Open House London 2014
From Open City:
Open House London 2014
London, 20–21 September 2014
Forty Hall, the 17th-century estate, is one of the 800 properties included in the Open House London programme.
Open House London, created and delivered by the independent non-profit organisation Open-City, is the capital’s largest annual festival of architecture and design. Now in its 22nd year, it is a city-wide celebration of the buildings, places and neighbourhoods where we live and work. By providing free and open access to 250,000 across 30 boroughs to more than 800 outstanding examples of historic and contemporary buildings, on-site projects and public spaces, it remains the most powerful medium for engaging everyone in a better appreciation of their city.
A full listing of the included sites will be posted on 15 August 2014 at the event website.
Exhibition | Collecting History
From The Wallace Collection:
Collecting History
The Wallace Collection, London, 6 November 2014 — 15 February 2015
George Cruishank, Polly and Lucy Takeing off the Restrictions, 1812, Hertford House Historic Collection (2007.36).
The Wallace Collection is not allowed to add to its main collection, which remains as it was when bequeathed by Lady Wallace in 1897. But ever since the foundation of the Wallace Collection, the library has acquired archival material and works of art to help illuminate the history of the collection and its founders. This exhibition will showcase the wide variety of the Hertford House Historic Collection including the often hilarious satirical cartoons concerning the Prince Regent’s obsessive passion for the 2nd Marchioness of Hertford.
Exhibition | Body and Soul: Munich Rococo from Asam to Günther
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the Kunsthalle Munich:
Body and Soul: Munich Rococo from Asam to Günther
Mit Leib und Seele: Münchner Rokoko von Asam bis Günther
Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, 12 December 2014 – 12 April 2015
The Kunsthalle Munich and the Diocesan Museum Freising are organising a joint exhibition on Munich rococo—a golden age of Bavarian art, unparalleled even by international standards.
The exhibition presents numerous outstanding artists who lived in Munich between 1720 and 1770, like the Asam brothers, Cosmas Damian (1686–1739) and Egid Quirin (1692–1750), along with Johann Baptist Straub (1704–1784), Anton Bustelli (1723–1763) and Ignaz Günther (1725–1775). On the one hand, their exceptionally aesthetic language is characterised by an almost unprecedented jocular vitality, then again it is pervaded with a refined elegance. Visitors will be treated to a unique exhibition experience as numerous significant works from Bavaria and Germany’s wealth of churches, museums and castles come together in a fascinating journey. Thanks to the cooperation with the diocesan, many of the works have been loaned by churches and monasteries for the very first time and are being presented in the rooms of the Kunsthalle in this unique exhibition. Rarely in the past have visitors been given the opportunity to behold these otherwise almost inaccessible works in such proximity, allowing their artistic and technical qualities to be unveiled.
The Many Faces of Rococo
Johann Baptist Straub, Raphael the Archangel from the high altar, 1767, gilt and polyhcrome wood, 200 cm (Munich: Parish Church of St. Michael, © Thomas Dashuber).
The exhibition is showing approximately 160 rococo masterpieces, particularly sculptures in wood and other materials like stucco, clay, porcelain and silver, together with paintings, drawings and graphic prints. The starting point of the exhibition is the baroque artwork combining architecture, painting, stucco and sculpture, which reached its final, particularly impressive culmination in the hands of the Asam brothers. Contextualised by Bozzetti (sculptural designs) and drawings, the sculptures of Johann Baptist Straub and Ignaz Günther are at the very heart of the exhibition. Straub is considered to be the founding father of rococo sculpture, while Günther marks the pinnacle, and yet also the grand finale, of the epoch. Christian Jorhan the Elder (1727–1804) and Franz Xaver Schmädl (1705–1777) represent the generation of students who propagated Munich’s rococo beyond the city walls and out into the surrounding areas. Anton Bustelli introduces a mundane aspect: the effortless sophistication and playfulness of his renowned porcelain figures, which were popular table decorations at court, symbolise the entire era. The final chapter of the exhibition is dedicated to the sculptor Roman Anton Boos (1733–1810). Although his works are clearly rooted in the tradition of his predecessors, at the same
time they presage the emerging art of classicism.
