Enfilade

Opening in September at The British Museum (from the press release). . .

French Portrait Drawings: From Clouet to Courbet 
The British Museum, London, 8 September 2016 – 29 January 2017

Jean Michel Moreau le Jeune, Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter Fanny at the Age of Two, ca. 1772; black and red chalk heightened with white on buff paper (London: The British Museum).

This exhibition will showcase The British Museum’s remarkable holdings of French portrait drawings, chosen to illustrate the development of this medium from the Renaissance until the 19th century. Throughout its history, the drawn portrait has been a more informal medium, created for circulation among friends and relations of the sitter, rather than the wider public intended for the official painted portrait. Artists turned to chalk or watercolour to depict members of their own families and throughout the display there is experimentation and innovation: drawings were cheaper to produce than an oil painting or sculpture and allowed the artist greater freedom for creativity.

Portraits on paper will be displayed alongside examples in other more formal media, including medals, enamels and an onyx cameo. The exhibition will open with drawings by Francois Clouet, which offer an intimate picture of the French Renaissance court, and close with Toulouse Lautrec’s vivid portraits of the Parisian demi-monde, offering visitors the chance to see some of the Museum’s well-known portraits along with some which have never been exhibited before.

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Note (added 8 January 2017) — The extended description from The British Museum:

See over 65 portraits by French artists spanning four centuries, from the early drawings of Jean Clouet (1480–1541) and his son François (c. 1510–1572) to the exquisite drawings of the Realist Gustave Courbet (1819–1877). The British Museum has a remarkable collection of French portrait drawings, including examples by the most celebrated artists—from Clouet, Watteau, and Ingres, to Fantin-Latour, Courbet, and Toulouse-Lautrec. Many have not been widely displayed, so this exhibition is a chance to see beautiful, rarely seen works. The exhibition illustrates the development of portrait drawing from the Valois and Bourbon kings to the upheavals of the Revolution, Napoleon’s Empire, and beyond.

Louis Rolland Trinquesse, A Young Man in Profile to the Right, ca.1770, red chalk over a red-chalk counterproof (London: The British Museum, 1928,1110.30).

Drawing was a more informal medium than official painted portraits. Drawn portraits were intended for circulation among friends or family of the sitter, rather than a wider public. Many of the portraits also demonstrate a range of experimentation and innovation. Drawings were cheaper to produce than oil paintings, sculptures, or medals and allowed the artist greater creative freedom, often for preparatory studies.

This exhibition begins in the 16th century with Clouet’s portrait series commissioned by Henri II’s queen, Catherine de’ Medici. Psychologically penetrating as well as artistically beautiful, these previously unexhibited portraits give a strikingly intimate glimpse of figures at the Renaissance French court. Later on, artists turned to the medium of chalk or watercolour to represent members of their own families, such as Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune’s portrait of his infant daughter or Albert Lebourg’s striking portrait of his wife and mother-in-law from around 1879.

The 18th-century works include famous sitters such as Marie-Antoinette and Leopold Mozart performing with his children Wolfgang and Marie-Anne. The exhibition also includes examples of original and creative ways of approaching portraiture, such as Pierre Dumonstier’s playful ‘portrait’ of the artist Artemisia Gentileschi’s hand, drawn in 1625, or Henri Fantin-Latour’s self-portrait studies from 1876, which show the artist seen from behind—a portrait without a face. The section focusing on 19th-century artists features Ingres’s splendid portrait of Sir John Hay and his sister Mary, made in 1816, Toulouse-Lautrec’s dynamic portrait of Marcelle Lender, drawn in 1894, and the confident self-portrait by Gustave Courbet.

The drawings, selected from the Museum’s unparalleled collection, are complemented by portraits in other media, including prints, medals, enamels, and an onyx cameo. Together they illustrate the development of French portrait drawing from the Renaissance until the 19th century.

The illustrated handlist, with entries for each image, is available from the museum.

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Press release (11 August 2016) from The Met:

Benjamin Franklin: Portraits by Duplessis
The Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 August — 28 November 2016

Curated by Katharine Baetjer

Joseph Siffred Duplessis, Portrait of Benjamin Franklin (The ‘Fur Collar’ Portrait), 1778, oil on canvas; oval, 72.4 × 58.4 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.100.132).

