Exhibition | Caroline Watson and Female Printmaking
Opening next month at The Fitzwilliam:
Caroline Watson and Female Printmaking in Late Georgian England
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 23 September 2014 — 4 January 2015
Curated by David Alexander
Caroline Watson, The Death of Cardinal Beaufort, stipple and etching after Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1792.
Caroline Watson (1760/61–1814) can be seen as the first British woman professional engraver. Many women in Britain had made prints before her day, but she was the first to make an extended career as an independent engraver. Nearly all those who had earlier made prints were either amateurs, making prints for amusement, or members of printmakers’ families, playing their part in family enterprises. The interest of her career is increased because she was working at a time when women were becoming more important as print buyers; some of her output reflected this change and the accompanying popularity of prints catering to feminine taste. She received support from other women, including recognition from Queen Charlotte, who appointed her ‘Engraver to the Queen’ in 1785, after she had been working for only five years. Later she was encouraged by the wealthy Bute family, particularly by the 4th Earl’s second wife, whose guest she was on several occasions at Luton Park, where Lord Bute, had one of the finest picture collections in England.
At the same time as finding support from other women Caroline Watson was encouraged by several influential men who saw advantage in using her skills; at the start of her career there were the painters Robert Edge Pine, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Ozias Humphry, as well as the printseller John Boydell, all of whom must have known her father; at the end of her career there was William Hayley, a poet and man of letters who befriended many artists. He both admired her as an ailing woman working on her own, and saw her as a reliable and talented collaborator. Having previously employed William Blake to engrave book illustrations he instead employed Caroline Watson on his Life of Romney, 1809. She did not owe her success to patronage, but to her great skill and dedication as an engraver; however the accidents of patronage were an important element in any artist’s career, especially for a woman who was of a retiring nature and not particularly robust in health.
The 200th anniversary of Watson’s death and the fact that the Fitzwilliam and the Folger Library own a number of unpublished letters by her to Hayley, which throw much light on her situation and way of life, provide a suitable opportunity not just to look at her career but to examine printmaking by women in the Britain of her time.
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Caroline Watson and Female Printmaking in Late Georgian England
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 24 September 2014
David Alexander, Honorary Keeper of British Prints and curator of the exhibition, will give a lunchtime talk at 1:15 on Wednesday, 24 September in the Seminar Room. Free admission is by token, 1 per person, available at the Courtyard Entrance desk from 12.45 on the day of the talk.
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Note (added 28 September 2014) — The catalogue is available from the Fitzwilliam:
David Alexander, Caroline Watson and Female Printmaking in Late Georgian England (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2014), 126 pages, ISBN 978-0957443464, £15.
Caroline Watson, who died in 1814, can be seen as the first professional woman engraver, in the sense that she worked independently rather than as a member of a family of engravers. Over a career of thirty years she engraved more than a hundred very delicate prints in the stipple, or dotted manner, which was particularly suited for reproducing miniature portraits. The catalogue, which contains a chronological list of her prints, puts her in the context of the female printmaking of her time, and shows how exceptional was her achievement in working in a male dominated profession. The catalogue carries a transcription of sixteen letters written to her last major employer, William Hayley, which throw much light on the working methods of engravers in general.
Exhibition | Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin
Press release (4 August) from The Fitzwilliam:
Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 14 October 2014 — 25 January 2015
Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 31 March — 12 July 2015
Curated by Jane Munro
Fashion doll with costume and accessories, 1755–60; wood, gesso, paint, glass, human hair, knitted cotton, satin, silk, gilt braid, wire, silk gauze, linen, cotton, and silk satin, 60 x 42 x 43 cm (London: V&A Museum)
Every picture tells a story … but it does not always give away its secrets. For much of its existence, the artist’s mannequin, or lay figure, was one of art’s best-kept.
Now, for the first time, Silent Partners will unveil the mannequin’s secret life to show how, from being an inconspicuous studio tool, a piece of equipment as necessary as easel, pigments and brushes, the lay figure became the fetishised subject of the artist’s painting, and eventually, in the twentieth century, a work of art in its own right.
A common figure in the studios of painters and sculptors from the Renaissance onwards, this ‘artful implement’ was used to study perspective, arrange compositions, ‘rehearse’ the fall of light and shade and, especially, to paint drapery and clothing. But, while even the very greatest artists condoned its use, the mannequin best served its purpose by remaining ‘silent’: too present or visible in the finished picture, the mannequin could make figures appear stiff and unnatural, and so betray the tricks of the artist’s trade.
