Exhibition | Treasures of Kenwood House
Press release (9 December 2011) from the MFAH:
Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 3 June — 3 September 2012
Milwaukee Art Museum, 4 October 2012 — 6 January 2013
Seattle Art Museum, 14 February — 19 May 2013
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, 6 June — 8 September 2013
Curated by Susan Jenkins
Thomas Gainsborough, "Portrait of Mary, Countess Howe," ca. 1764 (London: Kenwood House, English Heritage, Iveagh Bequest)
On June 3, 2012, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will debut the exhibition Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Gainsborough: The Treasures of Kenwood House, London, whose four-venue national tour was announced today by the American Federation of Arts in New York. An exhibition of forty-eight masterpieces, this will be the first tour of this important group of works from the Iveagh Bequest and will provide a unique opportunity to see these superb paintings outside the United Kingdom. Most of these paintings have never traveled to the States before, and many of them have rarely been seen outside Kenwood.
Donated to the nation by Edward Cecil Guinness (1847–1927), 1st Earl of Iveagh and heir to the world’s most successful brewery, the Iveagh Bequest resides at Kenwood House, a neoclassical villa in London that was remodeled by Robert Adam in the eighteenth century. The collection was shaped by the tastes of the Belle Epoque—Europe’s equivalent to America’s Gilded Age—when the earl shared the cultural stage and art market with other industry titans such as the Rothschilds, J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick. Acquired mainly from 1887 to 1891, the earl’s purchases reveal a penchant for the portraiture, landscape and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish works typically found in English aristocratic collections. While the majority of the paintings in the exhibition are from the Iveagh Bequest, several are drawn from the works acquired specifically for display at Kenwood. Pauline Willis, AFA’s Director, remarked, “We are extremely proud to be able to give greater exposure to this magnificent selection of paintings while Kenwood undergoes a major refurbishment.” Simon Thurley, Chief Executive for English Heritage, commented, “The collection of works of art on display at Kenwood is one of the most important in England, and we are thrilled that works from this collection will travel across the Atlantic for the first time and find new audiences in the United States.”
The collection is particularly strong in works by such Golden Age eighteenth-century English portraitists as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney, whose depictions of society beauties of the Georgian era, also known as England’s “Age of Aristocracy,” held a great appeal for Lord Iveagh. Among the several fine Gainsboroughs in the exhibition is the sumptuous full-length portrait Mary, Countess Howe (c. 1764), an image of both aristocratic elegance and of a landowner among her properties. Such full-length portraits of ladies in nature were very popular during this period, owing to a great admiration for the aristocratic portraits of Van Dyck. Along with such aristocratic women, the collection’s “virtual harem” of English portraits features celebrity demimondes, among them Emma Hart—later Lady Hamilton—who served as Romney’s muse, and Kitty Fisher—one of the most celebrated courtesans in London society. (more…)
Exhibition | Egyptomania in Houston
Press release (16 February 2012) from the MFAH:
Egyptomania
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 18 March — 29 July 2012
Bow Porcelain Factory, English, Pair of Figures as Sphinxes, ca. 1750. Porcelain (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Rienzi Collection, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harris Masterson, III)
An exhibition opening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston March 18, Egyptomania, explores the Egyptian Revivals of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries through some 40 objects, including photographs, Georgian garden sphinxes, 19th-century “Aegyptian” furniture and Art Deco perfume bottles with pharaoh-head stoppers. The works will be on view through July 29, 2012. “Westerners have long had an enduring romance with the idea of Egypt and its ancient people, of whom only their grand edifices really remain. We are captivated by their poignant narrative and other-worldliness,” said Christine Gervais, associate curator of decorative arts and Rienzi. “Egyptomania captures the way this fascination translates into European and American decorative arts objects,
from clocks, perfume bottles and ceramics to Tiffany glass
and Wedgwood.”