Several works depicting the brilliant writer, inventor, politician, patriot, and statesman Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), who has been the subject of hundreds of portraits, will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in a focused exhibition opening on August 22. The most famous of these was painted by Joseph Siffred Duplessis (1725–1802), Louis XVI’s official portraitist, after Franklin arrived in Paris in 1776 to seek French support for the American war of independence. Portraying Franklin in a red coat with a fur collar, and with an astonishingly elaborate frame decorated with his attributes, the oval painting was greatly admired and Duplessis exhibited it at the 1779 Paris Salon.

The painting, which has been in The Met collection for 85 years, will be a focal point of the installation Benjamin Franklin: Portraits by Duplessis, along with the preliminary pastel portrait of Franklin, probably a life study by Duplessis. The pastel, which is rarely exhibited and will be on loan from the New York Public Library, shows Franklin in the same pose as the painting but wearing a gray, collarless jacket and waistcoat. The image will be familiar to many: it is the same likeness that is replicated on the current one-hundred-dollar bill. The installation will also explore the processes of image transfer and replication in the 18th century.

Franklin arrived in Paris on December 21, 1776, as a commissioner of the American Continental Congress, and lived in nearby Passy until he returned to America in 1785. He promoted the treaty of alliance between the fledgling nation and the government of Louis XVI that was signed on February 6, 1778. The American Revolutionary War was an enormously popular cause in France, where the elderly statesman’s simplicity of dress and manner were admired. The ‘Fur Collar Portrait’, or ‘VIR Portrait’, by Duplessis was commissioned by the entrepreneur Jacques Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont. The oval canvas, exhibited in the frame in which it is still displayed, became the object of extravagant praise. Versions from the artist’s workshop and by other hands were in demand and the portrait was replicated dozens of times. A fine replica by or after Duplessis, also belonging to The Met, is so close in design that the contours must have been transferred from the 1778 picture.

Franklin understood the importance of circulating his image and gave sittings to some half-dozen French artists, but he did not enjoy doing so. He did not wish to sit for the same painter twice, sending away in later years those who applied to him for an original and suggesting that they instead commission a copy. An X-radiograph of the ‘Fur Collar Portrait’ reveals that Franklin’s coat was originally much simpler, with small buttons and a narrow collar. In this connection, the exhibition will draw attention to the Duplessis pastel portrait of Franklin that was given to the New York Public Library in 1896. For more than a century, the pastel has been conscientiously protected from damage due to overexposure to light and thus has rarely been exhibited. The pastel had been assigned to the early 1780s, but technical examination reveals that it dates to 1777 or early 1778 and is preliminary to the ‘Fur Collar Portrait’—its design precisely matches the composition revealed in the painting’s X-radiograph. Pastel is a portable medium, and Duplessis probably took his pastel crayons to Passy to set down the direct likeness of Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin: Portraits by Duplessis is organized by Katharine Baetjer, Curator in Department of European Paintings at The Met.

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Press release (17 May 2016) from The Met:

From the Imperial Theater: Chinese Opera Costumes of the 18th and 19th Centuries
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
first rotation: 15 June 2016 — 8 January 2017 / second rotation: 14 January — 9 October 2017

Curated by Pengliang Lu and Denise Patry Leidy

Theatrical robe with phoenix and floral patterns (detail), Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 19th century; silk thread embroidery on silk satin; 50 × 96 inches (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Drawn entirely from The Met collection, From the Imperial Theater: Chinese Opera Costumes of the 18th and 19th Centuries will examine these luxury textiles from artistic and technical points of view. The exhibition will be organized in two rotations. The first will focus on costumes used in dramas based on historical events, and the second will feature costumes from plays derived from legends and myths. The presentation will showcase eight robes, each of which was created for a specific role—court lady, official, general, monk, nun, and immortal. A set of album leaves faithfully depicting theatrical characters wearing such robes will also be displayed.

The 18th and 19th centuries witnessed a flowering of Chinese drama. Under the patronage of the Qing court (1644–1911), performances—including the ‘Peking Opera’—filled the Forbidden City in Beijing. A form of traditional Chinese theater, Peking Opera was developed fully by the mid-19th century, and because of the form’s minimal stage settings and the importance of exaggerated gestures and movements, costume played an unusually significant role. The exhibition will include superb examples with interior markings indicating their use in court productions.

The exhibition is curated by Pengliang Lu, Henry A. Kissinger Curatorial Fellow, and Denise Patry Leidy, Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art, both in the Museum’s Department of Asian Art.

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Idealized View of the Coin and Antiques Cabinet, Berliner Schloss, ca. 1695, Samuel Blesendorf, Thesaurus Brandenburgicus selectus, volume 1 (Berlin 1696).