The nineteenth century was a turning point. Mannequin-making became a profession in its own right and Paris, especially, became a leading centre of production. Competition was fierce to create and perfect the ‘naturalistic’ mannequin, one that was life-size with an articulated skeleton that could move in realistic ways and an exterior finish that was painted and padded to look—sometimes eerily—human.
And as the mannequins became an increasingly sophisticated human replica, so they emerged from the anonymity of the studio to take their place, centre stage, on the canvas. At first the mannequin featured humorously, in witty visual games of ‘hide and seek’ and double entendre. However, throughout the course of the nineteenth century, painters such as Degas began to represent it in more troubling ways, playing on the unnerving psychological presence of a figure that was realistic, yet unreal, lifelike, yet lifeless. Others—photographers especially—explored in more voyeuristic terms how the relationship between male painter and female mannequin played out behind closed doors, revealing the studio as a place of potent erotic encounter.
Paul Huot, Female Mannequin, ca. 1816; wood, metal, horsehair, wax, silk, cotton and painted papier-mâché head, 163 x 65 cm, (Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Sammlung Angewandte Kunst)
By the end of the century, innovations in the manufacture of mannequins shifted to the shop window dummy, the lay figure’s closest kin. Again, Paris led the way, and the fashion mannequin was transformed by firms such as Pierre Imans and Siégel from a schematic approximation of the human form into an uncannily realistic surrogate that inspired both consumerist longing and sexual fantasy.
This distinctively modern mannequin—one that reflected the life and elegance of its era—set a new challenge for twentieth-century painters and photographers. Featureless and expressionless, they haunted the paintings of the Italian metaphysical painters Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà, while the Surrealists celebrated the ‘modern’ mannequin as a manifestation of the ‘marvellous’, an object that could reveal the artist’s—and our—secret unconscious desires.
One of the most wide-ranging and ambitious shows ever hosted at the Fitzwilliam, the exhibition will feature over 180 paintings, drawings, books and photographs as well as fashion dolls, trade catalogues, a series of extraordinary patent documents and videos that will surprise and at times disturb. There will be paintings and drawings by Fra Bartolommeo, Cézanne, Poussin, Gainsborough, Millais, Ford Madox Brown, Courbet, Wilhelm Trübner, Kokoschka and Degas as well as photographs by and of Surrealist artists such as Bellmer, Raoul Ubac, Dalì and Man Ray; two works by Jake and Dinos Chapman will form a twenty-first-century coda. But among the most striking and fascinating exhibits will be the mannequins themselves: from beautifully carved sixteenth-century figures to haunting wooden effigies once belonging to Sickert (and maybe Hogarth) and painted dolls of full human height, top-of-the range models that were highly sought after by artists throughout Europe.
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From Yale UP:
Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0300208221, $65.
The articulated human figure made of wax or wood has been a common tool in artistic practice since the 16th century. Its mobile limbs enable the artist to study anatomical proportion, fix a pose at will, and perfect the depiction of drapery and clothing. Over the course of the 19th century, the mannequin gradually emerged from the studio to become the artist’s subject, at first humorously, then in more complicated ways, playing on the unnerving psychological presence of a figure that was realistic, yet unreal—lifelike, yet lifeless.
Silent Partners locates the artist’s mannequin within the context of an expanding universe of effigies, avatars, dolls, and shop window dummies. Generously illustrated, this book features works by such artists as Poussin, Gainsborough, Degas, Courbet, Cézanne, Kokoschka, Dalí, Man Ray, and others; the astute, perceptive text examines their range of responses to the uncanny and highly suggestive potential of the mannequin.
Jane Munro is a curator in the Department of Paintings, Drawings and Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum and director of studies in history of art at Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge.
Hand Fans, Goose Necks, and Archery Contests
Barthélemy du Pan, The Children of Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1746
Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014
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Pierre-Henri Biger’s website dedicated to the history of fans, Place de l’Eventail, recently published a notice related to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century target contests, commonly held in mid-August, involving a live goose (or more precisely, the goose’s neck, cou de l’oie).1 Biger quotes from Paul Sébillot’s Le Folklore de France (Paris, 1906), to make sense of a mis au rectangle (pictured at the website):
In Grez-Doiceau, in the Walloon Brabant, the second day of the fair, a live goose was hanging from a rope which brought together the upper ends of two long poles stuck in the ground. A man perched on a trestle remembered all the calamities which had hit the town during the past year, and accused the goose to be the cause. . .2
Installation view of The First Georgians, The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 2014.