François Cuvilliés, detail of the decorative frame from the St Anne Altar, 1742–44 (Munich: Wallfahrts-kirche St. Anna, © Thomas Dashuber)
Between Play and Earnest
The exhibition aims to offer fresh insight with an unadulterated look at the epoch and, in so doing, not merely showcase the high artistic quality of the works but also to integrate them in the zeitgeist and the spiritual world. In the process, rococo art is taken literally in its specificity and its characteristics—the playful, delicate elements—turn out to be its inherent strengths. Far-reaching issues, relating to the mounting of the sculptures, their architectural integration or workshop practice for example, are also addressed.
The art of Munich rococo interfuses sacrality and profanity, the ecclesiastical and courtly worlds, but also play and earnest. Thus, an aesthetic language emerges that is unique in Europe, yet entirely its own.
A lavishly illustrated catalogue with further essays and detailed information on all the exhibits has been published by Sieveking Verlag to accompany the exhibition.
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From the publisher:
Christoph Kürzeder, Ariane Mensger, Peter Volk, et al. Mit Leib und Seele: Münchner Rokoko von Asam bis Günther (Sieveking Verlag, 2014), 384 pages, ISBN 978-3944874159, 50€.
The exhibition Mit Leib und Seele (Body and Soul) aims to shed new light on the astounding stylistic diversity of the Munich Rococo between the years 1720 and 1770. The accompanying publication illustrates how a fresh consideration of the era provides illuminating insights into works by a range of artists, including the Asam brothers, Johann Baptist Straub, Franz Anton Bustelli, and Ignaz Günther. While the focus is on sculpture, the exhibition also features porcelain, silverwork, paintings, and drawings. The high art of the Rococo is presented in the context of its zeitgeist and religious milieu and appears more vibrant and more spectacular than ever: with their elegant, refined physicality and profound spirituality the artworks of this important period enter into a dialogue with viewers—and engage both body and soul.
The Kunsthalle of the Hypo Cultural Foundation in Munich is exhibiting these epochal works in partnership with the Diözesanmuseum Freising. The result of this collaboration is a unique exhibition in which the Munich Rococo will be seen in a presentation unprecedented in its magnitude and quality.
Reworking the Family Portraits of Schloss Grafenstein
In this sitting room, drawers painted with faux bois woodgrain and labelled with family estates are from the denuded archive shelves in the next room. On the chair is an unsigned oil portrait of Count Vinzenz Ferrerius Orsini-Rosenberg (1722–1794), an ancestor of Count Ferdinand used as the basis for a new work by Armin Guerino, titled 20130630-001. Photography by Fritz von der Schulenburg.
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This instance of recycling eighteenth-century source material for subsequent artistic production might fall somewhere between the collages of James Northcote (the subject of an exhibition this fall at the YCBA) and the work of Ai Weiwei (I’m thinking, for example, of Painted Vases). The article mentions an exhibition, but I could find nothing about it online and don’t know if it’s already happened or might still take place. –CH
From WoI’s Facebook page and the print edition of the article:
Michael Huey, “Relative Freedom,” The World of Interiors (August 2014): 70–79.
Original: Artist, Date, Sitter unknown, 69 x 55 cm. Revision: Alina Kunitsyna, Mlle Sphæræ, 2013
Seeking works of art to fill newly renovated living quarters, Austrian count Ferdinand Orsini-Rosenberg turned to the 90-odd ancestral portraits deteriorating in his ruined schloss next door. But instead of merely dusting off his forebears’ likenesses, he gave a crew of contemporary artists free rein to ‘refresh’ the originals.
Ferdinand Orsini-Rosenberg, second son of the late Prince Heinrich, presides over about 1,500 state square meters of what is basically storage space in the form of Schloss Grafenstein, the Carinthian palace built by his seventh great-grandfather and enlarged a century later—around 1730—by his fifth. Grafenstein, with is impressive facade and ruined interior, makes up part of his title and much of his patrimony, and in this way he is bound to it for life. At times the attachment is akin to being chained to a cadaver, and he is often sleepless as a result. “If an earthquake reduced it to rubble overnight,” he says, “I would thank God.” . . .
