Exhibition | Satires: Caricatures Genevoises et Anglaises du XVIIIe Siècle
Now on view in Geneva:
Satires: Caricatures Genevoises et Anglaises du XVIIIe Siècle
Musées d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève, 16 May — 31 August 2014
Dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, Genève voit naître plusieurs artistes au talent satirique avéré, tels Jean Huber l’Ancien ou Wolfgang-Adam Töpffer. La France est alors le premier modèle de l’art «sérieux» pour les Genevois, mais ce sont les productions anglaises qui nourrissent leur verve comique et parfois férocement critique à l’égard des mœurs, de la politique ou de la religion de leur temps. Si le lien entre les artistes locaux et leurs illustres contemporains anglais, tel William Hogarth, a souvent été souligné par les historiens de l’art, jamais il n’a été présenté au public sous la forme d’une exposition. Le Cabinet d’arts graphiques se propose de combler cette lacune.
The exhibition flyer is available here»
The press release is available here»
Exhibition | The Fortunes of the Italian Primitives, ca. 1800
From the exhibition website:
La Fortuna dei Primitivi: Tesori d’Arte dalle Collezioni Italiane fra Sette e Ottocento
The Fortunes of the Primitives: Art Treasures from Italian Collections
between the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, 24 June — 8 December 2014
Libro d’Ore di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Annunciazione (Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Ashb. 1874, c. 13v)
This exhibition is the first ever dedicated to the topic as a whole. It proposes to offer a critical-bibliographic picture of this very important cultural phenomenon concerning the history of taste and collecting in Italy between the late XVIII century and early XIX century. Among other things, this phenomenon exerted a considerable and direct influence on the formation of the major public art collections in the most important European countries.
The exhibition begins with the fundamental contribution of Giovanni Previtali (La fortuna dei primitivi. Dal Vasari ai Neoclassici, Turin, 1964), published exactly fifty years ago. With a scientific committee made up of art historians, historians of collecting and art critics, the exhibition intends to delve into this theme that to date has been relatively neglected. Significant progress has been made since the pioneering studies of Venturi, Previtali, Haskell and Pomian. The time is therefore ripe to reflect on this phenomenon and, especially, on the people who collected works by the primitives, to some extent systematically (and therefore not occasionally), and on those who strove to lay hands on these panel paintings with precious gold grounds (merchants, agents, procurers and restorers). Singling out Florence as the privileged site for an exhibition like this one is practically a foregone conclusion, given the wealth the Tuscan-Florentine area has had historically in the production of artworks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Almost all the collections of primitives indeed boasted works from this geographic area.
The exhibition will review the principal personalities who were in the forefront of this recovery, exponents of the church (from simple abbots to powerful cardinals), as well as noblemen and scholars who could not resist the attraction of these fragile and precious artistic representations. The rooms will therefore exhibit works of art (paintings, sculptures, objects of sumptuary art and illuminated codices) that were once in the collections of Francesco Raimondo Adami, Stefano Borgia, Angelo Maria Bandini, Alexis-François Artaud de Montor, Joseph Fesch, Teodoro Correr, Girolamo Ascanio Molin, Alfonso Tacoli Canacci, Sebastiano Zucchetti, Anton Francesco Gori, Agostino Mariotti, Matteo Luigi Canonici, Giuseppe Ciaccheri, Tommaso degli Obizzi, Gabriello Riccardi, Giovan Francesco De Rossi and Guglielmo Libri, to cite only the best-known names.
An animated dialogue will accompany visitors along a sort of ideal stroll through the Italy of collectors from the late XVIII century to the early XIX century. Visitors will be encouraged to make quick visual comparisons aimed at grasping the taste, the eye and the aesthetic sensitivity of the various collectors whose collections will be compared for the first time. Alongside paintings that at that time constituted the principal interest of collectors, there are other, equally important sections tied to illuminations and sculpture. The intention is to show the circularity of interests of collectors who with a pioneering approach sought to preserve these historical-scholarly representations, every day threatened by the risk of destruction or abandon.