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From the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (with thanks to Tobias Locker for noting it). . .

In Praise of Good Rule: The Lacquerwork of Gérard Dagly in the Berlin Palace
Lob der Guten Herrschaft: Die Lackkunst des Gérard Dagly im Berliner Schloss
Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Decorative Arts), Köpenick Palace, Berlin, 8 July — 9 October 2016

Gérard Dagly (c. 1660–1715) was a master of Baroque lacquerwork. His most important work is the coin cabinet from the cabinet of antiquities of the Prussian royal art collection, now preserved in the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum. The dramatic composition in gold on black lacquer on the cabinet’s decorative panels is unusual for Europe, and provides early evidence of a serious artistic interaction with East Asian models. In this piece Dagly unites East Asian and European visual traditions in a homage to Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg.

Gérard Dagly, Medal Cabinet for the Cabinet of Antiquities of the Brandenburg-Preußischen Kunstkammer, 1690–95 (Berlin: Kunstgewerbemuseum; photo by Tomasz Samek).

As ‘Director of Ornaments’, Gerard Dagly was responsible for all the furnishings of the cabinet of antiquities in the Berlin Palace. These included an ensemble of four coin and medal cabinets and six tables, as well as the interior decorations of the room, including paintings and gilded sculptures. A monumental catalogue, the Thesaurus Brandenburgicus selectus compiled by Lorenz Berger, accompanied the presentation of the collection. All these elements served Baroque prestige, forming an accolade praising the Elector Frederick III, later King Frederick I as a preserver of antiquity, and using this connection to the past to legitimize his claim to power.

This exhibition presents the coin cabinet in its context, for which the Kopenick Palace, built for Frederick III, forms the ideal location. Historic images of the cabinet of antiquities accompany a rich display of the works of art they depict. These include ancient gold and silver coins, sculptures, and gems, an Egyptian death mask, Etruscan beaked jugs, as well as the Thesaurus Brandenburgicus, Chinese and Japanese porcelain and lacquerwork, and other examples of Dagly’s work, such as the lost Chinese cabinet from the Berlin Palace.

Lenders to the exhibition include: the Brandenburgisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologisches Landeszentrum, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Museum für Lackkunst Münster, the Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, as well as other collections within the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, specifically: the Ägyptisches Museum, Antikensammlung, Kunstbibliothek, Münzkabinett, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, and Skulpturensammlung.

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Now on view at The Fitzwilliam:

An Amateur’s Passion: Lord Fitzwilliam’s Print Collection
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 9 August 2016 — 29 January 2017

Curated by Elenor Ling

To mark the bicentenary of the founding of The Fitzwilliam Museum and celebrate its collection, this exhibition looks at one of the passions of its founder, Richard 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (1745–1816). Lord Fitzwilliam embodies both our present idea of the amateur print collector, as a non-professional enthusiast, and in the way the word amateur was understood in his day—a ‘lover of the arts’. The 198 albums that were housed in his library at the time of his death and transferred to the University of Cambridge under the terms of his bequest are testament to his love of prints. Despite his other all-consuming passions—the plight of the French monarchy in exile and the activities for the Concerts of Ancient Music—he managed to find time to boast of his collection to the exiled French court and to the Earl of Sandwich. The fact that some 40,000 prints are contained within the 198 albums gives a sense of the time and effort he expended on his collection. This small exhibition, comprising thirty-one prints and seven albums, gives a sense of the content and scope of Fitzwilliam’s print collection.

The first significant fact about Fitzwilliam’s albums is that they are arranged according to printmaker—that is to the person who made the print, rather than the artist who designed it or the work in another medium it represents. The names on the spines of the albums, therefore, usually correspond to the work of the person, or a family of engravers, regardless of whether a print was designed by the printmaker or someone else. The display begins with a small selection of Fitzwilliam’s Rembrandt prints, known at the time of his death as one of the strengths of his collection and evidently one of his earliest preoccupations. Following Rembrandt is a mixture of old masters, including Ishrael van Meckenem (c.1445–1503) and Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), as well as work by contemporary artists, such as Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810) and Johann Christian Reinhart (1761–1847).

Fitzwilliam’s albums fall into two main categories: those he acquired complete from other sources and those containing mounted, individual prints arranged entirely by Fitzwilliam himself. The latter is the focus of this exhibition, although the first category is represented. In terms of construction, evidence suggests that Fitzwilliam assembled the work of each printmaker in turn. In general Fitzwilliam tried to acquire prints in good condition and of good quality, and paid great attention to the decorative effect of the finished sheets. Neatness, symmetry and elegance are characteristic qualities across all his albums. Large prints were usually folded, rather than cut and pasted on separate sheets (in contrast to some albums acquired from other collections).