After an initial phase of consolidation [of family portraits], during which a local historian aided him in sorting, photographing, identifying and documenting the paintings, he assembled (with curatorial guidance) a group of 35 artists to whom they would be offered as raw material. Each artist would be allowed to select a single portrait to use as the basis for a new work—no strings attached and with a modest fee for the commission. The results would be gathered together for a summer exhibition in the colonnaded inner courtyard at Grafenstein and later hung in Ferdinand’s rooms in the granary. . . .
While his courageous, uncompromising idea did lead to a few crass and brazenly ruthless results, it also gave rise, at the other end of the spectrum, to a handful of marvels—works both highly moving and of considerable aesthetic relevance by Alina Kunitsyna, Armin Guerino, Manfred Bockelmann, Helmut Grill, Johanes Zechner, Siegfried Zaworka and Alex Amann among others. . .
A regular contributor to The World of Interiors, Michael Huey, as an artist himself interested in issues of archives and loss, is an interesting part of the story.
Exhibition | Picture Talking: James Northcote and the Fables
Samuel William Reynolds, after James Northcote, Lion and Snake (detail), 1799, mixed method engraving (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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The prints Northcote used in the collages date from the eighteenth century. Press release from the YCBA:
Picture Talking: James Northcote and the Fables
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2 October — 14 December 2014
Curated by Mark Ledbury and A. Cassandra Albinson
The first exhibition solely dedicated to James Northcote’s art and career, Picture Talking: James Northcote and the Fables will present a fascinating look at one of Britain’s most imaginative and eccentric painters.
William Daniell, after George Dance, James Northcote, between 1798 and 1819, graphite and red chalk on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper mounted on moderately thick, moderately textured, beige laid paper (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
Northcote (1746–1831) has been remembered primarily as a memoirist, a writer on art and artists, and a conversationalist whose strong opinions on diverse topics were often repeated in print. A pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, Northcote enjoyed a popular reputation in his time for painting portraits of historical subjects, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, and animals. This subsequently was overshadowed by his prominence as a source of information on his contemporaries. This exhibition, drawn exclusively from the rich holdings of the Yale Center for British Art, will redress that imbalance by presenting an array of Northcote’s art: paintings, drawings, prints, and, at its center, a practically unknown manuscript for Northcote’s One Hundred Fables, Original and Selected (1828).
Northcote wrote and illustrated these fables for adults during the last twenty years of his life. They convey moral lessons, often with themes comparing the similarities of humans to animals. Using techniques well ahead of his time, Northcote created collaged illustrations for the Fables by cutting humans, other animals, and background details from his collection of historical engravings, then reassembling them into chimerical scenes. This exhibition will explore the translation of Northcote’s highly original designs from collages to their ultimate form as wood engravings for two series of Fables, the first published in 1828, the second, posthumously, in 1833. The wood engravings provided simplified, but highly popular, interpretations of the original fables for mass production and consumption. Picture Talking will consider the questions of originality versus pastiche and image versus text through careful consideration of Northcote’s art. It will argue that in his earlier work as a history painter and print designer, Northcote worked through the process of borrowing and collage. Thus, the fables represent a culmination of his career.
Picture Talking: James Northcote and the Fables has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art. The co-curators are Mark Ledbury (Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney) and A. Cassandra Albinson (Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art).
Opening Lecture
Mark Ledbury | Inspiration and Eccentricity: The Ups and Downs of James Northcote
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1 October 2014, 5:30
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From Yale UP:
Mark Ledbury, James Northcote, History Painting, and the Fables (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2014), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0300208139, $65.
The artistic accomplishments of James Northcote (1746–1831) have tended to be overshadowed by his role as a biographer of Joshua Reynolds, first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, with whom Northcote apprenticed. Here, Mark Ledbury constructs a very different image of Northcote: that of a prolific member of the Royal Academy and an active participant in the cultural and political circles of the Romantic era, as well as a portrait and history painter in his own right. This book focuses on Northcote’s One Hundred Fables (1828), a masterpiece of wood engraving, and the unconventional, collaged manuscripts for the volume. The Fables, extensively published here for the first time, were an early experiment in what is now a familiar multimedia practice. Idiosyncratic, personal, and visionary, One Hundred Fables serves as a lens through which to examine Northcote’s long, complex, and fruitful artistic career.