The very numerous visitors of the Galleria dell’Accademia will thus be able to appreciate a selection of works of art of high and, in many cases, of the highest level, based on a serious scientific project, which will offer yet another confirmation of the heights of quality Italian art attained from the XIII to the XV century. The artists whose work will be on display in this exhibition include, among others, the Master of Magdalene, Arnolfo di Cambio, Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, Nardo di Cione, Lippo Memmi, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Pietro da Rimini, Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Andrea Mantegna, Cosmè Tura, Piermatteo d’Amelia and Giovanni Bellini. The exhibition catalogue is expected to constitute the till-now inexistent text of reference dedicated to this specific theme taken as a whole.
The catalogue will be available from ArtBooks.com:
Angelo Tartuferi and Gianluca Tormen, eds., La Fortuna dei Primitivi: Tesori d’Arte dalle Collezioni Italiane fra Sette e Ottocento (Firenze: Giunti, 2014), $78.
Exhibition | Art and Politics: The Electress Palatine
From the Museo delle Cappelle Medicee:
Art and Politics: The Electress Palatine and the Final Season of Medici Patronage in San Lorenzo
Museum of the Medici Chapels (Cappelle Medicee) Florence, 8 April — 2 November 2014
Curated by Monica Bietti
There are many reasons for paying due tribute to the Electress Palatine, Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici (1667–1743), the last descendent of the Grand-ducal branch of the Medici dynasty. Indeed the last years of her life—following the death of her brother the last Medici Grand Duke Gian Gastone—were intimately bound up with the present and future life of her State, for the safeguarding of which she drafted the “Family Pact,” the fundamental document that guaranteed the protection and conservation of the heritage of the Medici within their city and their State.
The idea for the exhibition stemmed from a 2012 project organised in collaboration between the REM museums of Mannheim—which wished to honour the memory of the Electress who lived and reigned in Germany following her marriage to the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm von Pfalz Neuburg, from 1691 to 1716—the Museum of the Medici Chapels, the Faculty of Medical Surgery of the University of Florence and the Superintendencies for the Archaeological Heritage of Tuscany, for the Architectural, Landscape, Historic, Artistic and Ethno-Anthropological Heritage of the Province of Florence and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. This project led, between the 8th and 22nd October of 2012, to the control of the state of conservation of the mortal remains of the Electress and the rehabilitation of the tomb as well as the restoration of part of the important collection of grave goods. The Museum of the Medici Chapels decided to illustrate to the public the results of this research and restoration by organising this exhibition, centred in particular on the last years of life of the Electress.
Among the outcomes of the control of the tomb and the remains of the last descendent of the Medici, the show displays to the public for the first time two gold medals, two coins and the dedicatory plaque. In addition, the exhibition is also intended to cast light on what Anna Maria Luisa did for art and politics in Florence from 1737, when her brother Gian Gastone died up to the year of her own death in 1743. It presents novelties and authentic rarities emerging from the new studies and researches that followed in the wake of the monographic show devoted to the Electress in 2006, curated by Stefano Casciu (The Wise Princess: The Legacy of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, Electress Palatine).
Bartolomäus van Douven, Allegoria degli Elettori Palatini come protettori delle Arti, 1722 (Firenze, Galleria degli Uffizi)
The show is divided into four sections designed to introduce the heterogeneous public of the Museum of the Medici Chapels to the personality of the Princess. The first, Childhood and the Adolescent Years at Poggio Imperiale, briefly illustrates her education and the years of her early youth that she spent at the Medici Villa of Poggio Imperiale with her brothers Ferdinando and Gian Gastone, her uncle Francesco Maria and her grandmother Vittoria della Rovere.
