Exhibition | Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber
From The Frick:
Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court
Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden, 3 March — 2 May 2012
The Frick Collection, New York, 30 May — 19 August 2012
Galerie J. Kugel, Paris, 12 September — 10 November 2012
Coordinated by Dirk Syndram, Jutta Kappel, Ian Wardropper, and Charlotte Vignon
Johann Christian Neuber, Breteuil Table, Dresden, 1779–80, wood, gilded bronze, semiprecious stones, faux-pearls, and Meissen porcelain plaques, H: 32 inches, collection of the Marquis de Breteuil, Chäteau de Breteuil (Choisel/Chevreuse); photo: © Georges Fessy
Johann Christian Neuber was one of Dresden’s most famous goldsmiths. Sometime before 1775 he was named court jeweler to Friedrich Augustus III, elector of Saxony, and in 1785 he was appointed Curator of the Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault), the magnificent royal collection of Augustus the Strong, the founder of the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory. For more than thirty years, Neuber created small gold boxes, chatelaines, and watchcases decorated with local semiprecious stones such as agate, jasper, and carnelian. He fashioned enchanting landscapes, complex floral designs, and geometric patterns with tiny cut stones, often incorporating Meissen porcelain plaques, cameos, and miniatures. These one-of-a-kind objects, which reflect the Saxon court’s interest in both luxury items and the natural sciences, remain prized treasures today, but have never before been shown together in a monographic exhibition.
In 2012, the public will have their first comprehensive introduction to this master craftsman’s oeuvre through a traveling exhibition that is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated publication (Paul Holberton publishing, London, and Editions d’Art Monelle Hayot, under the direction of Alexis Kugel). The exhibition began in Dresden at the Grünes Gewölbe on March 3, remaining there through May 2, 2012, when it travels to the United Sates for an exclusive engagement at The Frick Collection (May 30 through August 19, 2012). It concludes at Galerie J. Kugel in Paris in the fall (September 12 through November 10, 2012).
Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court includes some thirty-five boxes and other decorative objects from the Grünes Gewölbe and the Porcelain Collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private collections in Europe and the United States. The exhibition also features Neuber’s masterpiece, the Breteuil Table. This small table is regarded as one of the most extraordinary pieces of eighteenth-century furniture ever made, distinguished not only by the materials used in its construction and for the remarkable skill of its creator, but also for its prestigious history. It was presented in 1781 by Friedrich Augustus III to Baron de Breteuil, a French diplomat, as recognition for the role Breteuil played in the negotiation of the Treaty of Teschen, which officially ended the war of Bavarian Succession fought between the Habsburg monarchy and a Saxon-Prussian alliance to prevent the Habsburg acquisition of the Duchy of Bavaria. The table features a mosaic top of 128 semiprecious stones and Meissen porcelain plaques. Still owned by the family who received it nearly 250 years ago, this stunning object has almost never been exhibited outside the Château de Breteuil (some twenty-five miles west of Paris) and has never before crossed the Atlantic. The Frick exhibition also reunites for the first time two bases designed and crafted by Neuber for the display of Meissen porcelain groups. One is now in the collection of the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, while the other is from a private collection in Paris. These bases were part of a much larger diplomatic gift from Friedrich Augustus III to Nicolai Wasilijewitsch Repnin, the Russian emissary who helped to negotiate the Treaty of Teschen. The gift originally included a Meissen porcelain service and an enormous centerpiece composed of seven stands of varying heights, each supporting an allegorical group made of Meissen porcelain. Of this extravagant gift, only these two bases have been definitively identified.
The exhibition is co-organized by the Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, The Frick Collection, and Galerie J. Kugel, Paris. The exhibition in Dresden will be shown in a slightly different form as Johann Christian “Neuber à Dresde”: Schatzkunst des Klassizismus für den Adel Europas. It is coordinated by Dirk Syndram, Director of the Grünes Gewölbe and the Armoury, and Jutta Kappel, Senior Curator of the Grünes Gewölbe. The presentation of the exhibition at The Frick Collection is coordinated by Director Ian Wardropper and Charlotte Vignon, Associate Curator of Decorative Arts.
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From Paul Holberton Publishing:
Alexis Kugel, ed., Gold, Jasper and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court (London: Paul Holberton, 2012), 400 pages, ISBN: 9781907372360, £100.