Mark Ledbury is Power Professor of Art History and director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney.
Reviewed | Judith Bonner on ‘The Coast and the Sea’
Linda S. Ferber, The Coast and the Sea: Marine and Maritime Art in America (New York and London: New-York Historical Society in association with D. Giles Limited, 2014), 104 pages, ISBN 978-1907804311, $30 / £20.
Reviewed for Enfilade by Judith H. Bonner
The New-York Historical Society, that city’s oldest museum, is celebrating its recent reopening after its lengthy renovation with a traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue by Linda S. Ferber.1 The exhibition features more than 60 artworks and artifacts, primarily paintings, including portraits, genre scenes, and marine and maritime scenes. Overall, the images document the development of the New York area with its harbor and its close relationship with the Atlantic Ocean, the great maritime highway for trade and immigration.
Works selected for the exhibition have their origins in the eighteenth century, beginning in 1728 and ending in 1904. Maritime-related artifacts include a vintage spyglass, scrimshaw, snuff boxes, and an 1816 silver presentation soup tureen commemorating acts of bravery during the War of 1812. The provenance of each artwork documents the development of the New-York Historical Society, as well as the city’s art collectors, their tastes, and their interests.
The exhibition features work by artists whose names are familiar, as well as those who are unfamiliar. The painters include Thomas Birch, Thomas Buttersworth, Carlton Theodore Chapman, Thomas Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Julian Oliver Davidson, Mauritz Frederick Hendrick De Haas, James Guy Evans, Robert Havell Jr., John Frederick Kensett, Rembrandt Peale, Francis Augustus Silva, and John Vanderlyn.
Several artists had nautical experience that informed their art in subject, rigging, and construction of the vessels. Buttersworth served in the British navy, while De Haas held an artist’s commission in the Dutch navy. James Guy Evans possibly served in the American navy. Chapman ran away to sea as a teenager; and Davidson sailed the globe, making sketches that provided visual sources for many years. Evident in these artists’ works is their understanding of the action of waves and atmospheric effects over the seas at different times of the day or season.
The marine subjects include frigates engaged in famous sea battles, working vessels and bustling port scenes, marine recreation scenes, portraits of heroic sea captains, and pioneering merchants. Marine scenes focus on recreation, shipwrecks, disasters, and military encounters, particularly those in the War of 1812 and Civil War. The exhibition spreads its reach down the East Coast, swinging farther south to the Battle of Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico and the Battle of Port Hudson up the Mississippi River about 100 miles above New Orleans.
Portraitists range from eighteenth-century painter John Wollaston to early nineteenth-century painters John Vanderlyn and Rembrandt Peale, the latter of whom executed a portrait of naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur in dress uniform and set against a dramatic stormy sky. Wollaston’s circa-1750 portrait of wealthy colonial merchant-shipbuilder Captain John Waddell, who owned a fleet of ships, sets the stage for the succession of ships’ portraits seen throughout the catalogue. Early portraits include personages having distinguished careers or an association with maritime enterprises. The sitter is often shown near an open window through which one views a conventionalized seascape or harbor scene with masted vessels. Other sitters are shown with maps, globes, compass, a spyglass, or other maritime instruments.
The catalogue is well researched and documented with a select bibliography. Explanations of the marine scenes are succinct yet vivid; the prose is fluid and often poetic. Ferber distinguishes between marine scenes—which focus on the pure seascape, its coast and environs—and maritime paintings. The latter, Ferber explains, emphasize human activity and other enterprises on shore or at sea. Her knowledge of nautical terminology and national history is evident throughout. She traces visual conventions from their development in seventeenth-century Holland, their passage into the British school of marine painting, and subsequent introduction into English colonies in the New World.
Ferber consistently places artworks within a broader historical context and, when appropriate, within a cultural narrative. Brief biographical sketches of artists trace their artistic development within the maritime tradition. Ferber discusses allegorical themes in paintings, as well as the effect that nostalgic longing for historically simpler times had upon the proliferation and re-creation of popular scenes celebrating heroic national victories and spirited naval encounters.