The second section, Youth and Marriage, opens with the fine portrait of Anna Maria Luisa as Flora by Antonio Franchi and deals with the period of her marriage to the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, Johann Wilhelm, celebrated in 1691, and her long sojourn in Germany where the couple were intensely engaged in artistic patronage, well-represented by the works commissioned from Bartolomeo Van Douven, whose famous Allegory of the Electors Palatine as Patrons of the Arts can be admired at the exhibition.
The third section, The Return to Florence and the Commitment to the Family Church, constitutes the core of the exhibition, illustrating the years immediately following the return to Florence of the Electress after the death of her husband in 1716. The events of these years significantly affected the complex of San Lorenzo, which was enhanced by important commissions made by Anna Maria Luisa, presented here in the light of new “political” documents. Following the “Family Pact” of 1737, the Princess indeed launched the final season of Medici patronage in the great complex of San Lorenzo: “Anna Maria set in motion a wide-ranging series of commission initiatives which were focused on San Lorenzo, comprising the construction of the bell-tower, the painting of the cupola of the basilica, the project for the decoration of the ceiling of the Chapel of the Princes (never carried through): it was clearly an attempt on her part to conclude the extensive cycle of operations begun by her distant ancestor Giovanni di Bicci three centuries earlier, in the service of the famous basilica and the public magnificence of the family” (Cristina Acidini).
The show ends with the fifth section, Death, which took place on 18 February 1743, where period engravings and publications illustrate the ceremonies connected with the event. Also displayed in this section are the three-dimensional cast of the head of the Electress, the medals and the other objects found in her tomb.
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From Sillabe:
Monica Bietti, Arte e Politica: L’Elettrice Palatina e l’ultima stagione della committenza medicea a San Lorenzo (Livorno, Sillabe, 2014), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-8883477324, €30.
La campagna di restauro e indagine che ha avuto per oggetto il monumentale complesso delle Cappelle dei Principi presso la basilica di San Lorenzo a Firenze ha dato esiti a dir poco straordinari, non ultima la riesumazione e la delicatissima ricognizione sulle spoglie mortali della principessa Anna Maria Luisa, evento eccezionale di altissimo profilo scientifico, documentato dal National Geographic, e in questo 2014 il Museo vuole renderne partecipe il pubblico.
Già nel 2006 Firenze ha reso omaggio all’ultima dei Medici con un’altra importante mostra La principessa saggia. L’eredità di Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici Elettrice Palatina, edito da Sillabe; in questo nuovo evento saranno affrontati temi che approfondiscono la vita di Anna Maria Luisa, moglie dell’Elettore Palatino Johann Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg, e la sua politica dopo il rientro a Firenze, in seguito della morte del fratello Giangastone.
La mostra delle 77 opere di vario genere, alcune delle quali mai esposte al pubblico, offriranno una panoramica aggiornata e approfondita della vita della principessa, le sue committenze artistiche, le sue scelte politiche e di famiglia.
Yorktown Museum Acquires Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo
Another portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo by William Hoare. . . From the press release (6 June 2014). . .
William Hoare, Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, ca. 1733
(Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation)
The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, a Virginia state agency that operates Jamestown Settlement and Yorktown Victory Center history museums, has acquired a previously unknown oil portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a freeborn, educated African who was kidnapped in Africa and sold as a slave in Maryland during the colonial era. Before taking its place as a centerpiece of the future American Revolution Museum at Yorktown (opening late 2016), the rare portrait (ca. 1733) goes on view at the Yorktown Victory Center this summer from June 14 through August 3.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was catapulted into fame in the 1730s when the remarkable story of his enslavement and redemption in the North American British colonies was published. From almost the moment he touched ground in London in April 1733, he won the respect of the leading lights of advanced learning in England and ultimately entered the annals of history as a figure embraced by the global abolitionist movement.
William Hoare, Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon), 1733 (NPG L245, Lent by Qatar Museums Authority/Orientalist Museum, Doha, 2010)
Showing Diallo in a white robe and turban, wearing around his neck a bright red leather pouch probably containing texts from the Qur’an, the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation portrait is one of two versions painted by William Hoare of Bath, a leading English portrait painter of the 18th century. They are the earliest known portraits done from life of an African individual who was held as a slave in the 13 British colonies that would become the United States of America. The other is currently on view in the National Portrait Gallery of London, on long-term loan following its purchase by the Qatar Museums Authority in 2009.