Johann Christian Neuber (1736–1808) was a goldsmith and mineralogist at the Saxon Court. In 1769 he became director of the Grünes Gewölbe, the magnificent State Treasury, and was appointed court jeweler in 1775. He specialized in creating small gold boxes, chatelaines and watchcases decorated with semiprecious stones, such as agate, jasper and carnelian. Neuber fashioned enchanting landscapes, complex floral designs and geometric patterns out of tiny cut stones, often incorporating Meissen porcelain plaques, cameos and miniatures. These one-of-a-kind objects are treasured in public and private collections all over the world today, but have never been brought together.
This book is the first comprehensive introduction to this master craftsman’s oeuvre, presenting boxes and other decorative objects from the Grünes Gewölbe, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as public and private collections in Germany, France and New York. One of its highlights is the ‘Breteuil Table’, still owned by the family for which it was made as a diplomatic gift nearly 250 years ago.
Beautiful photographs of all Neuber’s creations adorn this extraordinary book – well over 500 in number. The context and history of the growing interest in mineralogy and its celebration in these works of art are fully investigated. Its distinguished authors include Dr Jutta Kappel, Head of Conservation at Grünes Gewölbe, Dresden; art historians and specialists Sophie Mouquin and Philippe Poindront; marquis de Breteuil, Henri-François Le Tonnelier; and the editor of the book, Alexis Kugel, of the famous Parisian gallery.
There is also a French edition of this book: Le luxe, le goût, la science: Neuber, orfèvre minéarologiste à la cour de Saxe (ISBN 9782903824808).
Exhibition | Women of Achievement in the Early American Republic
From the exhibition website:
A Will of Their Own: Judith Sargent Murray and Women of Achievement in the Early Republic
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., 20 April — 13 September 2012
John Singleton Copley, "Judith Sargent Murray,"
1770–72 (Terra Foundation for American Art)
At the time of the American Revolution with Great Britain, women did not share the same status or rights as men. They could not vote or hold political office, enjoyed few property rights, were not equal in marriage, and had limited access to educational opportunities. As the debate about liberty and the rights of men took center stage during the Revolution, some women began to question their position in American society. Whereas many believed that women’s primary responsibility was to raise their children to be productive, moral citizens, some women began to argue for certain legal and economic rights and to pursue various professional careers. The Revolution created new opportunities for women to do work outside the home and to voice their opinions and concerns in public. Given the racial and class divisions that existed during the period, however, not all women were permitted to step forward in this manner. The eight women who are highlighted here did not produce a collective movement for women’s rights, but they were important in sowing the seeds for future progress. While the nature of their achievements differed, each demonstrated through their work that women possessed a will
of their own.
Autumn Exhibition in Venice | Francesco Guardi
From the Correr:
Francesco Guardi, 1712-1793
Museo Correr, Venice, 28 September 2012 — 6 January 2013
Curated by Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco
Francesco Gurdi, The Parlour of the Nuns at San Zaccaria
ca. 1750 (Venice: Ca’ Rezzonico), Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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In the third centenary of the birth of Francesco Guardi, the last great landscape artist of the 18th century, the monographic exhibition promoted by the Fondazione dei Musei Civici di Venezia aims to highlight his complex artistic production, from the lesser-known figure paintings of his youth to the ‘interior scenes’, concluding with the splendid views of Venice and his fabulous capriccios, painted in his maturity and old age. The exhibition at the Museo Correr will illustrate the various phases in Guardi’s development thanks to a series of major loans of works never before made to Venice.
It is known that Francesco Guardi’s training took place within a modest family workshop in which everyone was a painter, from his father, Domenico, to his brothers, Nicolò and Antonio. None of them in life was able to attain a certain degree of prosperity, let alone success. After his death in 1793, Francesco Guardi was forgotten. His rediscovery is the merit of 20th-century criticism, and attained a high point in the fine exhibition curated by Pietro Zampetti, held in Palazzo Grassi in 1965.
The first part of the exhibition will focus on the production of works of a prevalently everyday life subject inspired by genre painting of costume painting, one dominated by Pietro Longhi. The exhibition will present two masterpieces from this period: The Ridotto and The Parlour of the Nuns at San Zaccaria, now in Ca’ Rezzonico. A little later, Francesco Guardi began his production of the views, capriccios and fantastic landscapes that underpin his fame today. It is not certain when exactly he began working as a landscape painter; perhaps it was around 1755, when the painter was over 40 years old and had a less than exhilarating career as a figure painter behind him. His first works echoed the compositions of Canaletto and Marieschi, with fluid, controlled brushstrokes, still a long way from the bubbling, shorthand manner that would make him famous. But his unique style does already emerge in some of these works from the first period, including in the St. Mark’s Square belonging to the National Gallery in London, in which the figures, painted by frothy little impastos of colour, reveal a lively chromatic touch. His period of greatest success was between the 1760s and 1770s and it was in this period that he painted the 12 canvases of the Ducal celebrations adapted from Canaletto’s own models and engraved by Giambattista Brustolon. Guardi based his paintings, today in the Louvre, on these prints; the result is truly astonishing and reveals the artist’s transfiguring, fantastic skill.