The examples of prints from his monographic albums serve to highlight the anomalies in his collection: the outsized albums that housed his mezzotints (the chief strength of his collection of British prints) and two albums arranged by subject, ‘Imitations of Drawings’, which comprises a mixture of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian woodcuts and eighteenth-century prints produced as facsimiles of drawings. Most bizarrely of all is the strange large album called simply ‘Jesuites’, a testament to another of his admirations: St Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuit Order.

The exhibition presents what little can be gleaned about Fitzwilliam’s method of acquisition, including the single-surviving draft letter, written by Fitzwilliam just after the turn of the nineteenth century to someone who was to buy prints for him in Paris, and the names of print sellers and publishers written by Fitzwilliam as notes in a small number of the albums. The lack of documentation concerning the acquisition of prints highlights how importance it is that the majority of his albums has survived intact to this day.

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The exhibition closes this week at the Arts Décoratifs. Writing for Worn Through (10 August 2016), Hayley-Jane Dujardin-Edwards provides a review.

Fashion Forward, 3 Siècles de Mode, 1715–2016
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 7 April — 14 August 2016

Dress and Petticoat (robe à la française), ca. 1740, silk damask satin ground silk brocaded and filé (Collections UFAC, Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris / photo by Jean Tholance)

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of its fashion collection from April 7 to August 14, 2016. In doing so we are responding to our public’s strongly expressed desire to at last be shown an all-embracing panorama of fashion history over several centuries. It will also be an unique opportunity to showcase the jewels and highlight the particularities of a national fashion and textiles collection curated in full dialogue with the other departments of a museum dedicated to all the decorative arts. Fashion Forward, 3 Centuries of Fashion, 1715–2016 brings together 300 items of men’s, women’s and children’s fashion from the 18th century to today, selected from the museum’s collections to provide a novel chronological overview.

The Arts Décoratifs fashion collection now comprises more than 150,000 works, ranging from ancient textiles to haute couture creations and emblematic silhouettes of ready-to-wear fashion, but also including accessories, major collections of drawings and photographs, and the archives of iconic creators such as Elsa Schiaparelli, Madeleine Vionnet and Cristobal Balenciaga. Now France’s foremost national collection, it is the result of the amalgamation of two admirable collections, that of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs since its creation in 1864, and that of the Union Française des Arts du Costume (UFAC), founded in 1948 and currently presided by Pierre Bergé, of which the Musée des Arts Decoratifs is the proud custodian.

To mark the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Musée des Arts de la Mode—founded in 1986 on the initiative of Pierre Bergé and the French textile industry with the support of Jack Lang, then culture minister—the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is paying tribute to this collective adventure and great ‘fashion moment’. Fashion Forward, Three Centuries of Fashion casts a new spotlight on one of the richest collections in the world, freed from its display cases in the Fashion galleries to be shown for the first time in the museum’s Nave.

The three hundred pieces, selected from a collection constantly enriched by donations and acquisitions, take us on a journey through time, highlighting the key moments in fashion history from the very late 17th century to the most contemporary creation. Freeing itself from the dictates of the conservation of works and the stringent conditions of their display, the exhibition is conceived as an ideal museum of fashion, featuring the finest examples of three centuries of creation habitually illustrated in reference books. It also provides a fascinating new insight into fashion’s evolution via its designers, clients and periods, because now more than ever at Les Arts Décoratifs, fashion is treated as an artistic field that has wide-ranging echoes in the museum’s other collections. Fashion is a history of evolving techniques, materials and designs but also a history of changing times and attitudes, a reflection of the art of living. Fashion is even more fascinating when it is not self-generating but dialogues with the arts of its time, as did great figures of Couture such as Charles-Frederick Worth, Jacques Doucet, Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, Madeleine Vionnet, Gabrielle Chanel, Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent.

In a completely novel manner, the exhibition recreates each of these ‘fashion moments’ in its human, artistic and social context, not didactically but via ellipses illustrating fashion’s constant elective affinities with the decorative arts. Eighteenth-century wood paneling, scenic wallpapers by Zuber, Paul Iribe’s drawings for the ‘Robes de Paul Poiret’, and the straw marquetry doors created by Jean-Michel Frank for the writer François Mauriac, provide perfect settings for fashion’s stylistic expressions and the metamorphoses of the body and style from the 18th century. The exhibition culminates in the effervescence and singular eclecticism of the global contemporary fashion scene, in which the names of the most original creators are now associated with the most ancient fashion houses.

