Enfilade

This special issue of HLQ arises from a conference held at the Huntington Library in September 2023:

Huntington Library Quarterly 87.2 (Summer 2024)

Paintings, Peepshows, and Porcupines: Exhibitions in London, 1763–1851

Edited by Jordan Bear and Catherine Roach

Dazzling variety characterized exhibitions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain: boxing matches, automata, contemporary art shows, panoramas, dog beauty contests, and menageries all contributed to a flourishing display culture. Despite their differences, these attractions shared both techniques for engaging audiences and widely reverberating themes. All of the essays in this volume work across multiple sites of display. By examining the varied terrain of exhibitions collectively, this issue illuminates cultural preoccupations of the time, including the multifarious impact of empire and the productively ambiguous boundaries between the cultural expressions that were deemed low and those that were deemed high.

c o n t e n t s

• Jordan Bear and Catherine Roach, “Introduction: Exhibitions in London, 1763–1851,” pp. 153–63.

• Adam Eaker, “The Art of Marring a Face: Exhibiting Boxers in Georgian London,” pp. 165–82.

• Nicholas Robbins, “The Circumference of the Subject: Figuring Race at Egyptian Hall,” pp. 183–205.

• Rosie Dias, “Making Space for Empire: India in Panoramas and Dioramas, 1830–1851,” pp. 207–31.

• Holly Shaffer, “Provisioners, Cooks, Coffeehouses, and Clubs: Exhibiting Taste in Calcutta and London in the Early Nineteenth Century,” pp. 233–54.

• Jordan Bear, “The Sea Serpent of Regent Street: On the Evidentiary Strategies of Nineteenth-Century Exhibitions,” pp. 255–71.

• Catherine Roach, “Dog Shows: Porcelain Pugs and Pre-Raphaelite Painters in Thomas Earl’s Art and Nature,” pp. 273–90.

• Alison FitzGerald, “Centers and Peripheries: Exhibiting London’s ‘Marvels’ in Britain’s ‘Second City’,” pp. 291–311.

• John Plunkett, “An Early Moving Picture Industry? Exhibition Networks and the Panorama, 1810–1850,” pp. 313–35.

Paul-André Basset, Fête du 14 Juillet An IX, ca. 1801, hand-colored engraving, 28 × 44 cm (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art). The print depicts the national holiday, as celebrated on the Champs-Élysées and organized by Chalgrin, commemorating the storming of the Bastille in 1789.

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

All contents from this special issue of Status Quaestionis are available as free downloads:

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?

The Art of the Ephemeral in Eighteenth-Century France

Status Quaestionis: Language, Text, Culture 28 (2025)

Edited by Elisa Cazzato

This monographic issue of Status Quaestionis explores the notion of ephemerality in French artistic culture during the long eighteenth-century. The volume is highly interdisciplinary, featuring articles from art and theatre history, costume-making, and performance studies, extending the notion of the ephemeral to a wide range of examples. The authors investigate how, in order to exist, ephemerality needs materiality, since any creative process intersects with the material requirement that both artworks and performances need: materials, locations, settings, scripts, costumes, and bodies. This dichotomy enables historians to further analyse the cultural and political meanings of the ephemeral, connecting artworks to social contexts, dance costumes to movements, and public festivals to human reception. Rather than focusing solely on aesthetics, the volume interrogates how the ephemeral was experienced, recorded, and remembered and how its traces persist in artworks, texts, and collective memory. The contributions question the boundary between presence and absence, visibility and oblivion, reflecting on the long-term cultural implications of transience. In seeking what remains of the ephemeral, the volume challenges dominant narratives and reconsiders the politics of cultural memory.

This special issue was inspired by the intellectual discussions that took place during the international conference organised at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in June 2023. The conference was part of the research project SPECTACLE, funded by the European Union’s Horizion 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 893106.

t h e m a t i c  a r t i c l e s

Jean-Baptiste-Philibert Moitte, The Comte d’Artois as a Hunter, ca. 1777, gouache on paper, 22.9 × 30 cm (Amiens, Musée de Picardie). Figure 1 from the article by Noémie Étienne and Meredith Martin.

• Introduction: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? The Art of the Ephemeral in Eighteenth-Century France — Elisa Cazzato

• ‘Mais, le lendemain matin’: Residues of the Ephemeral in Eighteenth-Century French Art — Mark Ledbury

• Spectacular Blindness: Enslaved Children and African Artifacts in Eighteenth-Century Paris — Noémie Étienne and Meredith Martin

• L’art du comédien au tournant des Lumières: Conscience de l’éphémère et sensibilité mémorielle — Ilaria Lepore

• L’expérience éphémère d’Ériphyle (Voltaire, 1732): Matériaux tangibles et réécritures d’une dramaturgie passagère — Renaud Bret-Vitoz

• Un événement unique: Le théâtre de la Révolution entre surgissement et disparition — Pierre Frantz

• Ephemeral Emblem: Jacques-Louis David and the Making of a Revolutionary Martyr — Daniella Berman

• Les feux d’artifices des frères Ruggieri à l’intérieur d’un théâtre: L’autonomie de l’éphémère dans le Paris du XVIIIe siècle — Emanuele De Luca