The picture showing the Bucentaur at San Nicolò on the Lido is exemplary: although faithful to its model, it creates an image of unmatched appeal. The gondolas and Bucentaur used for special occasions seem to shimmer on the water; a myriad of reflections sparkle on the slightly choppy sea, while tiny figures resembling Oriental ideograms bustle in the vessels. In 1782, Guardi was commissioned to paint four pictures to commemorate the visit of Pope Pius VI to Venice. For the 70-year-old artist, here at last was an official commission, and it was followed by the celebratory paintings of the incognito visit to Venice of the Russian archdukes, who travelled under the name of the Counts of the Nort
Over time, his highly personal style became increasingly free and allusive; the proportions between the various elements were freely modified, the perspective framework became elastic and was deformed, losing all association with reality. And finally, the figures became simply splashes of colour, a rapid white scribble or black dot traced out with a trembling movement.
Apart from a number of airy capriccios, he also painted some splendid pictures of villas half-hidden in the green Veneto countryside, and alongside traditional views of Venice he added others of the lagoon, broadening the horizons of 18th-century Venetian landscape and dissolving it in wide stretches of water and sky.
The exhibition will present a total of over 100 paintings and drawings from leading Italian and foreign institutions, including the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, the National Gallery of Washington, the National Gallery in London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Alte Pinakothek of Munich, the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon, the Hermitage of Saint Petersburg, the Fine Art Museum of Boston, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the Poldi Pezzoli of Milan. The exhibition can boast an academic committee formed of the leading international scholars of 18th-century Venetian painting, and will be accompanied by a comprehensive, well-illustrated catalogue edited by Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco, and published by Skira, containing the latest studies concerning the artist.
Curators: Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco
Academic Committee: Giuseppe Pavanello, Charles Beddington, Catherine Whistler, Keith Cristiansen, Stephane Loire, Andrew Robison, Irina Artemieva, Lino Moretti
Scientific Director: Gabriella Belli
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Catalogue: Alberto Craievich and Filippo Pedrocco, eds., Francesco Guardi, 1712-1793 (Milan: Skira, 2012), ISBN: 9788857214818, $90. Available October 2012
Exhibition | Hubert Robert: Les Jardins du Temps
From The National Museum of Western Art:
Hubert Robert: Les Jardins du Temps
The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 6 March — 20 May 2012
Fukuoka Museum of Art, Fukuoka, 19 June — 29 July 2012
Shizuoka Municipal Museum of Art, Shizuoka, 9 August — 30 September 2012
Curated by Hélène Moulin-Stanislas and Megumi Jingaoka
In 18th-century Europe, enthralled by the discoveries at the sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Hubert Robert (1733-1808) was a French landscape painter became known later by the nickname Robert des ruines (Robert of the Ruins), for his many works on these ancient sites. During his studies in Italy, Robert depicted fascinating landscapes that incorporated ancient motifs enhanced by his own fanciful imagination. His images brought to life the architecture and sculpture of ancient times, contrasting with the scenes of trees, flowing streams and the lively everyday world of ordinary people. These images developed in an age newly fascinated with antiquity. Robert’s arts with their uniquely lyrical expression attracted a great number of people, inspiring dreams of the flow of time, nature and the power of the arts.
The painter of these fantastic scenes was also the creator of numerous famous landscape-style garden designs, under his title of Designer of the Royal Gardens. Robert’s placement of ancient architectural forms and man-made waterfalls and grottoes amidst actual scenery adds all the more fascination to his works. This exhibition focuses on about 80 drawings in red chalk, selected from the world-renowned Robert Collection of the Musée de Valence, as it introduces Japanese audiences to Robert’s oeuvre, dating from his earliest production to his final years. Works by Robert’s teachers and colleagues, including Piranesi and Fragonard, from other collections round out the display of approximately 130 oil paintings, drawings, prints and furnishings. The natural and the man-made, fiction and fact, and the jumbled memories of happiness and imaginary futures, all present the secrets of Arcadia, as created in the midst of this artist’s paintings and gardens.