In a private collection since the 19th century, the Foundation’s portrait came to light following the publicity surrounding an appeal to the British public to keep the Qatar portrait in England. The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, Inc., purchased the oil-on-canvas painting with funds raised privately, including a lead gift from Foundation trustee Fred D. Thompson, Jr., of Thompson Hospitality, the country’s largest minority-owned food service company. “This portrait is a powerful symbol of the diversity of colonial America’s population, which included people from many different African cultures,” says Thompson. “Diallo—his image and story—is an ideal teaching opportunity for the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown galleries.”
“For approximately three years now, the Foundation has been in confidential negotiations to acquire this important portrait,” says Thomas E. Davidson, Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation senior curator. “Diallo’s visage speaks for the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans who remain largely unknown, yet who constituted a major part of late-colonial America’s population.”
“As we plan for the new museum,” Davidson continued, “we hope to convey the way in which the American Revolution represented the beginning of the end for slavery in the United States. While the Revolution did not end slavery by itself, it created an intellectual, moral and political climate in which the practice could not and did not continue forever.”
While there are similarities, neither Hoare portrait is a copy of the other. The painting of Diallo that will be exhibited at the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown is 14 by 12 inches, with the subject’s upper body turned toward his right, against a landscape background, within a painted oval. In the other portrait, Diallo is turned toward his left against a solid background. (more…)
Exhibition | Progress
Left: David Hockney, Bedlam from A Rake’s Progress, 1961–63; Right: William Hogarth, The Madhouse, Plate 8 from A Rake’s Progress, 1735. The images are from the University of Colorado at Boulder, which in 2012 mounted the exhibition Hockney and Hogarth: Selections from the CU Art Museum’s Collection of British Art.
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From The Foundling Museum:
Progress
The Foundling Museum, London, 6 June — 7 September 2014
To mark the 250th anniversary of Hogarth’s death, Progress brings together for the first time three great contemporary responses to his eternally modern moral tale, A Rake’s Progress. David Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress (1961–63), Yinka Shonibare MBE’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), and Grayson Perry’s The Vanity of Small Differences (2012) are shown alongside Hogarth’s original 1735 prints and joined by a newly commissioned work by Jessie Brennan.
Hogarth’s popularity with both artists and the public has endured for over two hundred years, and his work has provided inspiration to successive generations. Hockney, Shonibare, and Perry not only update Hogarth’s searing social commentary; they also add their own personal concerns to the creative dialogue. Commissioning an emerging female artist to respond to Hogarth’s work, the Foundling Museum further develops the conversation. Exploring issues of sexuality, race, class, vice, temptation, youth, and urban living this exhibition both highlights Hogarth’s continuing relevance and allows us to consider the idea of ‘progress’.
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Rough Music: A Folk at The Foundling Museum
The Foundling Museum, London, 1 July 2014
To accompany the Progress exhibition the Foundling Museum is excited to present a unique event by Dead Rat Orchestra and Jeremy Barlow. Dead Rat Orchestra will perform Rough Music, a new work, incorporating performances on a set of tuned bronze meat cleavers. These specially-commissioned instruments were designed by composer and DRO member Nathaniel Mann as part of his Embedded Residency at The Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford Contemporary Music working with a professional swordsmith using bronze sword casting techniques. The performance will be preceded by a talk by author and early music expert Jeremy Barlow, author of The Enraged Musician. Barlow will consider Hogarth’s prints and explore the artist’s representations of music and sound.
See more at the event website.
Exhibition | Peace Breaks Out! London and Paris in the Summer of 1814
Henry Parke, Drawing of the Arc de Triomphe, 1819
(London: Sir John Soane’s Museum)
Click here for a higher resolution image.
