be organised in the coming years. Goya. Lights and Shadows is the first show planned as part of the joint exhibition programme established by ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Prado National Museum, the result of an agreement made between the two institutions in July 2011, under which ”la Caixa” becomes a Benefactor of the Spanish art gallery. . .
The full press release (which includes programming and lectures) is available here»
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Exhibition | Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings
Press release from Sue Bond:
Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings from The Courtauld Gallery
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 June — 9 September 2012
The Frick Collection, New York, 2 October 2012 — 27 January 2013
Curated by Stephanie Buck and Colin B. Bailey
The Courtauld Gallery holds one of the most important collections of drawings in Britain. Organised in collaboration with the Frick Collection in New York, this exhibition presents a magnificent selection of some sixty of its finest works. It offers a rare opportunity to consider the art of drawing in the hands of its greatest masters, including Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Cézanne and Matisse. The Courtauld last displayed a comparable selection of its masterpieces more than twenty years ago and this exhibition will bring the collection to new audiences nationally and internationally.
The exhibition opens with a group of works dating from the 15th century, from both Northern and Southern Europe. An exquisite and extremely rare early Netherlandish drawing of a seated female saint from around 1475-85 is rooted in late medieval workshop traditions. It was also at this time that drawing assumed a new central role in nourishing individual creativity, exemplified by two rapid pen and ink sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. These remarkably free and exploratory sketches show the artist experimenting with the dynamic twisting pose of a female figure for a painting of Mary Magdalene. For Renaissance artists such as Leonardo, drawing or disegno was the fundamental basis of all the arts: the expression not just of manual dexterity but of the artist’s mind and intellect.
These ideas about the nature of drawing achieved their full expression in the flowering of draughtsmanship in the 16th century. At the heart of this section of the exhibition is Michelangelo’s magisterial The Dream. Created in 1533, this highly complex allegory was made by Michelangelo as a gift for a close friend and it was one of the earliest drawings to be produced as an independent work of art. More typically, drawings were made in preparation for other works, including paintings, sculptures and prints. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s engaging scene of drunken peasants cavorting at a festival in the Flemish village of Hoboken was drawn in 1559 in preparation for a print. Whereas Michelangelo sought ideal divinely inspired beauty in the human figure, Bruegel here revels in the disorder of everyday life.
Charles Joseph Natoire, "Life Class at the Académie Royale," 1746, watercolour, chalk (black) on paper, 454 x 323 mm, © The Courtauld Gallery, London
Despite the important preparatory function of drawing, many of the most appealing works in the exhibition were unplanned and resulted from artists reaching for their sketchbooks to capture a scene for their own pleasure. Parmigianino’s Seated woman asleep is a wonderful example of such an informal study surviving from the early 16th century. Drawn approximately 100 years later in around 1625, Guercino’s Child seen from behind retains the remarkable freshness and immediacy of momentary observation. Guercino was a compulsive and brilliantly gifted draughtsman. Here the red chalk lends itself perfectly to the play of light on the soft flesh of the child sheltering in its mother’s lap. No less appealing in its informality is Rembrandt’s spontaneous and affectionate sketch of his wife, Saskia, sitting in bed cradling one of her children. The exhibition offers a striking contrast between this modest domestic image and Peter Paul Rubens’s contemporaneous depiction of his own wife, the beautiful young Helena Fourment. Celebrated as one of the great drawings of the 17th century, this unusually large work shows the richly dressed Helena – who was then about 17 – moving aside her veil to look directly at the viewer. Created with a dazzling combination of red, black and white chalks, this drawing was made as an independent work of art and was not intended for sale or public display. In its imposing presence, mesmerising skill and subtle characterisation, it is the equal of any painted portrait.
The central role of drawing in artistic training is underlined in a remarkable sheet by Charles Joseph Natoire from 1746. It shows the artist, seated in the left foreground, instructing students during a life class at the prestigious Académie royale in Paris. Drawing after the life model and antique sculpture was considered essential in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the great champions of this academic tradition was Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The beautiful elongated forms of the reclining nude in his Study for the ‘Grand Odalisque’, 1813-14, represents the highest refinement of a precise yet expressive linear drawing style rooted in the academy. Outside the academy, drawing could offer the artist a means of liberating creativity. Goya’s Cantar y bailar (Singing and dancing), 1819-20, comes from one of the private drawing albums which the artist used to inhabit the world of his dreams and imagination.
Canaletto’s expansive and meticulously composed View from Somerset Gardens, looking towards London Bridge is one of several highlights of a section exploring the relationship between drawing and the landscape. This group stretches back as early as Fra Bartolomeo’s Sweep of a river with fishermen drawn in around 1505-09, and also includes a particularly strong selection of landscapes from the golden age of the British watercolour. The interest in landscape is nowhere more powerfully combined with the expressive possibilities of watercolour than in the work of J.M.W. Turner. His late Dawn after the Wreck of around 1841 was immortalised by the critic John Ruskin, who imagined the solitary dog shown howling on a deserted beach to be mourning its owner, lost at sea. For Ruskin, this was one of Turner’s ‘saddest and most tender works’. (more…)
Exhibition | Taking Time: Chardin’s ‘Boy Building a House of Cards’
From Waddesdon Manor:
Taking Time: Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards and Other Paintings
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 28 March — 15 July 2012
Curated by Juliet Carey
This exhibition brings together some of the greatest works to come out of eighteenth-century France. Prompted by Waddesdon’s recent acquisition of Boy Building a House of Cards (1735) by Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), the exhibition will unite all four of the artist’s paintings of the subject for the first time ever.
Loans from the UK, France and the USA will demonstrate how Chardin paired these works with other compositions to explore themes of childhood, adolescence and play. A group of Chardin’s images of servants – again, never seen together before – will provide a contrast with these images of children playing.