The book invites readers to the repeated examination of the images, some of which, like those illustrating the America’s Cup, are iconic. Truly memorable is a painting by Howard Pyle, A Privateersman Ashore (1893), shown in historically correct clothing and accouterments. The privateer stands near the Battery and Castle Clinton at the time of the War of 1812, posed and preening, with smoke from his cigar curling upward from the corner of his mouth as townspeople in the distance look toward him with disdain. The latter is a comment about the disapprobation citizens held for such freebooters, who preyed upon British ships.
Closing this maritime jaunt through history are two paintings. The first, by Andrew Meyer, shows President Grover Cleveland reviewing a naval parade in New York Harbor as the setting for opening ceremonies of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, with the Statue of Liberty clearly visible, as though she also stands in review of the parade. Lastly, in 1904 Chapman portrays the Great East River Bridge (now Brooklyn Bridge) over the East River, celebrating New York’s location on the rim of the Atlantic, the gateway to America.
1. Venues for exhibition include: The Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Florida (25 January — 9 March 2014); The Baker Museum of Art, Naples, Florida (19 April — 6 July 2014); Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine (January — May 2015); The Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut (6 June — 13 September 2015); and The New York State Museum, Albany, New York (24 October 2015 — 22 February 2016).
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Judith H. Bonner is Senior Curator and Curator of Art at The Historic New Orleans Collection.
Exhibition | Christophe-Paul de Robien and the Age of Libertinism
Phallus of blown glass.
From the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes:
Cabinet de Curiosités: Le Temps des Libertinages
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, 13 June 2014 — 4 January 2015
Vincennes Porcelain Manufactory, Le Flûteur
(The Flute Lesson), ca. 1752–53
(Paris: Musée National de la Céramique de Sèvres)
Christophe-Paul de Robien (1698–1756) possédait dans son cabinet douze objets érotiques dont certains qualifiés d’obscènes dans les inventaires. Il s’agit là de peu de chose pour en faire un érotomane, mais c’est plus que ce que possédait Caylus ou Calvet à la même époque.
Cette exposition accompagnant la réouverture du cabinet de curiosités tentera de remettre dans son contexte les objets érotiques de Robien à partir d’autres objets qui lui sont contemporains : des raretés venues de Guimet, du Louvre et des Arts décoratifs délimiteront les contours d’un érotisme longtemps occulté parmi les collections d’amateurs que la seconde moitié du XVIIIème polarisera entre bon gout et vulgarité.
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Sandra Dufils provides a summary here»
Jean-Baptiste Gandon provides a summary here»
Information on Christophe-Paul de Robien’s collection generally is available here»
And finally, the museum’s website provides this impressively extensive bibliography on eroticism, sexuality, and libertinism
(as a PDF File).
Exhibition | Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture
Artist unknown, Elihu Yale, the 2nd Duke of Devonshire, Lord James Cavendish, Mr. Tunstal, and an Enslaved Servant, ca. 1708, oil on canvas (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Gift of the 11th Duke of Devonshire)
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Press release from the YCBA:
Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2 October 2014 — 14 December 2014
Curated by Esther Chadwick, Meredith Gamer, and Cyra Levenson
This October, the Yale Center for British Art will shed new
light on representations of slavery in Britain through more than sixty paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and decorative objects. Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain will examine the ways in which portraiture reflected the perceptions, attitudes, and contradictions of slavery at the time.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl of Harrington, 1782 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art)
The rise of the British Empire during the eighteenth century, fueled by enslaved labor on plantations in the Caribbean and the mainland of North America, contributed to a period of economic and cultural growth. It also brought unprecedented numbers of Africans and people of African descent, both enslaved and free, to Britain. Figures of Empire explores the impact of these developments on the most popular artistic genre of the time: the portrait.