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From the press release (9 April 2014) for the upcoming exhibition:
Peace Breaks Out! London and Paris in the Summer of 1814
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 20 June – 13 September 2014
In the centenary year of the start of the First World War, Sir John Soane’s Museum presents Peace Breaks Out! an exhibition focusing on the summer of 1814, when Europe celebrated peace after the Treaty of Paris following the fall of Napoleon. Displaying over 100 rare pieces from the museum and private collections, the exhibition will explore this pivotal moment in the history of Europe, through the eyes of its contemporaries. Pieces on show include paintings and prints created for the festivities held in London and across the United Kingdom to mark the Treaty; drawings of Paris demonstrating the architectural changes that took place under Napoleon’s government; Sir John Soane’s collection of Napoleonica (objects belonging to Napoleon and his closest collaborators); and a quirky, satirical depiction of Englishmen visiting Paris, as seen by the French.
Dr Jerzy J. Kierkuć-Bieliński, Exhibitions Curator at Sir John Soane’s Museum, explains: “The Peace of 1814 and the subsequent congress of Vienna in 1815, after the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, laid the geo-political framework of the European Empires that would dominate the Continent and much of the globe up to the outbreak of the First World War. The Allies who celebrated the signing of the Treaty as guests of the Prince Regent in London, would, almost exactly one hundred years later face each on the battlefields of Europe—this time as enemies. In many ways, to understand the origins of the First World War, one has to look at the events of 1814 and the false promise of lasting peace that it offered.”
Sir John Soane’s drawings of Paris, commissioned by his clerk Henry Parke during their second visit in 1819, will be on display. The collection documents Soane’s personal study of the vast architectural changes to the French capital under Napoleon’s empire, especially the introduction of public space. Soane saw the French ruler as a great example of a self-made man, and he appreciated Napoleon as a patron of the arts, and keen supporter of architecture. From the Arc de Triomphe, to Place Vendôme, the drawings illustrate how Napoleon’s architectural innovations made a great impression on Soane.
Cossia, Portrait of Napoleon, 1797 (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum)
Items from Soane’s collection of Napoleonica—bronze medals commemorating the significant events of Napoleon’s reign and a sword thought to have been presented to Napoleon by one of his officers—will also be on display. The collection of Napoleonica features rare books from Soane’s library, including an exquisite hand-coloured volume by Napoleon’s personal architects and interior designers, Percier and Fontaine—arguably the most famous interior designers of the time. The volume, a gift to the future Empress Joséphine, illustrates a selection of late 15th- and 16th-century villas and palaces in and around Rome. The influence of Percier and Fontaine’s designs are most evident in Soane’s designs of his Library-Dining Room in the Museum. This section of the exhibition is completed by Sir John Soane’s ‘Napoleonic Ring’, a chased gold ring containing a lock of the Emperor’s hair, and a portrait from 1797 of a young Napoleon—aged just 27—the youngest portrait of Napoleon in any British collection, painted by a little known Italian artist named Cossia.
French caricatures of the British visitors to Paris in that summer of 1814 will complete the exhibition, presenting a view of French-British relations at the time. Paris had been cut off during Napoleon’s reign but in 1814 saw visitors flooding the French capital. The image portrayed is not flattering: the Parisians saw the British as awkwardly dressed, glutinous, obsessed with bodily functions and prone to the charms of Parisian courtesans. Such scenes, including the English gawping at the treasures amassed in the Louvre, dining at the elegant Café des Milles Colonnes or strolling in Place Vendôme would have been familiar to Soane, who travelled to Paris shortly after the fall of Napoleon.
This is the first exhibition devoted to marking a significant but somewhat overshadowed bicentenary. In 1914, plans were underway to mark the centenary of the Peace Treaty in 1814, but the outbreak of the Great War meant that these plans were abandoned as Europe (and much of the globe) spiralled once again into conflict.