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Addition information is available at the Art Media Agency; the complete exhibition checklist (as a PDF file) is available here (in both English and Japanese).
Exhibition | The Prisons by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
From The National Museum of Western Art:
The Prisons by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 6 March — 20 May 2012
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, "The Prisons (Le Carceri," Round Tower 2nd edition, 1st Publication: 1761 G.1987-425 (Tokyo)
Giovanni Battista Piranesi was a major 18th-century Italian print artist. The Prisons [Carceri d’invenzione], a series of prints, are amongst his most famous works. Amidst the rise of Romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century, this series stimulated the imaginations of a number of writers. In the intervening decades and centuries, this series has continued to exert an influence in architecture, literature and film, as well as fine art. As indicated by its title, this series presents various views of prisons. But these images are not depictions of actual prisons; rather they are images of a fantastic, imaginary world. Giant pillars, beams, chains and torture implements, along with prisoners, are depicted amongst bold compositions made up of powerful lines. The NMWA collection includes a set of the first state of the Prisons, along with the second state, which involved considerable reworking of the first, plus two additional prints. The second state was made by Piranesi in 1761, the year in which he established his own printing studio, and is characterized by its stronger light-dark contrast and its more dramatic impression. Piranesi sought the full expressive range of the print in this series, at times going so far as to use his own finger and
the palm of his hand to achieve desired results.
This exhibition presents approximately 30 works from both the first and second states, allowing visitors a chance to compare the two states and the changes in Piranesi’s conception of the prints. We hope that you will enjoy these many prints with their powerful impact.
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The exhibition checklist (as a PDF) is available here (in Japanese and English).
Exhibition | Gainsborough’s Landscapes
From the Holburne Museum in Bath . . .
Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations
Holburne Museum, Bath, 24 September 2011 — 22 January 2012
Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 11 February — 10 June 2012
Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with a View of a Distant
Village, ca. 1750 (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland)
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Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations is the first exhibition in fifty years devoted solely to his landscape paintings and drawings, bringing together remarkable works from public and private collections, many of them little known and some not previously exhibited. For Gainsborough, if portraiture was his business, landscape painting was his pleasure, and his landscape paintings and drawings reveal his mind at work, the extraordinary breadth of his invention and the dazzling quality of his technique.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) sold relatively few of his landscape paintings, and none of his drawings, but he regarded them as his most important work. His paintings do not represent real views, but are creations ‘of his own Brain’, as he put it. A limited number of rural subjects exercised his imagination from one decade to the next, changing as he developed an increasingly energetic ‘hand’, or manner of painting, and becoming ever grander in conception.
The exhibition includes some of his most famous and popular works including The Watering Place from the National Gallery (the most famous of all his landscape compositions in his life-time) and less well-known works such as the little-seen but ravishing Haymaking from Woburn. The paintings have been selected to represent six landscape themes; the remarkable drawings and prints show Gainsborough returning to these themes and demonstrate the longevity of each theme and the degree of experimentation that was involved in the search for the perfect composition.
The evolution of Gainsborough’s style is traced from early naturalistic landscapes in the Dutch manner, enlivened with small figures (pictured above), to grand scenery that is dramatically lit and obviously imaginary, such as the Romantic Landscape from the Royal Academy of Arts. In the Girl with Pigs, from the Castle Howard Collection, a rustic figure takes centre stage: fancy figures of this kind are, in Gainsborough’s art, closely integrated with his landscape practice.
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Accompanying publication: Susan Sloman, Gainsborough’s Landscapes: Themes and Variations (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011), ISBN: 9780856676970, £14.99
Exhibition | Botanical Watercolours from the the Van Berkhey Collection
On at NCB Naturalis, as noted by Hélène Bremer:
Passion for Flowers: Drawings from the Van Berkhey Collection
NCB Naturalis, the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity, Leiden, 29 March — 8 July 2012
Johannes le Francq van Berkhey (1729-1812) was a man of the Enlightenment. His love for the arts, antiquities, literature and the natural sciences was reflected in his being an artist, collector, writer and lector in Natural History. He obtained a doctorate in medicine in his beloved home town of Leiden for his thesis on botanical studies. Over a period of forty years he assembled a magnificent and wide-ranging collection of natural history objects, including a remarkable collection of drawings and engravings, intended as a classified version of the entire living nature. Having a wide interest in his time, he could not keep himself out of politics. After being denounced for his political ideas, he was forced to sell his collections at auction in order to pay for his defence in court in 1785. The Spanish Royal Cabinet for Natural History realised the value of Van Berkhey’s collection and acquired it to advance the knowledge of natural history.