The fascination for Egypt has been repeatedly rejuvenated. Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801), the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) and the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb by English archaeologist Howard Carter all intoxicated the public, resulting in the reflection of Egyptian influences in Western culture, including literature, art and architecture. The exhibition focuses primarily on such trends in the decorative arts, where the influence can be seen in design motifs and symbols, as well as in actual forms. (more…)
Exhibition | Royal River: Power, Pageantry, and the Thames
As noted at British Art Research, this summer the Thames is on doubly on display at Greenwich. The museum website is worth visiting for the video promotion alone. From the National Maritime Museum:
Royal River: Power, Pageantry, and the Thames
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 27 April — 9 September 2012
Curated by David Starkey
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Magnificent gilded barges, liverymen in their finest uniforms, the splendour of lavish celebrations: the Thames is the ‘royal river’, used for centuries by British monarchs to involve the people in ceremony and festivities displaying their regal status. For hundreds of years this famous river has been host to the pageantry of coronations, processions of boats, and other events which helped tie people closer to the Crown and to London as Britain’s capital.
This spectacular exhibition, a landmark heritage event of the year, brings together nearly 400 beautiful, fascinating and often unique objects, including one of the largest-ever loans of Royal Collection objects to any museum. Created to mark Her Majesty The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and guest-curated by historian David Starkey, Royal River presents the historic Thames in all its glory, from British royal and City events to London’s famous watermen, and the river’s transformation after the notorious ‘Great Stink’.
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Image: Detail from The Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day, looking towards the City and St Paul’s Cathedral, before 1752, Canaletto, The Lobkowicz Collections, Czech Republic. Visitors to London Bridge station can now see a 30m-long version of the Canaletto painting gracing a temporary wall at the new station entrance. Find out more
New Gallery at Greenwich | Traders: The East India Company and Asia
From the National Maritime Museum:
Traders: the East India Company and Asia
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, gallery opened in September 2011
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Established by a group of London merchants, the East India Company was given its first royal charter by Elizabeth I. By the time it was abolished 250 years later, Queen Victoria was on the throne. The East India Company took on pirates, princes and rival traders in its pursuit of profit – changing the world in the process. This new gallery at the National Maritime Museum explores the history and continuing relevance of Britain’s trade with Asia, looking at this compelling story through the lens of the East India Company. Traders: the East India Company and Asia examines the commodities that the company traded, the people that shaped its tumultuous career and the conflicts and rebellions that were its ultimate undoing.
The exotic spices the company imported brought exciting flavours to Britain. The calicos, muslins and silks carried on its ships shaped fashions, clothing rich and poor alike. But its greatest success was tea, which it helped transform from an expensive luxury to a national pastime. However, the British cup of tea had a darker side: opium. This illegal drug trade was interwoven with the company’s business, resulting in war with China on two separate occasions.
ISBN: 9781857596755, $60
The company can be seen as a forerunner of the modern multinational. But its power and global reach were unique. At its height, the company minted its own currency and ruled over a sixth of humanity. It had its own navy, the Bombay Marine, and had 250,000 soldiers at its command. Regarded by the British establishment as too big to fail, the Company was repeatedly bailed out and ended its days shrouded in controversy.
Traders: the East India Company and Asia showcases the museum’s world-famous collection of objects relating to Asia and the Indian Ocean, including: Japanese, Chinese and Burmese swords; beautifully crafted ship models and navigational instruments; Nelson’s Japan-pattern breakfast service; Victoria Crosses awarded during the Indian Mutiny; and journals kept by Company sailors.
The gallery also contains portraits of key figures from throughout the East India Company’s history including: Sir James Lancaster, commander of the first Company voyage; Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia, master shipbuilder at Bombay Dockyard; the ship-wrecked and imprisoned Robert Knox, said to be the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; the appropriately named Money brothers, who made their fortunes in Asia; and Commodore Sir William James, a poor Welsh miller’s son who ran away to sea, and rose to become commodore of the Bombay Marine and Chairman of the Company.
To celebrate the opening of Traders the National Maritime Museum staged a festival of events throughout autumn and winter 2011. Traders Unpacked, sponsored by Sharwood’s, explored the complex legacy of the EIC and its contemporary significance though events including a textile-themed walking tour of London’s East End; an alternative East India Company pub quiz; an evening of Japanese psychedelia; Singaporean deep house and sea shanties; the Curry and a Pint nights, which explored the origins of the great British curry; a series of international tea parties; and a night of nautical games for grown-ups.
The gallery is accompanied by an illustrated history of the Company, which draws extensively on the collections of the Museum. Monsoon Traders: the Maritime World of the East India Company is published by Scala and written by Robert J. Blyth and John McAleer, curators of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum and H. V. Bowen, Professor of Modern History, Swansea University.