Historian Alexander Rich, co-curator, comments: “We are now as far away from the outbreak of the First World War as the protagonists of that conflict were from the Peace Celebrations of 1814. This exhibition looks for the first time at a very specific time in the artistic production of Europe, and offers a different, perhaps hidden perspective, on the events that have shaped the world as we know it today.”
Peace Breaks Out! is part of the London Festival of Architecture. A series of events, special curator-led tours giving unprecedented access to unique and rarely seen architectural models in the Soane’s collection will be offered as part of the Festival.
Display | Capital Investment: Sir John Soane’s Model of Tyringham Hall
In conjunction with the London Festival of Architecture:
Capital Investment: Sir John Soane’s Model of Tyringham Hall, Buckinghamshire
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 3–28 June 2014
Sir John Soane revived the use of architectural models in Britain in his teaching and in his architectural practice. One of the more beautiful architectural models in Sir John Soane’s Museum is for Tyringham Hall, Buckinghamshire. Made by Joseph Parkins, c. 1793–94, in box wood, the highly detailed model was commissioned by Soane to present to his client William Praed, a Fleet Street banker. Soane designed and executed his country house from 1792 to 1800, and this model is an exceptional survival of a Soane Office ‘presentation model’ given to a client to explain volume, the arrangement of rooms and the play of light in the completed building (the model opens to reveal the interior arrangements of rooms and staircases). This is a rare opportunity to see this highly detailed presentation model which is not usually on display to the public. A model by a contemporary architect will be shown alongside to demonstrate the use importance of architectural models in today’s architectural practice.
Exhibition | The Splendours of Royal Coronations, 1610–1825
Palais du Tau, Reims (Photo by Ludovic Péron, 9 September 2007, Wikimedia Commons). From Wikipedia: “The building was largely rebuilt in Gothic style between 1498 and 1509, and modified to its present Baroque appearance between 1671 and 1710 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Robert de Cotte. It was damaged by a fire on 19 September 1914, and not repaired until after the Second World War. The Palace was the residence of the Kings of France before their coronation in Notre-Dame de Reims. The King was dressed for the coronation at the palace before proceeding to the cathedral; afterwards, a banquet was held at the palace. The first recorded coronation banquet was held at the palace in 990, and the most recent in 1825.”
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From the Palais du Tau à Reims (the 22-page press release is available as a PDF file here) . . .
Splendours of Royal Coronations from Louis XIII to Charles X
Sacres Royaux, de Louis XIII à Charles X
Palais du Tau, Reims, 28 May — 2 November 2014
Curated by Frédéric Lacaille and Benoît-Henry Papounaud
Le Centre des monuments nationaux présente, en partenariat avec le château de Versailles, l’exposition Sacres Royaux, de Louis XIII à Charles X au Palais du Tau à Reims du 28 mai au 2 novembre 2014.
C’est au Palais du Tau, qui a accueilli à 33 reprises le roi la nuit précédant son sacre, que le Centre des monuments nationaux (CMN) a choisi de présenter cette exposition d’envergure, en partenariat avec le château de Versailles. Les visiteurs pourront y découvrir les cérémonies de sacres de 1610 à 1825, fondement essentiel de la monarchie absolue, qui consacraient le pouvoir, la puissance et la légitimité du roi. Ce partenariat d’exception avec le Château de Versailles donnera à voir de nombreuses œuvres encore jamais présentées au grand public.
Découvrez, au palais du Tau, séjour des rois pour leur couronnement, plus de 70 œuvres, témoins des fastes du règne des Bourbons, à l’occasion de cette exceptionnelle exposition en partenariat avec le château de Versailles. Au travers de tableaux, dessins, gravures, tapisseries, pièces d’orfèvrerie, éléments textiles et mobilier, l’exposition évoque les différentes étapes de la cérémonie du sacre des rois de France. Le calice des sacres, dit de Saint Remi (XIIème siècle), ou le manteau du sacre de Charles X, conservés au palais du Tau, sont mis en lumière aux côtés des collections du château de Versailles et de pièces prêtées par d’autres institutions, tel le Mobilier National, la Bibliothèque nationale de France ou le musée de l’hôtel Le Vergeur de Reims.