In eighteenth-century Britain, portraits were a principal means of self- representation. Sitters conveyed information about themselves in a variety of ways—through clothing, setting, props, and, often, in relation to subordinate figures, such as servants or slaves. In many cases, these figures were modeled after life; however, in the eighteenth century, they were rarely regarded as subjects in their own right. By contrast, this exhibition challenges us to consider all of the figures depicted within a given portrait as individuals with histories and as ‘figures of empire’—as people whose lives were shaped by British imperialism and the institution of transatlantic slavery. Figures of Empire asks us to think again about what exactly a portrait is and how the answer to this question might change over time.
Studio of Francis Harwood, Bust of a Man, ca. 1758, black limestone on yellow marble socle (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
The exhibition opens with a selection of early eighteenth-century portraits, maps, and sculptures that trace Britain’s expanding commercial empire and engagement with the institution of transatlantic slavery. Anchoring this display is an important and rarely exhibited group portrait that includes Elihu Yale, the founding benefactor of Yale University, along with an enslaved servant. The next section focuses on the role and representation of slavery in a number of mid-century portraits and conversation pieces, including William Hogarth’s Portrait of a Family (ca. 1735) and Francis Harwood’s remarkable sculpted Bust of a Man (1758). The exhibition continues with an exploration of imagery produced within the context of abolitionism later in the century, examining the particular impact of the antislavery movement on the practice of Britain’s leading portraitist, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Finally, the exhibition concludes by highlighting a number of cases in which portraiture became a means for some of African birth and descent who crossed the Atlantic aboard slave ships to forge new identities as both black and British.
The exhibition presents the portraits and their historical context through a wide range of media and art forms. Selected primarily from the Center’s holdings, the display also will be enriched by loans from other Yale collections, and from the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Figures of Empire takes its place in a new body of scholarship and critical engagement with the legacy of slavery, including the recent high-profile films Twelve Years a Slave (2013) and Belle (2014). It also expands upon conversations begun by prior scholarly publications and exhibitions at the Center, most significantly Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (2007). While Art and Emancipation focused on slavery in British colonial Jamaica, this exhibition will turn its sights to Britain.
The exhibition includes a series of interviews with academic and curatorial scholars, as well as artists, to help place the works of art in a contemporary context. The interviews will be presented as part of an interactive presentation, accessible in the exhibition and on the Center’s website. In addition, a series of related programs, including lectures, exhibitions, a conference, and a film screening, is taking place across Yale University. Highlights include a pendant exhibition entitled Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Atlantic Britain at the Lewis Walpole Library, and a major international conference planned in partnership with The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, entitled Visualizing Slavery and British Culture in the Eighteenth Century.
Figures of Empire has been organized by the Center and curated by Esther Chadwick and Meredith Gamer, PhD candidates in the history of art at Yale University, and Cyra Levenson, Associate Curator of Education at the Yale Center for British Art.
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Figures of Empire: Opening Panel Discussion
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 8 October 2014, 5:30
A conversation with Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University; Kobena Mercer, Professor, History of Art and African American Studies, Yale University; and Titus Kaphar, artist.
Exhibition | Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology
H. Cock, after prints included in Captain John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted
Negroes of Surinam, from the year 1772 to 1777, elucidating the history of that country and describing its productions
(London, 1796). Left: after William Blake, The Skinning of the Aboma Snake, shot by Capt. Stedman. Right: after Benedetti,
Indian Female of the Arrowauka Nation. Though originally appearing in separate volumes of Stedman, the two images
were here printed together.
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From The Lewis Walpole Library:
Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain
The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, 20 October 2014 — 27 March 2015
Curated by Hazel Carby and Heather Vermeulen
Prospects of Empire: Slavery and Ecology in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain will explore the notion of empire’s ‘prospects’—its gaze upon bodies and landscapes, its speculations and desires, its endeavors to capitalize upon seized land and labor, as well as its failures to manage enslaved persons and unruly colonial ecologies. It will read latent anxieties in the management of bodies and borders, both in the colonies and in the metropole, and will examine the forces that empire mustered in efforts to quell and contain various threats to its regimes of power and knowledge. In addition to the focus on eighteenth-century material, the exhibition will feature a selection of four lithographs from Joscelyn Gardner’s series Creole Portraits III: Bringing down the Flowers (2009–11), a recent joint acquisition by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Gardner’s work mines the eighteenth-century Jamaica archive of white English immigrant and overseer Thomas Thistlewood, whose plantation ledger book will be on loan from the Beinecke.
