Gainsborough Linley Portraits Reunited at Dulwich
Press release from Dulwich Picture Gallery in London:
Thomas Gainsborough, "Elizabeth and Mary Linley," ca. 1772 (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
Known in their times as the ‘nightingales’, Elizabeth and Mary Linley were the most beautiful and talked-about young girls in Bath’s society in the 1770s. From a musical family, they were applauded on the theatre stages of Bath and London, as much as they appeared in the newspapers of the day as society figures. They were portrayed together, in 1772, by Thomas Gainsborough, who was a close friend of their father’s, and their neighbour in Bath. The painter had seen Elizabeth and Mary grow before his eyes and tenderly represented them in their magnificent large canvas known as The Linley Sisters, now at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
In the same year as the Dulwich painting was finished by Gainsborough, Elizabeth eloped to France with the young playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, causing a great scandal. A year later, in 1773, the two were married. Elizabeth did not expect the marriage to be an unhappy one, constantly marked by Sheridan’s infidelities. Elizabeth gave up singing and supported her husband in his career as a writer and politician.
Thomas Gainsborough, "Mrs. Elizabeth Richard Brinsley Sheridan," 1785-87 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery)
Gainsborough was to portray Elizabeth at different points in her life. This is his last image of her – aged thirty-one- only a few years before her untimely death of tuberculosis in 1792. Elizabeth sits under a tree in the open countryside – a windswept valley so different from the delicate violets and primroses of the earlier double portrait at Dulwich. Elizabeth’s entire figure is transformed by the romantic wind in the canvas, just as passion swept her short life. After her death, William Jackson noted that “as a singer she is perished forever, as a woman she still exists in a picture painted by Gainsborough.”
Earl A. Powell III, the Director of the National Gallery of Art Washington, said: “We are delighted that Gainsborough’s Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan will represent the National Gallery of Art at the Bicentenary celebrations of Dulwich Picture Gallery.” The masterpiece will be on display from 6 September – 2 October 2011.
Exhibition: ‘Capability’ Brown at Compton Verney
From Compton Verney:
‘Capability’ Brown and the Landscapes of Middle England
Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 25 June — 2 October 2011
Curated by Steven Parissien and Tim Mowl
Set in its own ‘Capability’ Brown landscape, Compton Verney is the ideal location for the first-ever exhibition about internationally-renowned landscape designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-83). This exhibition brings the man and his genius to life through a series of case studies of ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes from the Midlands. It looks at how Brown designed his natural, neoclassical arcadias; how his landscapes were designed to work in practice; how Brown responded to technological advances in shooting and carriage-making; and how he addressed the enormous task of moving tons of earth and creating hills, vales and lakes in an age before tractors or JCBs.
The focus is on famous ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes in the Midlands region, including Croome, Charlecote Park, Combe Abbey and of course Compton Verney itself. It will showcase the very latest research on the design and use of Georgian landscapes with paintings, maps, accounts, historic guns, manuals and specially-
commissioned photography.
The exhibition is curated by Compton Verney’s Director, Georgian expert Dr Steven Parissien, and Professor Tim Mowl, Director of the Landscape and Garden History Centre at the University of Bristol and founding author of Redcliffe Press’s county guides to the Historic Gardens of Britain.
A 27-page gallery guide is available as a PDF file here»
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Laura Mayer, Capability Brown and the English Landscape Garden (Oxford: Shire Publications, 2011), 64 pages, ISBN: 9780747810490, $12.95.
Laura Mayer presents a concise and colourful introduction to Brown and other leading landscape gardeners of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as William Kent, Richard Payne Knight and Humphry Repton. She explores how competing ideas in garden design were shaped both by changes in prevailing fashion and by the innovations of particular designers, and why Brown’s designs are currently considered to be the epitome of landscape gardening in this period.
Laura Mayer is studying for a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century gardens at the university of Bristol under the supervision of Professor Timothy Mowl. She won the 2010 Garden History Society essay prize and is working, with Mowl, on ‘The Historic Gardens of England: Northumberland’.
Five Eighteenth-Century Exhibitions at McMaster University
From The McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario:
This fall, explore 18th-century art and its ongoing influence in five concurrent exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. Rising to the Occasion is mounted in conjunction with and as a complement to the McMaster University John Douglas Taylor Conference The Immaterial Eighteen Century, October 27-29.
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Rising to the Occasion: The Long 18th Century
The McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, 3 September — 5 November 2011
Rising to the Occasion: The Long 18th Century is the governing title for exhibition-episodes that explore facets of culture and society in the 18th century—ideas, rather than attempts to tell the story of art as history. But art has a value in a historical reckoning—it does rise to the occasion, and allows both a mirror and lens perspective.
The choice of exhibition works interweaves the historical and the contemporary in order to open up different discussions—the legacies of the 18th century—enlightenment, empiricism, revolution and innovation and the instability of these ideas, as they speak to our unstable time. The keynote episode is borrowed directly from the title of Rebecca Belmore’s Rising to the Occasion. The original occasion was Belmore’s response to the Duke and Duchess of York’s official visit to Canada in 1987; she cobbled together and wore a hybrid-material dress in the manner and style of the 19th century. The new context is the inclusion of John Verelst’s so-described “Four Indian Kings” paintingswhich were commissioned by Queen Anne in 1710. The now disembodied Belmore dress as object-artifact has a resonance with Jean-Antoine Houdon’s 1767 life-sized plaster flayed figure—sculpted to show the body muscles—and in turn George Romney’s portrait with an écorché figure.