At Naturalis, for the first time, we present a careful selection of 41 of his botanical illustrations, meticulously preserved in Madrid’s Royal Botanic Gardens. The species represented include clovers,
lilies, peonies, roses, bamboos, chrysanthemums, asters, poppies and a flowering branch of a cherry or plum tree; species that typically started being introduced into European gardens during the 18th century.
Passie voor bloemen is on view until 8 July 2012.
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NCB Naturalis, the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity, was launched on 28 January 2010. The centre is the result of cooperation between Amsterdam University (Amsterdam Zoological Museum), Leiden University and Wageningen University and Research Centre (National Herbarium Nederland) and the National Natural History Museum Naturalis in Leiden. The partners’ collections will come together at NCB Naturalis into a collection totalling over 37 million objects. In terms of collection size, NCB Naturalis is one of the top five natural history museums in the world.
Exhibition | Lux in Arcana: The Vatican Secret Archives
Thanks to Hélène Bremer for drawing my attention to this exhibition in Rome. If only things revealed themselves! -CH
Lux in Arcana: The Vatican Secret Archives Reveals Itself
Musei Capitolini, Rome, 1 March — 9 September 2012
It will be the first and possibly the only time in history that they leave the confines of the Vatican City walls. And they will do so in order to be housed and displayed in the beautiful halls of the Capitoline Museums in Rome. One hundred original and priceless documents selected among the treasures preserved and cherished by the Vatican Secret Archives for centuries. The exhibition which is conceived for the 4th Centenary of the foundation of the Vatican Secret Archives aims at explaining and describing what the Pope’s archives are and how they work and, at the same time, at making the invisible visible, thus allowing access to some of the marvels enshrined in the Vatican Secret Archives’ 85 linear kilometers of shelving; records of an extraordinary historical value, covering a time-span that stretches from the 8th to the 20th century.
The name, Lux in arcana, conveys the exhibition’s main objective: the light piercing through the Archive’s innermost depths enlightens a reality which precludes a superficial knowledge and is only enjoyable by means of direct and concrete contact with the sources from the Archive, that opens the doors to the discovery of often unpublished history recounted in documents. The exhibition is enriched by multimedia installations, guided by an intriguing but rigorous historical narration, to allow the visitor to experience some famous events from the past and to “re-live” the documents, that will come to life with tales of the context and the people involved.
The 100 documents, chosen among manuscript codices, parchments, strings and registers, will remain at the Capitoline Museums for nearly seven months, from 1st March till September 2012. An extremely prestigious location, chosen to host this memorable event since it underlines the profound bond existing between the city of Rome and the Papacy since medieval times; the origins of both institutions involved in the event trace their roots back to Sixtus IV’s artistic sensibility; however, at the same time, the history enshrined in the Vatican Secret Archives is intertwined with the history of Italy, Europe and the World as a whole.
The Vatican Secret Archives represent a cultural world heritage centered in the city of Rome; for this very reason the exhibition has been conceived in cooperation with Roma Capitale, Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e Centro Storico – Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Roma and Zètema Progetto Cultura. This memorable exhibition is already creating great expectations, fuelled by the mysterious fascination that the Vatican Secret Archives generate in the collective imagination. All of the above will make Lux in arcana – The Vatican Secret Archives reveals itself an event of unprecedented scientific and media importance.
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An eighteenth-century sample from the exhibition:
A Note from Prison by Marie Antoinette of France, ca. 1792-93
The feelings of those who share my sorrow, my dear brother-in-law, are the only consolation I can receive in this sad circumstance. Please receive my wishes for the new year and reassurance of my sincere devotion, that I am, my dearest brother-in-law, your affectionate sister-in-law and cousin Marie Antoinette.
A note with no date, just over ten lines in French, written in a clear and tidy script on a small sheet of paper, signed by the last queen of France. The contents of this dispirited message that bears no official character suggest it may have been written during one of the gloomiest periods in Marie Antoinette’s existence: between December 1792 and January 1793, just after the revolutionary tribunal’s death sentence against her husband Louis XVI, desacralized as “Citoyen Louis Capet”, and just before his execution on January 19, 1793. Marie Antoinette was held prisoner with all the royal family at the Tour du Temple, an ancient fortress built by the knights Templar in the 13th century. Anxious over her husband’s dire fate and certainly foreseeing her own death, the queen wrote this message to an unknown recipient, possibly Louis XVI’s brother, Charles Philippe, count of Artois and future king Charles X of France. Ten months after this note’s supposed date, Marie Antoinette’s curse fate unfolded: early on October 16, 1793, she was taken to the guillotine on a squalid barrow . . .