A pendant exhibition, Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture, will be on display at the Yale Center for British Art from 2 October until 14 December 2014.
Exhibition | William Blake: Apprentice and Master
William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar, ca. 1795–1805, colour print,
ink, and watercolour on paper, 54.3 x 72.5 cm (London: Tate)
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From the Ashmolean:
William Blake: Apprentice and Master
Ashmolean, Oxford, 4 December 2014 — 1 March 2015
Curated by Michael Phillips and Colin Harrison
This major exhibition focuses on the extraordinary life and work of William Blake (1757–1827), printmaker, painter and revolutionary poet of the prophetic books. It examines his formation as an artist, apprenticeship as an engraver, and his maturity during the 1790s when he was at the height of his powers as both an artist and revolutionary poet. We also explore his influence on the young artist-printmakers who gathered around him in the last years of his life, including Samuel Palmer, George Richmond and Edward Calvert.
One of the most popular English artists, William Blake is still one of the least understood. His radical politics were reflected in his extraordinary technical innovations, especially in the field of printmaking and the illuminated book. This exhibition brings together more than 90 of Blake’s most celebrated works and offers new insights into his remarkable originality and influence.
At a young age William Blake showed artistic promise and, at the age of 15, was apprenticed to James Basire, the official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. Under Basire’s tutelage, Blake was sent out to study London’s gothic churches and, most particularly, the monuments and decorations in Westminster Abbey—an experience which was to prove formative for his later style and imagery. The first section of the exhibition looks at Blake’s early work, exemplifying his already unorthodox approach.
After studying at the Antique School of the Royal Academy, Blake opened a print shop with his former apprentice colleague, James Parker, and from this point he began to associate with the leading writers and intellectuals of radical politics such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, who gathered at the house of publisher, Joseph Johnson. Blake was soon producing prints of startling originality, which anticipate by nearly a century the monotypes made by artists such as Edgar Degas from the 1880s onwards. The exhibition examines Blake’s technical innovations in the creation of his illuminated books, which brought a new sophistication to colour printing. Among the works on display are several of the most extraordinary illuminated books, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and a complete set of the plates from Europe: A Prophecy, together with some of the finest separate plates, among them Nebuchadnezzar and Newton.
Apprentice and Master will also look at Blake’s later career when, encouraged by his friendship with the young artist, John Linnell, he developed an interest in the great artist-printmakers of the Renaissance such as Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leyden. It was Linnell who commissioned the last of Blake’s great series of watercolours, the illustrations to the Book of Job and to Dante. It was these works, and above all the small woodcut illustrations to Virgil’s Pastorals, which inspired the young artists Samuel Palmer, George Richmond, and Edward Calvert, known as the Ancients. During the last three years of his life, they visited Blake and his wife in their two-room flat off the Strand. This exhibition juxtaposes many of the works the Ancients would have seen on these visits, with their own early works. Among the most notable are Palmer’s greatest creations, the six sepia drawings of 1825; and Calvert’s exquisite woodcuts of the late 1820s.
William Blake: Apprentice and Master has been curated by Dr Michael Phillips (Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York) and Mr Colin Harrison (Senior Curator of European Art, Ashmolean Museum).
Michael Phillips is currently writing a biography of William Blake in Lambeth during the anti-Jacobin Terror in Britain, entitled Blake and the Terror. His edition in facsimile of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was published by the Bodleian Library and the University of Chicago Press in 2011. He was guest curator of the William Blake Exhibition that opened in Paris at the Petit Palais from 1 April to 28 June 2009 and editor of the catalogue. He was also guest curator of the major Blake exhibition at Tate Britain and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000–2001, and is currently guest curator of the Blake exhibition opening in December 2014 in the new galleries of the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford, William Blake: Apprentice & Master, where Blake’s printmaking studio at No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, will be recreated.
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Michael Phillips, William Blake: Apprentice and Master (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2015), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-1854442888, £21 / $40.
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