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Writing for The New York Times (4 November 2011), Roderick Conway Morris provides a review of the exhibition.
Exhibition | Goya: Lights and Shadows
From ArtDaily.com (16 March 2012):
Goya: Lights and Shadows / Luces y Sombras
The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 22 October 2011 — 29 January 2012
CaixaForum Barcelona, 15 March — 24 June 2012
Curated by Manuela B. Mena and José Manuel Matilla
Francisco de Goya, The Clothed Maja, ca. 1800
(Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado)
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Nearly two hundred years after his death, Francisco de Goya continues to exercise a universal attraction that very few others in the history of art have equalled. Not only is Goya enveloped in the greatness of his art and his genius, he is also shrouded in mystery and popular legend in a way that makes him doubly attractive and accessible. Now, almost thirty-five years after the last major exhibition devoted to the Spanish master in Barcelona, Goya. Lights and Shadows brings a large selection of great works the collection of El Prado National Museum, the most important in the world. The show features nearly one hundred pieces – oils, drawings, prints and letters – in a chronological journey through the main periods in the career of this Aragón-born artist. From the early years, in which Goya’s realism contrasted with the over-refined Rococo style favoured by his contemporaries, to the intimate works he produced towards the end of his life in Bordeaux, not forgetting the drama of the Peninsular War, which marked a turning-point in his artistic development. The exhibition is the fruit of a cooperation agreement signed between ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Prado National Museum 2011 under which the Catalan organisation became a Benefactor of the museum. Under the terms of the agreement, three more joint exhibitions will be organised in the coming years. Goya. Lights and Shadows is the first show planned as part of the joint exhibition programme established by ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Prado National Museum, the result of an agreement made between the two institutions in July 2011, under which ”la Caixa” becomes a Benefactor of the Spanish art gallery. . .
The full press release (which includes programming and lectures) is available here»
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Exhibition | Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings
Press release from Sue Bond:
Mantegna to Matisse: Master Drawings from The Courtauld Gallery
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 June — 9 September 2012
The Frick Collection, New York, 2 October 2012 — 27 January 2013
Curated by Stephanie Buck and Colin B. Bailey
The Courtauld Gallery holds one of the most important collections of drawings in Britain. Organised in collaboration with the Frick Collection in New York, this exhibition presents a magnificent selection of some sixty of its finest works. It offers a rare opportunity to consider the art of drawing in the hands of its greatest masters, including Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Cézanne and Matisse. The Courtauld last displayed a comparable selection of its masterpieces more than twenty years ago and this exhibition will bring the collection to new audiences nationally and internationally.
The exhibition opens with a group of works dating from the 15th century, from both Northern and Southern Europe. An exquisite and extremely rare early Netherlandish drawing of a seated female saint from around 1475-85 is rooted in late medieval workshop traditions. It was also at this time that drawing assumed a new central role in nourishing individual creativity, exemplified by two rapid pen and ink sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. These remarkably free and exploratory sketches show the artist experimenting with the dynamic twisting pose of a female figure for a painting of Mary Magdalene. For Renaissance artists such as Leonardo, drawing or disegno was the fundamental basis of all the arts: the expression not just of manual dexterity but of the artist’s mind and intellect.
These ideas about the nature of drawing achieved their full expression in the flowering of draughtsmanship in the 16th century. At the heart of this section of the exhibition is Michelangelo’s magisterial The Dream. Created in 1533, this highly complex allegory was made by Michelangelo as a gift for a close friend and it was one of the earliest drawings to be produced as an independent work of art. More typically, drawings were made in preparation for other works, including paintings, sculptures and prints. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s engaging scene of drunken peasants cavorting at a festival in the Flemish village of Hoboken was drawn in 1559 in preparation for a print. Whereas Michelangelo sought ideal divinely inspired beauty in the human figure, Bruegel here revels in the disorder of everyday life.