The full entry is available here (click on the letter on the far right side, second from the top).
Display | The Comte de Vaudreuil: Courtier and Collector
From the National Gallery of Art:
The Comte de Vaudreuil: Courtier and Collector
National Gallery, London, 7 March — 12 June 2012
The Comte de Vaudreuil (1740–1817) was one of the leading courtiers and collectors of paintings in Paris during the 1780s. This display features Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings in the National Gallery’s collection that were once owned by Vaudreuil or were in Parisian collections at that time. Vaudreuil’s collection provides an example of the decoration of wealthy homes in pre-Revolution Paris. Reflecting the fashion of the time, the paintings are hung according to their size and symmetry rather than by subject or chronology.
The Paintings
The display features paintings from the Comte’s collections by artists Jan Wijnants, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Steen and Adriaen van Ostade. Alongside these are works that were in French collections in the same period by artists Nicolaes Berchem, Aelbert Cuyp, Willem van de Velde and Gabriel Metsu. The paintings show a variety of subjects, from portraits of peasants to social life in 17th-century Holland to landscapes with ruined castles.
April 2012 Issue of ‘Apollo Magazine’
Eighteenth-century offerings from the latest Apollo Magazine (for the full text of each article, click on the images below). . .
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Anne Kapeller, “A Unique Heritage: Treasures of the Swiss National Museum in Nyon,” Apollo Magazine (April 2012).
. . . In 1741, the curate Johann Georg Sulzer carried out a series of excavations at Lunnern, in the Reuss Valley near Zurich, leading to the discovery of a Roman temple, baths and a necropolis. On 17 November, he uncovered a hoard consisting of 17 pieces of gold jewellery and 84 silver coins, hidden in a recess. Three days later news of the sensational discovery reached Zurich. The painter Johann Balthasar Bullinger was commissioned to visit the site and produce a picture of the excavations. It was preserved along with the jewels in the art collection of the Wasserkirche in Zurich, before becoming part of the collections of the SNM. . .
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Lucy Davis & Christoph Martin Vogtherr, “A Taste for Blue,” Apollo Magazine (April 2012).
The Wallace Collection is famous for its exceptional group of works from the French 18th century. A smaller collection of around 150 Dutch 17th-century paintings is of equally fine quality, including masterpieces by Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Caspar Netscher, Jacob van Ruisdael, Nicolaes Berchem, Philips Wouwermans and other leading painters of the Golden Age. It is particularly rich in genre paintings, landscapes by the Dutch Italianates and the work of some outstanding artists – Rembrandt first of all, but also Steen, Metsu, Willem van de Velde, Meindert Hobbema and Willem van Mieris. The resulting view of Dutch art does not provide a systematic overview but follows the personal preferences of the collectors and the typical view of Dutch art during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Artists such as Jan van Goyen, Hercules Seghers and Vermeer, but also the earlier periods before Rembrandt, are hardly represented. They were only admitted to the canon
at a time when the Hertford family had stopped collecting Dutch art. . .
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Juliet Carey, “A House of Cards: Taking Time,” Apollo Magazine (April 2012).
Waddesdon Manor is temporarily home to a small but extraordinarily beautiful group of works by one of the most revered of all French painters. The exhibition Taking Time: Chardin’s ‘Boy Building a House of Cards’ and Other Paintings is prompted by the recent acquisition of one of four works by Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) of a subject that particularly fascinated him. The last to enter the public domain, the Waddesdon canvas, is united for the first time with three other variations on the theme, on loan from national collections in France, Britain and the United States. . .
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Humphrey Wine, “The Art of a Connoisseur: Review of Pierre Rosenberg and Laure Barthélemy-Labeeuw, Les Dessins de la Collection de Pierre-Jean Mariette (2011),” Apollo Magazine (April 2012).
Soon after the death of Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) his heirs had Pierre François Basan organise a sale of his collection. It included paintings (among them Poussin’s Nurture of Bacchus, c. 1628, now in the National Gallery, London), terracottas, antique marbles, bronzes and engraved gems; the bulk of the sale, however, comprised some 9,000 Italian, Dutch, Flemish and French drawings. It was not only size that distinguished Mariette’s collection of drawings – the earlier collection of Pierre Crozat, built with Mariette’s advice, had been twice as large – but also its quality and comprehensive nature. . . .
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