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From Paul Holberton Publishing:
Juliet Carey, with essays by Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, Pierre Rosenberg and Katie Scott, Taking Time: Chardin’s Boy Building House of Cards and Other Paintings (London: Paul Holberton, 2012), 160 pages, ISBN: 9781907372339, £30.
Recently acquired by Waddesdon Manor, Jean-Siméon Chardin’s early masterpiece Boy Building a House of Cards has a self-contained stillness that contrasts with the splendour of its new setting. Yet, it resonates with existing apspects of the collection from games and the representation of childhood to the influence of North European genre painting on French art. A child playing – with cards, bubbles, spinning-top or shuttlecock – was a favourite subject of Chardin’s. Such scenes, with their intimations of the transitory nature of human life, were derived from 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish vanitas, but display a delight in childhood for its own sake.
Full of repetition, pendants and series, this catalogue allows the reader to scrutinize some of Chardin’s greatest works, and to follow the artist’s exploration of some of his most arresting subjects. Prints by Pierre Filloeul, Antoine Marcenay de Ghuy and others demonstrate the shifts in appearance and meaning that Chardin’s card-house compositions underwent through transposition from painting to engraving. The prints also help reconstruct some of the occasional pairings in which Chardin’s figure paintings were staged, whether on the walls of the Salon or in the cabinets of private collectors. The pendants include two of the most famous of all Chardin’s figure paintings, Lady Taking Tea and Girl with a Shuttlecock. Essays in self-containment and stillness, these works invite us to consider the nature of attention – the attention of the painter, his human subjects and ourselves.
This richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (28 March – 15 July 2012) that will unite Chardin’s four paintings of a boy with a house of cards for the first time (loans come from the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the National Gallery, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington), allowing us to examine Chardin’s treatment of the subject in the context of his fascination with themes of play, childhood and adolescence. Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Musée du Louvre and the pre-eminent scholar of Chardin’s work, considers the Rothchilds as collectors of Chardin; Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, an independent scholar and Rothschild specialist, gives an insight into Charlotte de Rothschild’s collecting; Katie Scott, lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in French art and architecture of the early modern period, explores Chardin’s paintings of games; and Juliet Carey, Curator of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture at Waddesdon Manor and curator of the exhibition, writes on repetition and meaning in Chardin’s houses of cards and their pendants.
Exhibition | Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi
Press release from the Asia Society Museum:
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857
Asia Society Museum, New York, 7 February — 6 May 2012
Curated by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 brings together 100 masterpieces created during an artistically rich period in India’s history. This major international loan exhibition provides a new look at an era of significant change during which the Mughal capital in Delhi shifted from being the heart of the late Mughal Empire to becoming the jewel in the crown of the British Raj. The exhibition includes jewel-like portrait paintings, striking panoramas, and exquisite decorative arts crafted for Mughal emperors and European residents alike, as well as historical photographs. The exhibition is curated by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma. It is accompanied by a 264-page illustrated book with essays by William Dalrymple, Yuthika Sharma, Jean Marie Lafont, Malini Roy, Sunil Sharma, and J.P. Losty, published by Asia Society Museum in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
(Yale University Press, 2012), ISBN: 9780300176667, $60
“Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 is a reappraisal of a transitional era in India that provided unprecedented impetus for artistic innovation and experimentation,” says Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum Director and Vice President for Global Art Programs. “We’re pleased to be taking a new approach to this magnificent and vibrant work with notable author William Dalrymple and art historian Yuthika Sharma as curators.”
The exhibition focuses on the reigns of the last four Mughal emperors: Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748), Shah Alam II (reigned 1759–1806), Akbar Shah II (reigned 1806–1837) and Bahadur Shah II Zafar (reigned 1837–1857). Having lost military, political and economic power to the newlyarrived British in Calcutta, Delhi continued to maintain its extraordinary cultural, literary, and artistic patronage networks. Artists were supported by the Mughal court in Delhi and the city’s ascendant European residents, creating an environment of extraordinary interaction and influence between them and the new world of the British East India Company.
As the British took over the reign of a dispersed empire from the Mughals in 1803, they were enamored of its courtly elegance and sought to participate in its culture as patrons and enthusiasts. Company painting, involving artistic commissions undertaken by Indian artists for officers of the British East India Company, was practiced alongside Mughal court painting, with both patrons utilizing the services of a common group of artists.
The exhibition looks at recognized works by Delhi-based court artists Nidha Mal and Chitarman, and less familiar works by artists such as Ghulam Murtaza Khan, Ghulam Ali Khan, and Mazhar Ali Khan. In addition to Mughal miniatures produced under later emperors, this exhibition highlights a selection of so-called Company School paintings produced for Delhi-based personalities such as William Fraser, James Skinner, and Thomas Metcalfe. The exhibition also chronicles the rise in genre portraiture during this era, epitomized by character studies of urban and rural residents of Delhi.
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From Yale UP:
William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 224 pages, ISBN: 9780300176667, $60.
. . . Sumptuous color illustrations of such works illuminate the pages of this book, painting a vivid portrait of this important city and its art, artists, and patrons. Masterworks by major Mughal artists, such as Nidha Mal and Ghulam Ali Khan, and works by non-Mughal artists demonstrate the dynamic interplay of artistic production at this time. This largely overlooked period is explored in thought-provoking essays by a panel of distinguished scholars of Indian art, history, and literature to present an engaging look at this dynamic artistic culture in the midst of rapid change.
William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer, historian, and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Yuthika Sharma received a PhD in South Asian art and architecture from Columbia University and a doctorate in design from Harvard University.
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