• Tra utopia e ricerca del consenso: Fuochi e apparati effimeri di epoca napoleonica a Milano tra il 1801 e il 1803 — Alessandra Mignatti

• Witnesses of the Past: Costumes as Material Evidence of the Ephemeral Performance — Petra Zeller Dotlačilová

• Noverre’s Lament: Inscription, Posterity, and the Ephemeral Art of Dance — Olivia Sabee

• Ephemerality on the Fringe: Exploring the Venues Hosting Power Quadrilles in Brussels on the Eve of Waterloo and Beyond (1814–1816) — Cornelis Vanistendael

Miscellaneous articles and reviews are available here»

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

Elisa Cazzato is research fellow at the University of Naples Federico II. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Sydney, and she is a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow. For her project SPECTACLE she was a visiting scholar at the CELLF of the Université Sorbonne and in the New York University’s Department of Art History. Her publications include articles in the peer-review journals Studi Francesi, Dance Research, Humanities Research Journal, and RIEF. She is currently writing her first book on the life and career of Ignazio Degotti.

A selection of J18 Notes & Queries essays responding to the 2023 conference:

Elizabeth Saari Browne and Dana Leibsohn, eds., “Provocations from HECAA@30,” Journal18 (October 2024).

Responses
• Jennifer Van Horn — Absence and Abundance: Thinking Ahead from HECAA@30
• Karen Lipsedge — The Power of Storytelling and Story-Listening: Reflections on HECAA@30
• Emily C. Casey and Matthew Gin — Everything in Between: Reflections on HECAA@30
• Deepthi Murali —The Ethics of Study and Display of Ivory Objects
• Dawn Odell — Who (or What) Speaks in a Global History of Art?
• Kathryn Desplanque —Material Art History and Black Feminist Pedagogies

From the introduction by Elizabeth Saari Browne and Dana Leibsohn:

In October 1725, a Jiwere (Otoe) leader named Aguiguida found himself at Versailles watching the fountains play. Invited by French men eager to secure allies amongst those who lived on the Central Plains of North America, this visit had been designed to impress. Along with a tour of Parisian sites and a meeting with the king, Aguiguida and his fellow travelers received gifts aplenty: dress coats with silver ornaments, plumed hats, royal medallions; also rifles and swords, and a painting depicting their audience with the monarch. The visitors had meant to offer their own gifts, but most of these were lost in a shipwreck off the coast of America.[1] Today, no material creations from their trip exist, neither those meant for Louis XV nor those offered the delegates.

By the 1720s, people had been traveling from the Americas to European courts for centuries. Itineraries varied, but when Aguiguida met Louis, it was as much trope as history. So why does this story still surprise? Indeed, who does it still surprise? These kinds of questions surfaced at the recent 30th-anniversary convening of HECAA (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture) in October 2023, Environments, Materials, and Futures. This particular eighteenth-century narrative circles around colonial and imperial histories and how creations of earthen and animal materials, of voyages across (and art lost to) land and sea, and of material cultures of global exchange and of war are implicated in such enterprises. But Aguiguida’s trans-Atlantic voyage and visit also pose other questions for historians of art and architecture: about archival absences, affective relationships, and presumed and real (im)balances of power embedded in materials, in pedagogical relationships, and in the Academy. It is these themes the following essays address. . .

Elizabeth Saari Browne is Assistant Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Dana Leibsohn is the Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The full introduction and all essays are available here»

The latest issue of the Sculpture Journal is dedicated to the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:

Sculpture Journal 32.4 (November 2023)

• Samantha Lukic-Scott and Charlotte Davis, “Valuing Sculpture: Art, Craft, and Industry, 1660–1860,” pp. 409–16.
Responding to the many useful and intriguing discussions that arose over the two days of the Valuing Sculpture: Art, Craft and Industry, 1660–1860 conference held in July 2021, this special issue explores new directions for scholarly research. This introduction considers the usefulness of the classifications of art, craft, and industry, and in doing so presents this collection’s methodology of expanding dialogues by reaching across medial, dimensional, geographical, and categorical boundaries.

• M. G. Sullivan, “Valuing Sculpture in the Long Eighteenth Century: Materials and Technology,” pp. 417–32.
In 1712 the sale catalogue of John Nost’s studio defined the value of sculpture as lying in the intrinsic value of materials, the performance of the artist, and the costs and complexity of sculptural production. This article looks at how these values of materials and making shifted over the course of the following 150 years through specific examples of materials—lead and granite—that gained and then lost value; and how production processes that streamlined sculptural production, notably James Tulloch’s marble works, were first celebrated and then seen as anathema to sculptural value. The article argues for the malleability of sculptural value systems in the long eighteenth century, and the need to understand sculptural value in materials and production in relation to economic and technological history.