Le commissariat est assuré par Frédéric Lacaille, conservateur en chef au musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, et par Benoît-Henry Papounaud, administrateur du Palais du Tau.
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Information about the catalogue is available as a PDF file here:
Frédéric Lacaille, Alexandre Maral, and Benoît-Henry Papounaud, Sacres Royaux, de Louis XIII à Charles X (Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine, 2014), 64 pages, ISBN: 978-2757703878, 12€.
Exhibition | Making Colour
Press release from The National Gallery for the exhibition:
Making Colour
The National Gallery, London, 18 June — 7 September 2014
Curated by Ashok Roy and Caroline Campbell
Moses Harris, Prismatic Colour Wheel, from ‘The Natural System of Colours’, hand-coloured etching, 1769/1776
(Royal Academy of Arts, London)
Making Colour, the first exhibition of its kind in the UK, offers visitors an exceptional opportunity to discover the wide-ranging materials used to create colour in paintings and other works of art. Using the National Gallery’s own paintings and loans from major UK cultural institutions, the exhibition traces the history of making colour in Western paintings, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century. The exhibition brings together the worlds of art and science to explain how artists overcame the technical challenges involved in creating colour. Work on this subject has long been a specialism of the Gallery’s internationally recognised Scientific Department. Making Colour shows the material problems faced by artists in achieving their painterly aims, the breakthroughs they struggled for, and the difficulties they faced in creating works of art that were both beautiful and enduring. Making Colour looks at its subject from multiple perspectives. It examines the origins of paint sources—be it the natural world or human invention—and their supply, manufacture and application, as well as their permanence and colour effect.
The rich and diverse display with National Gallery paintings at its core is part of the ‘National Gallery Inspires’ programme of exhibitions. Drawn from the National Gallery collection, the exhibitions take a fresh view of National Gallery paintings alongside special loans and featuring world-leading research by Gallery experts. Making Colour shows the central importance of colour to painting, but also incorporates minerals along with textiles, ceramics and glass, demonstrating the material connections in these sister arts.
The exhibition begins by examining how theories of colour—such as an awareness of primary colour, or of the colour spectrum—have influenced painters’ use of pigments, and their quest for new materials. Visitors then journey from lapis lazuli to cobalt blue, ancient vermilion to bright cadmium red, through yellow, orange, purple and verdigris to deep green viridian in a series of colour-themed rooms. Finally, they enter a dazzling central room devoted to gold and silver. These metals were of fundamental importance to the colour effects of European painting through many centuries, although they do not appear on the traditional colour wheel.
Making Colour is illustrated at every stage by National Gallery paintings, complemented by selected objects on loan, such as Joseph Mallord William Turner’s paintbox. The exhibition includes Claude Monet’s Lavacourt under Snow (about 1878–81) on display with lapis lazuli figurines from the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Anthony van Dyck’s Lady Elizabeth Thimbelby and her Sister (1637) and elaborate majolica plates from the British Museum help to illustrate the story of yellow. In the red room Degas’s Combing the Hair (La Coiffure) (about 1896) and Masaccio’s Saints Jerome and John the Baptist (about 1428–29) are displayed alongside fragments of beautiful crimson velvet brocade on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The exhibition is complemented by a scientific experiment that introduces a new world of contemporary and scientific thought on colour. It deals with human colour perception, and the degree to which it is individually variable. It will also consider the ways in which the brain processes different visual information—for example in lighting paintings—and the impact that this has on our perception of colour.
The computer-controlled experiment in lighting and perception will be presented beside the Sainsbury Wing exhibition galleries, designed to demonstrate how we perceive and register colour, and to show that the eye and brain respond to colour in unexpected ways. The experiment has been developed with the advice of Professor Anya Hurlbert, Professor of Visual Neuroscience and Director of the Institute of Neuroscience, University of Newcastle and the support of the Wellcome Trust.