Because the entire history of fashion is also a history of the body and style, the exhibition’s artistic direction was entrusted to the British dancer and choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, formerly one of the stars of the New York City Ballet and winner of a Tony award for his stage adaptation of An American in Paris in 2014, based on the film by Vicente Minelli. In collaboration with the scenographer Jérôme Kaplan and assisted by Isabelle Vartan, Christopher Wheeldon has succeeded in giving the collection a sensual, poetic dimension, breathing new life into these illustrious creations by transforming every stage of the exhibition into a world in itself. Each of these moments is enhanced by a unique collaboration with the dancers of the Opéra de Paris, in which a choreography gracefully casts new light on a silhouette, posture or attitude characteristic of this social and artistic evolution of the body.

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Traveling exhibition through Art Services International:

Power & Piety: Spanish Colonial Art
Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, 18 March — April 17 2016
Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago, 20 August — 13 November 2016
Appleton Museum of Art, College of Central Florida, Ocala, 3 December — 26 February 2017
Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, 1 July — 24 September 2017
Figge Art Museum, Davenport, 14 October — 7 January 2018
Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, 26 January — 22 April 2018
Allentown Art Museum (Pennsylvania), 25 August — 9 December 2018

Juan Pedro Lopez, Our Lady Guidance, ca. 1762, oil on wood (Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection)

From the late 17th century until the 1820s, vast profits from cattle ranching and the cultivation and trading of tropical crops turned Spanish American elites from cities in the Caribbean basin into some of the wealthiest people in the New World. The production and trading of religious art during this period was centered on high-end pieces for churches, the local nobility, and wealthy individuals; their fine craftsmanship rivaled that of luxury goods imported from Europe. More affordable—and less refined—artworks were produced in large numbers for the homes of people of lesser means.

Painters, sculptors, gilders, silversmiths, and cabinetmakers created pieces of the finest craftsmanship to compete with luxury goods imported from Europe. They benefited from a vast supply of assorted raw materials from the Americas that included not only precious metals such as gold and silver, but also rare wood varieties with colors and grains of unmatched richness, and unique local pigments. Through 57 paintings, sculpture, silver pieces, furniture, and other decorative devotional objects, this exhibition showcases a wide range of artistic production and the finesse of local masters. It offers an exceptional opportunity to learn more about the daily life and religious practices of colonial Latin America and sheds light on the nature of commercial exchange in the region.

The works are drawn from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection—a component of the Fundación Cisneros which was founded to enhance the appreciation of art from Latin America—and is co-organized by the Museum of Biblical Art, New York, and Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia.

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Note (added 25 August 2018) — The original posting did not include the Allentown Art Museum.

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On view now at the Wadsworth Atheneum:

Miniature World in White Gold: Meissen Porcelain by Johann Joachim Kaendler
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, 16 January 2016 — 16 January 2017

Curated by Vanessa Sigalas

Model by Johann Joachim Kaendler,Writing Cavalier, ca. 1740, hard-paste porcelain.

Johann Joachim Kändler was one of the most visionary artists in the history of porcelain, creating more than 2,000 models over the course of his career and consistently testing the limits of porcelain as an artistic medium. Kändler was one of the first artists to use porcelain as a sculpting material rather than as a surface for painted decoration. His designs and figures—more detailed and realistic than any earlier creations—were essential for the development of porcelain as an independent art form in Europe.

Miniature World in White Gold showcases a broad selection of the finely detailed and innovative porcelain sculptures Kändler designed over his 44 years at the Meissen Porcelain Factory in Germany, featuring examples of his animals, crinoline figures, exotic representations, and court and peasant figures.

Model by Johann Joachim Kaendler, Persian Woman with Elephant, ca. 1763–74, hard-paste porcelain.

The formula for hard-paste porcelain, which originated in China centuries earlier, was not discovered in Europe until the early 18th century—only decades before Kändler became a modeler at Meissen. The material was as valuable as gold during his lifetime (1706–1775), when dinner services and figurines were commissioned by aristocrats to ornament extravagant banquet and dining tables. While they initially served as table decoration and conversation pieces, porcelain figures soon became collectibles themselves and were displayed in cabinets as independent artworks.

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