With The First Georgians exhibition (on view at The Queen’s Gallery in London until October 12) still fresh in my memory, it’s hard to not to think of Barthélemy du Pan’s 1746 large-scale portrait of The Children of Frederick, Prince of Wales (Royal Collection), which depicts the future George III as having just struck a wooden popinjay.3 The prince wears the tartan of the Royal Company of Archers—which, as a British regimental uniform, was exempt from the 1745 ban on Scottish national dress. Bearing in mind Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s suggestion that we understand the picture as “an early example of the process by which Scottish identity became something manly and romantic, rather than threatening and rebellious,” I wonder if rustic traditions of shooting a living bird as part of a celebration with ‘atonement/scapegoat’ undertones might add another layer of relevant associations.4 I’m not sure how far I would push the point: the two contests weren’t the same thing (particularly from an animal rights perspective), and with folk festivals, it’s difficult to pin down specifics (times, places, meanings, &c.). Still, Biger’s piece, at the very least, suggests a larger context for archery contests and their pictorial representation in the eighteenth century and might encourage us to look to fans for useful points of comparison.
–Craig Ashley Hanson
1. Pierre-Henri Biger’s piece is available in both English and French. On the topic generally, see Biger’s recent article, “Introduction à l’éventail européen aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 36 (July 2014): 84–92. The issue, edited by Katherine Ibbett, is dedicated to the topic of fans. The table of contents is available as a PDF file here.
2. Paul Sébillot, Le Folklore de France (Paris, 1906), volume 3, pp. 247–48.
3. The Royal Collection’s online entry for Barthélemy du Pan’s The Children of Frederick, Prince of Wales is available here.
4. Desmond Shawe-Taylor makes the point in the entry for the painting from the exhibition catalogue, which he also edited, The First Georgians: Art & Monarchy, 1714–60 (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2014), p. 366.
Exhibition | Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea
From the NMWA:
Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 5 December 2014 — 12 April 2015
Curated by Timothy Verdon
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Madonna of the Goldfinch, ca. 1767–70 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Samuel H. Kress Collection #1943.4.40)
Appearing throughout the entire world, her image is immediately recognizable. In the history of Western art, she was one of the most popular subjects for centuries. Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea is a landmark exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), bringing together masterworks from major museums, churches and private collections in Europe and the United States. Iconic and devotional, but also laden with social and political meaning, the image of the Virgin Mary has influenced Western sensibility since the sixth century.
Picturing Mary examines how the image of Mary was portrayed by well-known Renaissance and Baroque artists, including Botticelli, Dürer, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Gentileschi and Sirani. More than 60 paintings, sculptures and textiles are on loan from the Vatican Museums, Musée du Louvre, Galleria degli Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti and other public and private collections—many exhibited for the first time in the United States.
“Among the most important subjects in Western art for more than a millennium was a young woman: Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her name was given to cathedrals, her face imagined by painters and her feelings explored by poets,” said exhibition curator and Marian scholar Monsignor Timothy Verdon, director, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, Italy. “This exhibition will explore the concept of womanhood as represented by the Virgin Mary, and the power her image has exerted through time, serving both sacred and social functions during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.”
Picturing Mary is the newest project in an ongoing program of major historical loan exhibitions organized by NMWA, including An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (2003) and Royalists to Romantics: Women Artists from the Louvre, Versailles, and other French National Collections (2012). In addition to illustrating the work of women artists, NMWA also presents exhibitions and programs about feminine identity and women’s broader contributions to culture. Picturing Mary extends, in particular, the humanist focus of Divine and Human: Women in Ancient Mexico and Peru, a large-scale exhibition organized by NMWA in 2006.
The full press release (16 July 2014) is available as a PDF file here»
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From ACC Distrbution:
Timothy Verdon, Melissa R. Katz, Amy Remensnyder, Miri Rubin, Kathryn Wat, Picturing Mary Woman, Mother, Idea (New York: Scala Arts Publishers, 2014), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1857598957, $45 / £30.
Iconic and devotional, but also fraught with social and political significance, the image of the Virgin Mary has shaped Western art since the sixth century. Depictions of the Virgin Mary in art through the ages are examined from a unique combination of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and contemporary art-historical perspectives. The thought-provoking texts examine Mary’s image as an enthroned queen, a tender young mother and a pious woman, demonstrating how her personification of womanhood has resonated throughout history to the present day.
Timothy Verdon is director of Museo dell Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. Melissa R. Katz is Luther Gregg Sullivan Fellow in Art History, Wesleyan University. Amy Remensnyder is associate professor, Department of History at Brown University. Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History, Queen Mary University of London. Kathryn Wat is Chief Curator,
National Museum of Women in the Arts.
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.
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