Enfilade

George Dance, Bank of England: Record Drawing of the Wall from Lothbury Street, 1794–97
(London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, SM 12/1/2).

◊    ◊   ◊    ◊    ◊

From The Soane:

George Dance the Younger: A Bicentennial Celebration

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 14 January — 31 December 2025

Curated by Frances Sands 

On 14 January 2025, we mark the bicentenary of the death of the architect George Dance the Younger (1741–1825). Dance is not a household name, and relatively few of his buildings survive, but during his lifetime he was an innovative and celebrated architect. Moreover, as the architectural mentor of John Soane, his influence looms large at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Born in 1741, George Dance studied architecture in Italy from 1758 until 1764. Initially joining his father’s architectural practice on his return to London, Dance then succeeded him as Clerk of the City Works in 1768. His long and prolific career of 1764–1816 spanned the neoclassical movement and the Greek Revival and he experimented with and shaped both styles. Dance accepted apprentices into his office, shaping the careers of major architects including John Soane, who was apprenticed to Dance in 1768–71. Dance was also a founder member of the Royal Academy.

There is little surviving correspondence from Dance and almost nothing to reveal his thoughts on architecture. Moreover, few of his buildings survive. Yet his legacy is notable, thanks largely to his surviving drawings at the Soane Museum. These were the last great addition to Soane’s collection, on 18 November 1836, just weeks before Soane died. Soane’s accounts show that he paid Dance’s son, Sir Charles Webb Dance, £500 for the drawings collection. Along too came a handsome cabinet, known as ‘The Shrine’ which had been made to contain the drawings. The Shrine can be admired in the North Drawing Room at the Soane Museum and still contains the Dance collection, comprising an invaluable record of the work of George Dance the Younger, a towering figure in architectural history.

More information is available here»

Now on view, as noted at the blog Art History News:

Women Artists: 1300–1900 / Ženy, mistryně, umělkyně 1300–1900

National Gallery Prague, Waldstein Riding School Prague, 29 May — 2 November 2025

Curated by Olga Kotková

Elisabetta Sirani, Omphale, ca. 1660-61 (Dresden: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister , Gal.-Nr. 388).

The exhibition presents the artistic work of women from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century. Exhibited artworks highlight the unique qualities of women’s work, particularly in painting, sculpture, drawing, and graphic art, as well as in the applied arts, revealing a lesser-known dimension within the history of art. Attention is given to the description of the environment in which female artists worked; social connections and influences shaping their work and the themes women explored in their art.

For the first time, visitors have a chance to see a comprehensive exhibition of female artists who were active in Central Europe, the Netherlands, and present-day Italy in the period 1300–1900. The exhibition is focused on this period because it marks a turning point in the status of women artists: they gradually gained access to art academies, and both aristocratic and urban women were actively engaging in art. Female artists were increasingly taking control of their careers, gradually establishing themselves professionally and socially. However, only a few were able to run an art studio like male artists. The theme of the exhibition underscores a key message: while gender influences artistic expression and has historically limited women’s opportunities for recognition and education, what truly matters is talent, skill, and the determination to succeed in a still male-dominated world.

It may come as a surprise to some that women’s daring fantasies were already manifested during the medieval period, revealing how deeply religious women, especially nuns and monastics, harboured both erotic and maternal desires. Visitors will also be captivated by the stories of female painters from the Renaissance, many of whom were victims of violence and intrigue; the cruelty they endured was often reflected in their artistic work. Many sought to match the output of their male counterparts, proving that they were just as skilled, if not more so.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, numerous talented women made their mark north of the Alps, achieving success as scientists, painters, and travellers. A very inspiring story is that of Maria Sibylla Merian, who in 1699 undertook an adventurous expedition to Suriname to study insects. In the late 18th century and the early decades of the 19th century, several prominent female painters emerged, including Angelica Kauffmann, Barbara Krafft Steiner, and Amalie von Peter. Their paths were followed by other artists. Thanks to their talent, family support, and education, they were able to fully dedicate themselves to professional artistic creation, which brought them self-fulfilment, respect, and recognition.