Charles Joseph Natoire, "Life Class at the Académie Royale," 1746, watercolour, chalk (black) on paper, 454 x 323 mm, © The Courtauld Gallery, London
Despite the important preparatory function of drawing, many of the most appealing works in the exhibition were unplanned and resulted from artists reaching for their sketchbooks to capture a scene for their own pleasure. Parmigianino’s Seated woman asleep is a wonderful example of such an informal study surviving from the early 16th century. Drawn approximately 100 years later in around 1625, Guercino’s Child seen from behind retains the remarkable freshness and immediacy of momentary observation. Guercino was a compulsive and brilliantly gifted draughtsman. Here the red chalk lends itself perfectly to the play of light on the soft flesh of the child sheltering in its mother’s lap. No less appealing in its informality is Rembrandt’s spontaneous and affectionate sketch of his wife, Saskia, sitting in bed cradling one of her children. The exhibition offers a striking contrast between this modest domestic image and Peter Paul Rubens’s contemporaneous depiction of his own wife, the beautiful young Helena Fourment. Celebrated as one of the great drawings of the 17th century, this unusually large work shows the richly dressed Helena – who was then about 17 – moving aside her veil to look directly at the viewer. Created with a dazzling combination of red, black and white chalks, this drawing was made as an independent work of art and was not intended for sale or public display. In its imposing presence, mesmerising skill and subtle characterisation, it is the equal of any painted portrait.
The central role of drawing in artistic training is underlined in a remarkable sheet by Charles Joseph Natoire from 1746. It shows the artist, seated in the left foreground, instructing students during a life class at the prestigious Académie royale in Paris. Drawing after the life model and antique sculpture was considered essential in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the great champions of this academic tradition was Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The beautiful elongated forms of the reclining nude in his Study for the ‘Grand Odalisque’, 1813-14, represents the highest refinement of a precise yet expressive linear drawing style rooted in the academy. Outside the academy, drawing could offer the artist a means of liberating creativity. Goya’s Cantar y bailar (Singing and dancing), 1819-20, comes from one of the private drawing albums which the artist used to inhabit the world of his dreams and imagination.
Canaletto’s expansive and meticulously composed View from Somerset Gardens, looking towards London Bridge is one of several highlights of a section exploring the relationship between drawing and the landscape. This group stretches back as early as Fra Bartolomeo’s Sweep of a river with fishermen drawn in around 1505-09, and also includes a particularly strong selection of landscapes from the golden age of the British watercolour. The interest in landscape is nowhere more powerfully combined with the expressive possibilities of watercolour than in the work of J.M.W. Turner. His late Dawn after the Wreck of around 1841 was immortalised by the critic John Ruskin, who imagined the solitary dog shown howling on a deserted beach to be mourning its owner, lost at sea. For Ruskin, this was one of Turner’s ‘saddest and most tender works’. (more…)
Exhibition | On the Edge of Reason, Works on Paper in Berlin
From the National Museums in Berlin:
On the Edge of Reason: Cycles of Works on Paper in the Age of the Enlightenment
Am Rande der Vernunft: Bilderzyklen der Aufklärungszeit
Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, 16 March — 29 July 2012
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, "Carceri. The Giant Wheel" © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, photo: Volker-H. Schneider
The exhibition whisks visitors to the murky edges of the Age of Reason. The creative and fantastical visual world of the capriccio thrived all the way through the 18th century, existing beyond the intellectual, socially critical and emancipatory endeavours of the Enlightenment. Stock themes of myth and reality, of antiquity and the modern day, of arcadias and Commedia dell´Arte, of ornament and decay all merge, piece-by-piece to form a kaleidoscope of playfully vivid imaginings. The pictures on display here depict the fancifully capricious but equally dark, irrational sides of nature, architecture and humankind.
Many form the theme of several extensive series of prints that are impressive for the breadth and variety of their vision. Scenes, as found in the Capricci and Scherzi di Fantasia series by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Bacchanales by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, remain enigmas even today. The strangeness of these images often leaves the viewer confused, as in the case of the sinister, brooding architectural fantasies of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri or Goya’s Caprichos. For while several of their individual sheets reflect core Enlightenment themes, they also seem to contradict them, revealing visual and moral discrepancies, conveying a sense of entrapment and making the unreal appear real. The most famous sheet from the Caprichos, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos) has become an emblem of this dark underbelly of the enlightened, illuminated world of reason and the Enlightenment.