Ashok Roy, Director of Collections at the National Gallery, said: “Art and science really do come together in Making Colour. By exploring the materials that make up the array of artists’ pigments, we can begin to comprehend some of the historic circumstances and difficulties in creating colours that we now take for granted. The inclusion of objects such as early textiles, mineral samples and ceramics ensures an enticing display that provides a new angle from which to approach familiar works in the collection.”
Caroline Campbell, Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500 at the National Gallery, said: “Artists from the Middle Ages to the present day have sought to find suitable pigments and colours. This exhibition is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate this quest for colour. Thanks to the work of our Scientific Department, we can add another layer to our understanding of how artists created such beautiful images.”
Making Colour is curated by Ashok Roy, Director of Collections, and Caroline Campbell, Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500.
Study Day | Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust
The exhibition Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust (recently closed at YCBA) opens June 18 at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire (where it will be on display until 26 October 2014). In connection, Malcolm Baker will lead a special interest day on Thursday, 10 July.
From Waddesdon Manor:
Study Day | Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust
Waddesdon Manor and Stowe Landscape Gardens, 10 July 2014
Led by Professor Malcolm Baker, the curator of the exhibition, this day will begin with an in-depth look at Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust, followed by lunch in the Manor Restaurant. In the afternoon, participants will travel to nearby Stowe Landscape Gardens to see the famous Temple of British Worthies and to explore the central role of the sculpture portrait bust in the creation and celebration of fame and friendship. The day will end with tea at Stowe. The price of your ticket (£70) includes coach travel from Waddesdon to Stowe and return to your car at Waddesdon; normal admissions charges apply to both Waddesdon and Stowe.
Malcolm Baker is Distinguished Professor of the History of Art, University of California, Riverside, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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In addition to The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Malcolm Baker’s major publication related to the exhibition and due out later this year from Yale University Press, a more tightly focused catalogue will be published by Paul Holberton:
Malcolm Baker, Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2014), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-0954731052, £15 / $25.
No literary figure of the eighteenth century was more esteemed than the poet Alexander Pope, and his sculpted portraits exemplify the celebration of literary fame at a period when authorship was being newly conceived and the portrait bust was enjoying new popularity. Accompanying an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor (The Rothschild Collection), this publication explores the convergence between authorship, portraiture, and the sculpted image in particular, by bringing together a wide range of works that foreground Pope’s celebrity status.
Pope took great pains over how he was represented and carefully fashioned his public persona through images, published letters and the printed editions of his works. Alongside some of the most celebrated painted portraits of the poet will be a selection of the printed texts which Pope planned with meticulous care. The publication focuses on eight versions of the same portrait bust by the leading sculptor of the period, Louis François Roubiliac.
The marble bust had long been seen as a form appropriate for the celebration of literary fame and Pope’s bust in part imitates those of classical authors whose works he both translated and consciously imitated in his own poems. More than any other sculptor, Roubiliac reworked the conventions of the bust, transforming it into a genre that was considered worthy of close and sustained attention. Nowhere is this seen more tellingly than in his compelling and intense portraits of Pope. Based on a vividly modelled clay original, the variant marble versions were carved with arresting virtuosity, recalling Pope’s own phrase, “Marble, soften’d into Life.” At the same time, the image was reproduced by both the sculptor himself and by others, in a variety of materials.
Multiplied and reproduced throughout the eighteenth century, Pope’s bust was the most familiar and visible sign of his authorial fame. At the same time, it was also used as a way of articulating friendship—a constant theme in Pope’s verse—and all the early versions of Roubiliac’s bust were probably executed for Pope’s closest friends. By bringing together the eight versions thought to have been executed by Roubiliac and his studio, and a number of other copies in marble, plaster and ceramic, this publication will offer the opportunity to explore not only the complex relationship between these various versions but the hitherto little understood processes of sculptural production and replication in eighteenth-century Britain.
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