Now on view at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, as noted by The Art Newspaper:

Joseph Wright of Derby: Life on Paper

Derby Museum and Art Gallery, 23 May — 7 September 2025

Curated by Lucy Bamford

In 2022, Derby Museums made its most significant acquisition in twenty years, with a remarkable self-portrait of Joseph Wright of Derby. Completed around 1772, this was the first and only occasion that Wright depicted himself as an artist. Curiously, it was with the specific trappings of a draughtsman—rather than a painter—that he pictured himself. Inspired by the self-portrait, this exhibition explores the role of drawing within the story of Wright’s life through 50 works on paper from Derby Museums’ collection. Rarely before seen outside Derby, they include early works made in training to remarkable ‘one-off’ productions, such as his self-portrait in pastel.

Studies of the works of the Old Masters and classical statuary provide a glimpse of his interests and influences. Elsewhere, illustrated letters reveal a collaborative side to his practice, as he sought advice from friends concerning subjects as diverse as chemical experiments and scenes from Shakespeare. Wright’s works on paper constituted a valuable expression of his personal, as well as professional, experience as an artist. The result is an exhibition that reveals this much-loved artist at his most experimental and exuberant, as well as his most vulnerable and human.

Image: Joseph Wright, Vesuvius in Eruption, ca. 1774, gouache on paper (Derby Museums).

Now on view at the Uffizi:

Florence and Europe: Arts of the Eighteenth Century at the Uffizi

Firenze e l’Europa: Arti del Settecento agli Uffizi

Curated by Simone Verde and Alessandra Griffo

The Uffizi Galleries, Florence, 28 May — 28 November 2025

Masterpieces by Goya, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Le Brun, Liotard, Mengs, and other masters; spectacular views of iconic places of the Grand Tour in Italy; the monumental Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by French painter Pierre Subleyras, restored live on display before the public’s eyes; the sensual curiosities of the Cabinet of Erotic Antiquities reconstructed according to the fashion of the Age of Enlightenment. The Uffizi Galleries bring the 18th century back to life with the exhibition Florence and Europe: Arts of the Eighteenth Century at the Uffizi, curated by the director Simone Verde and the head of 18th-century painting Alessandra Griffo. Installed in the airy, frescoed rooms on the ground floor of the museum, the exhibition includes a selection of around 150 works, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, porcelain, prints, and a large tapestry, many exhibited for the first time in the Gallery and others seen for the first time in ten years due to the museum’s extension works.

The exhibition recounts, through art, an era of crucial changes for Western thought, aesthetics, and taste, and also for the Uffizi itself, which, in the 18th century, was completely transformed from a dynastic treasure chest of royal collections into a modern museum, the first in the world. It was precisely at this time, in fact, that the pact established by the last Medici descendant, Anna Maria Luisa, certifying the end of the dynasty in 1737, bound the boundless store of works to Florence “for the ornament of the State,” and it was Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who in 1769 allowed citizens, on the feast day of Florence’s patron saint, St. John (24 June), to visit the museum freely. Structural changes intertwined with the great wave of political, cultural, and aesthetic transformations throughout Europe, which the Grand Dukes in Florence managed to intercept with the Uffizi Galleries, transforming the city and the museum into a microcosm where the new climate of the Continent could be felt.

Simone Verde states: “Florence and Europe aims to trace an extremely multifaceted century through its aesthetic culture, interweaving the general narrative of the context with the management of the Uffizi Galleries as Europe’s first modern museum. It’s a complex story rich in subtexts and nuances that we have constructed with patience and dedication, making works from the collection that have not been seen for many years, or have never been exhibited, available to the public.”

Alessandra Griffo states: “The works on display, besides being of great quality, have the merit of offering insights into a century that was crucial for the formation of the modern mentality, sensibility and even taste. Today, millions of people come to Florence every year, attracted by the myth of the early Renaissance: the rediscovery of this period occurred precisely during the 18th century.”