The age of the Enlightenment is couched in a symbolism that revolves around the contrast between lumiéres (light) and tenèbres (shadow), between black and white – a set of oppositions that also defines the very essence of printmaking as a medium. Thanks to the technical refinement of various printmaking techniques attained to gain the upper edge over other art forms, the sheets and series of great artists from this epoch became prized collector’s items. In the artistic principle of the Caprice, not only does the artist’s imaginative spirit reveal itself, but also his virtuosity in his handling of the medium. This exhibition sees treasures from the Kupferstichkabinett’s rich holdings of works in this genre go on display together for the first time, giving visitors the chance to appreciate the outstanding aesthetic value of these works on paper. The exhibition invites the public to discover the artistic richness of a visual world that hovered on the edge of reason in an epoch that hovered on the threshold of modernity.
The exhibition is being held as part of a wider series of events called Art – King – Enlightenment, coordinated by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in honour of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Frederick the Great on 24 January 2012.
Exhibition | Taking Time: Chardin’s ‘Boy Building a House of Cards’
From Waddesdon Manor:
Taking Time: Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards and Other Paintings
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 28 March — 15 July 2012
Curated by Juliet Carey
This exhibition brings together some of the greatest works to come out of eighteenth-century France. Prompted by Waddesdon’s recent acquisition of Boy Building a House of Cards (1735) by Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), the exhibition will unite all four of the artist’s paintings of the subject for the first time ever.
Loans from the UK, France and the USA will demonstrate how Chardin paired these works with other compositions to explore themes of childhood, adolescence and play. A group of Chardin’s images of servants – again, never seen together before – will provide a contrast with these images of children playing.
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From Paul Holberton Publishing:
Juliet Carey, with essays by Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, Pierre Rosenberg and Katie Scott, Taking Time: Chardin’s Boy Building House of Cards and Other Paintings (London: Paul Holberton, 2012), 160 pages, ISBN: 9781907372339, £30.
Recently acquired by Waddesdon Manor, Jean-Siméon Chardin’s early masterpiece Boy Building a House of Cards has a self-contained stillness that contrasts with the splendour of its new setting. Yet, it resonates with existing apspects of the collection from games and the representation of childhood to the influence of North European genre painting on French art. A child playing – with cards, bubbles, spinning-top or shuttlecock – was a favourite subject of Chardin’s. Such scenes, with their intimations of the transitory nature of human life, were derived from 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish vanitas, but display a delight in childhood for its own sake.
Full of repetition, pendants and series, this catalogue allows the reader to scrutinize some of Chardin’s greatest works, and to follow the artist’s exploration of some of his most arresting subjects. Prints by Pierre Filloeul, Antoine Marcenay de Ghuy and others demonstrate the shifts in appearance and meaning that Chardin’s card-house compositions underwent through transposition from painting to engraving. The prints also help reconstruct some of the occasional pairings in which Chardin’s figure paintings were staged, whether on the walls of the Salon or in the cabinets of private collectors. The pendants include two of the most famous of all Chardin’s figure paintings, Lady Taking Tea and Girl with a Shuttlecock. Essays in self-containment and stillness, these works invite us to consider the nature of attention – the attention of the painter, his human subjects and ourselves.
This richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire (28 March – 15 July 2012) that will unite Chardin’s four paintings of a boy with a house of cards for the first time (loans come from the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the National Gallery, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington), allowing us to examine Chardin’s treatment of the subject in the context of his fascination with themes of play, childhood and adolescence. Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Musée du Louvre and the pre-eminent scholar of Chardin’s work, considers the Rothchilds as collectors of Chardin; Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy, an independent scholar and Rothschild specialist, gives an insight into Charlotte de Rothschild’s collecting; Katie Scott, lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, specializing in French art and architecture of the early modern period, explores Chardin’s paintings of games; and Juliet Carey, Curator of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture at Waddesdon Manor and curator of the exhibition, writes on repetition and meaning in Chardin’s houses of cards and their pendants.
Exhibition | Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi
Press release from the Asia Society Museum:
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857
Asia Society Museum, New York, 7 February — 6 May 2012
Curated by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma
Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 brings together 100 masterpieces created during an artistically rich period in India’s history. This major international loan exhibition provides a new look at an era of significant change during which the Mughal capital in Delhi shifted from being the heart of the late Mughal Empire to becoming the jewel in the crown of the British Raj. The exhibition includes jewel-like portrait paintings, striking panoramas, and exquisite decorative arts crafted for Mughal emperors and European residents alike, as well as historical photographs. The exhibition is curated by William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma. It is accompanied by a 264-page illustrated book with essays by William Dalrymple, Yuthika Sharma, Jean Marie Lafont, Malini Roy, Sunil Sharma, and J.P. Losty, published by Asia Society Museum in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London.