• Caroline Stanford, “‘Peculiarly Fit for Statues’: The Contribution of Coade’s Fired Artificial Stone to Sculpture in the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 433–50.
This article considers the enduring ‘value’ of Coade stone as artefact. Using insights from Alois Riegl’s The Modern Cult of Monuments, it examines the contribution of fired artificial stone as a key enabler of the eighteenth-century passion for sculpture in Britain, as replicated sculptural forms entered interiors, gardens, and architecture. This durable stoneware first crossed into statuary in the 1720s. From 1769, Eleanor Coade (1733–1821) became its figurehead, successfully positioning Coade stone as superior to natural stone. Formulation and production were collaborative processes dependent upon specialist, often overlooked fabricating skills. This article considers factors that led to the success of Coade stone, as well as its composition and production. It concludes with a brief case study of the Coade stone caryatids that Sir John Soane took as a personal motif.

• Rebecca Wade, “The Young Naturalist by Henry Weekes: Intermediality, Industry, and International Exhibitions,” pp. 451–68.
The Young Naturalist by Henry Weekes (1807–77) was first presented in plaster at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1854. Beginning as an object located firmly in the domain of the fine arts through its modes of production and sites of display, the sculpture encountered industry through a series of international exhibitions in Paris, London and Manchester during the 1850s and 1860s. Not only was the work in proximity to industrial objects, processes and collectors, it was fundamentally transformed by them, resulting in a collaboration between Weekes and the Birmingham-based manufacturer Elkington & Co. This article charts the changing status of sculpture and labour in the second half of the nineteenth century, with its increasing visibility and availability to new markets through both emerging and established technologies of reproduction.

• Liberty Paterson, ” ‘Wider than the Realm of England’: The Hosack Family Heritage, Atlantic Slavery, and Casting Mary, Queen of Scots for the Nation,” pp. 469–92.
In 1871 the Scottish-born magistrate John Hosack (1809–87) was described as ‘the chivalrous and most recent defender’ of Mary, Queen of Scots. After writing a popular historical account of her life, he had presented a plaster cast bust of her Westminster effigy to London’s National Portrait Gallery, which it then used to create an electrotype sculpture with the help of Elkington & Co. This article interrogates the ‘value’ of this sculpture as a cultural heritage object by retracing its history. It places Hosack’s desire to replicate and commemorate Scottish heritage alongside his family ties to Jamaica, including the parallel life of his half-brother William and the wealth John derived from his father’s sugar profits, which relied on African enslavement. It argues the importance of understanding how such legacies enabled individuals to participate in cultural philanthropy in the Victorian period, which simultaneously distanced them from their Atlantic pasts. It also considers how, in its transformation into an electrotype, Hosack’s cast became part of a wider effort by museums and galleries to replicate national heritage using manufacturing methods indebted to the industrial economy intertwined with the British Empire. Sculpture offered a powerful medium through which to fortify national history, but its commemorative capacity can, and should, be unpicked to better understand British legacies of enslavement and colonialism.

• Justine Gain, “Valuing Ornament: Jean-Baptiste Plantar (1790–1879) between Art, Craft, and Industry,” pp. 493–511.
In the nineteenth century, as European countries reacted to industrialization, art, and burgeoning industries intertwined in a myriad of new ways. From this union, several major changes occurred in building construction, decorative arts, and sculpture. The career and oeuvre of Jean-Baptiste Plantar, French ornamentalist and sculptor des Bâtiments du Roi, illustrate the new relationships forged between traditional architectural patterns and industrial artistic production. Despite holding a central role in their establishment, Plantar has been largely unheeded both by his contemporaries and later writers. This article reasserts Plantar’s significance in the creation of a visual—essentially Parisian—landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century.

• Patricia Monteiro, “The Art of Stucco in Southern Portugal: Morphologies, Value Judgements, and the Prejudice of Conservation,” pp. 513–29.
The Portuguese artistic production of stucco is part of a long tradition of decorative techniques that form part of a shared visual and cultural legacy in southern Europe. However, little is understood of local idiosyncrasies within this legacy. By focusing on stucco artworks in the peripheral area of Alentejo, away from the cultural capitals of Europe, this article explores the emergence of an original and distinct formal and functional interplay over the course of several centuries. This article re-evaluates the morphologies of Alentejo’s stucco sculptures and assesses the degree to which such morphologies express common artistic practices and constitute a distinct art form. Finally, the article identifies the deleterious ramifications that have arisen from such considerations not being taken account of during the conservation of these works.

• David Mark Mitchell, “Fabricating Enchantment: Antoine Benoist’s Wax Courtiers in Louis XIV’s Paris,” pp. 531–44.
Antoine Benoist’s Cercle royal was an exhibition of life-size wax figures on display in Louis XIV’s Paris. In the absence of extant objects from the exhibition itself, this article focuses on the corpus of sources that attest to its reception. It concentrates on the Cercle royal’s initial recognition, beginning in the 1660s, when the exhibition centred on French royalty’s courtly entourage. Alternately celebrated as vivid miracles or derided as deceitful trivialities, Benoist’s wax figures provide an informatively problematic case for considering questions of sculptural craft and the decorum of its display in this era. In tracing the discord of wax portraiture’s reception, this article demonstrates that vexed questions of artisanal stature were embedded within aesthetic debates about illusionistic verisimilitude.

• Jennifer Dudley, Review of the exhibition If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960–2022 (Hepworth Wakefield, 2023), pp. 545–48.