More information is available here»

On view at the Museum of Costume and Fashion at the Pitti Palace:

New Arrangement of the Museum of Costume and Fashion

Museo della Moda e del Costume, Florence, ongoing

The history of fashion from the 18th century to the 2000s illustrated by captivating glimpses in an interplay between art and the historical environment of the Museum

After four years of renovation, the elegant historical premises of the Palazzina della Meridiana, the rooms that traditionally house the collections of the Museum of Costume and Fashion, have reopened completely. The Museum was inaugurated in 1983 at Pitti Palace—already known for being the ‘temple’ of fashion in the post-war period—and was the first Italian State museum dedicated to the history of fashion, haute couture, and the evolution of taste through the centuries. The new installation offers visitors a selection of rare and precious dresses accompanied by accessories—shoes, hats, fans, parasols, and bags—that exemplify through suggestions and samples a vast collection which in total has more than 15,000 items, and which will be put on display over time and according to rotations grouped by typologies, themes and leitmotifs, while always maintaining the criterion of the new arrangement which aims to propose a journey through the evolution of fashion and taste seen in their historical development, from the 18th century to the present day.

Another characteristic element of the new arrangement is indeed the interplay, strongly recommended by Director Simone Verde and the Museum’s curator Vanessa Gavioli, between the dresses and accessories and the most diverse forms of art, first of all painting, through the comparison between the gorgeous dresses on display and some fascinating coeval portraits and paintings, which help to make fashion also through the representations of painters such as Carle Vanloo, Laurent Pecheux, and Jean-Sébastien Rouillard, passing through the elegant portraits by the 19th-century ones such as Tito Conti, Giovanni Boldini, Edoardo Gelli, and Vittorio Corcos, to get to some of the most relevant artists of the Italian avant-garde including Massimo Campigli, Giulio Turcato, Corrado Cagli, and Alberto Burri. After all, fashion is by definition an art that has always lived in symbiosis with the most diverse disciplines, and the new arrangement of the Museum aims to recreate an ideal palimpsest in which, at a glance, one can also catch the relationships between different arts. Therefore not only between fashion and painting, but also between fashion and plastic arts (the match between the handles of porcelain vases and the sleeves of 18th-century dresses are intriguing); fashion, theatre, and sculpture (the relationship between Mariano Fortuny’s dress worn by Eleonora Duse and the actress’s face sculpted by Arrigo Minerbi is a particularly fascinating example); but also between fashion and architecture, with the dresses that stand in close connection with the historical space around, the furnishings and frescoes of the Palazzina della Meridiana; to end with a visual dialogue, virtually reconstructed thanks to the use of video screens, between the current arrangement and the historical ones, from the years in which in Florence, at Pitti Palace, in those same rooms that we can visit again today, Italian high fashion was establishing itself internationally according to a tradition that runs seamlessly to the present.

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

Now on view at the BL:

Unearthed: The Power of Gardening

British Library, London, 2 May — 10 August 2025

Curated by Maddy Smith

From beautiful botanical illustrations to the world’s oldest mechanised lawnmower, ancient herbals to guerrilla gardening zines, Unearthed reveals how gardeners have cultivated more than just plants—they’ve sown the seeds of change. Dive into gardening’s role in our health and wellbeing, see how people have reimagined our homes, towns and cities to create green spaces, and uproot the tangled histories of the plants that grow in our gardens today.

Among an incredible collection of books, manuscripts, photographs, artworks and historical tools, highlights include:
• the first English gardening manual: Thomas Hill’s 1558 guide on how to tend a garden
• Charles Darwin’s vasculum, for collecting plant specimens on the Beagle voyage
• the only surviving illustrated Old English herbal
• an oil portrait of John Ystumllyn, one of Britain’s earliest documented Black gardeners
• Gertrude Jekyll’s boots: a trailblazing gardener, writer, artist, and one of the 20th century’s most influential garden designers
• striking botanical art by European, Indian, Chinese, and Caribbean artists
• four short films following Coco Collective, an Afro-diaspora led community garden that opened as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic
• a Victorian Wardian case, the mini travelling greenhouse that enabled thousands of living plant specimens to be moved around the world.

Unearthed celebrates gardening as a force for creativity, resilience, and community through the remarkable stories of the people and plants that shape our gardens.