(Yale University Press, 2012), ISBN: 9780300176667, $60
“Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 is a reappraisal of a transitional era in India that provided unprecedented impetus for artistic innovation and experimentation,” says Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum Director and Vice President for Global Art Programs. “We’re pleased to be taking a new approach to this magnificent and vibrant work with notable author William Dalrymple and art historian Yuthika Sharma as curators.”
The exhibition focuses on the reigns of the last four Mughal emperors: Muhammad Shah (reigned 1719–1748), Shah Alam II (reigned 1759–1806), Akbar Shah II (reigned 1806–1837) and Bahadur Shah II Zafar (reigned 1837–1857). Having lost military, political and economic power to the newlyarrived British in Calcutta, Delhi continued to maintain its extraordinary cultural, literary, and artistic patronage networks. Artists were supported by the Mughal court in Delhi and the city’s ascendant European residents, creating an environment of extraordinary interaction and influence between them and the new world of the British East India Company.
As the British took over the reign of a dispersed empire from the Mughals in 1803, they were enamored of its courtly elegance and sought to participate in its culture as patrons and enthusiasts. Company painting, involving artistic commissions undertaken by Indian artists for officers of the British East India Company, was practiced alongside Mughal court painting, with both patrons utilizing the services of a common group of artists.
The exhibition looks at recognized works by Delhi-based court artists Nidha Mal and Chitarman, and less familiar works by artists such as Ghulam Murtaza Khan, Ghulam Ali Khan, and Mazhar Ali Khan. In addition to Mughal miniatures produced under later emperors, this exhibition highlights a selection of so-called Company School paintings produced for Delhi-based personalities such as William Fraser, James Skinner, and Thomas Metcalfe. The exhibition also chronicles the rise in genre portraiture during this era, epitomized by character studies of urban and rural residents of Delhi.
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From Yale UP:
William Dalrymple and Yuthika Sharma, Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707–1857 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 224 pages, ISBN: 9780300176667, $60.
. . . Sumptuous color illustrations of such works illuminate the pages of this book, painting a vivid portrait of this important city and its art, artists, and patrons. Masterworks by major Mughal artists, such as Nidha Mal and Ghulam Ali Khan, and works by non-Mughal artists demonstrate the dynamic interplay of artistic production at this time. This largely overlooked period is explored in thought-provoking essays by a panel of distinguished scholars of Indian art, history, and literature to present an engaging look at this dynamic artistic culture in the midst of rapid change.
William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer, historian, and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Yuthika Sharma received a PhD in South Asian art and architecture from Columbia University and a doctorate in design from Harvard University.
Exhibitions | Ottomania at the Rijksmuseum
From the Rijksmuseum:
Ottomania: The Turkish World through Western Eyes
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 7 March — 7 May 2012
Joseph-Marie Vien, fantasy costume from the Bacha de Caramanie, illustration 7 from "Caravane du sultan à la Mecque," 1748.
In observance of the 400-year anniversary of diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum presents two special exhibitions. Ottomania: The Turkish World through Western Eyes presents the Turkey of old, depicted in over 35 special prints from the Rijksmuseum collection. The presentation Ahmet Polat: Modern Turkey paints a picture of Turkey today, with 10 impressive portraits of young Dutch-born Turkish people, trying their luck in Turkey.
With Ottomania, the Rijksmuseum shows how the Turkish world of the 16th to 18th centuries was seen through Western eyes. Exotic travel stories, exquisite costume books, and prints by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and Tiepolo demonstrate the fascination of artists with charming Eastern figures and oriental attire, although the powerful Ottoman Empire also instilled fear and inspired awe. In addition to well-known masterpieces, various new discoveries and acquisitions are also on display, including a unique 16th-century etching of Turkish oil wrestlers. A number of pithy cartoons also depict the often strained
relations between the Ottoman empire and the West. The presentation
consists of over 35 prints and illustrated books.
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