Paintings by Jean-Joseph Taillasson and Angelica Kauffmann, draw their subject matter from the classical world to send messages to their “18th-century present.” Taillasson’s audience was the new social order of post-Revolutionary France; for Kauffmann, a subject that could appeal to the heroic—in the wake of the first “global” Seven Years War—and her metatext on the role of women. A contemporary counterpoint is Tony Scherman’s monumental Napoleon painting, from his About 1789 series, which Scherman describes as a forensic portrait. Likewise, John Massey’s 1985 photo-collage serigraph Versailles is another forensic moment and constructed embodiment; an arm of collaged gold that cannot rise, gripped by the arm of the artist. Angela Grauerholz’s black and white photograph Voltaire’s Study (Voltaire was one of the great writer and humanists of the 18th century) has a subtle counterpoint in Taillasson’s painting, as Jiri Ladocha’s suite of Voltaire portraits have with the Houdon figure. Ladocha worked with a mould from Houdon’s Voltaire portrait bust, reconstructed as if it were a Cubist vision—the deep past, the historical modern, and the present.
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Jinny Yu and Don Andrus: Cadenza
The McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, 3 September — 5 November 2011
Cadenza is a collaborative artist project. Jinny Yu and Don Andrus agreed upon the starting point, an early, major mural The Brazen Serpent, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696-1770), and to work to the original dimensions, 164 x 1365 cm. The Brazen Serpent, is based on a biblical story of Moses and commissioned for the SS. Cosma e Damiano church in Venice. As a consequence of Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1797, and the suppression of the church, the mural was removed and taken to Castelfranco, 40 km away. It was left rolled up until the end of the 19th century when it was reinstalled at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, a museum dedicated to Venetian painting from the Byzantine era to the 18th century.
The why of Tiepolo, and this mural, is different for the two artists. For Jinny Yu—working with oil on aluminium panels and a grisaille (monochromatic) technique—it was the condition of the work, the striations and loss of painting that occurred during its history, that opened up “modern questions.”
Yu wrote:
I am fascinated by the pictorial tension that is present due to the co-existence of illusional space Tiepolo created and the cracks on the surface of the painting left by years of bad conservation. I “express” these cracks on the surface of my work to emphasize a receding space—to explore the boundary between illusion and reality in painting.
For Andrus, it was the challenge of working figuratively, and at the same time, understanding and admiring Tiepolo’s contribution as one of the great colourists of the 18th century. He decided to “extract” twelve heads/portraits from the Tiepolo mural, but based eleven of them on individuals on Prince Edward Island—the twelfth is Jinny Yu. As he also commented on the importance and value in mining art history as if a geological undertaking, thereby revealing something below the surface.
The title Cadenza is apt, a term in music referring to improvisations within a scored piece of music. It was chosen as a reference to their intention in creating their own particular variation on Tiepolo’s mural.
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A Glimpse of China in the 18th Century
The McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, 23 August 2011 — 7 January 2012
Curated by Angela Sheng
The 18th century in China witnessed the reign periods of three important Manchu emperors of the last imperial Qing (pronounced as ch’ing) dynasty (1644-1911): Emperor Kangxi (r. 1662-1722), Emperor Yongzheng (r. 1723-1735), and Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736-1795). Both Emperor Kangxi and his grandson, Emperor Qianlong, were intensely interested in other cultures. They emulated the scholarly elite of the Han majority whom they ruled, for example, composing poems and writing them in calligraphy and displaying them in many forms. Similarly, they showed much curiosity about the west. During these three prosperous reigns, the arts flourished at court with far-reaching implications for innovation. In this exhibition, with works from the McMaster Museum of Art, and private collections, we present a mere glimpse of the rippling effects as contrast to that which highlighted the 18th century in the West.
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The ‘Floating’ Urbanities of Utamaro and Hogarth: Pictures for Women?
The McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, 23 August 2011 — 7 January 2012
Curated by Mark A. Cheetham
The famous printmakers and painters William Hogarth (1697-1764) and Kitagawa Utamaro (c.1753-1806) lived worlds apart. What little Hogarth knew of Asian art fell under the broad heading of Chinoiserie: lacquer, porcelain, and figurines popular in Britain since the East India Company traded out of Hirado, Japan c.1613-23. As late as the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London—almost a century after Hogarth’s death—the specific qualities of Japanese art remained officially a subset of Chinese achievement. Utamaro was equally unaware of European art.
Art historians like to see verifiable aesthetic influence of the sort Japanese art so powerfully exercised on British artists beginning in the 1860s. That wasn’t the relationship between Utamaro and Hogarth, but their remoteness can free us to consider connections other than those of cause and effect. Hogarth and Utamaro were strategically involved with the thriving commerce in prints in their respective metropolises and societies. Both struggled against competition and state censorship. We can also witness the unstable vicissitudes of two of the 18th century’s most vibrant visual cultures in these artists’ signature trade in images of women.
Both artists offered the many viewers of their prints infinitely intricate typologies of women and their activities. Hogarth mirrored the shifting social sands of London through endless anecdote. Utamaro construed Edo’s visual culture of women more simply and subtly but with no less purpose. Seeing this work together, we may productively reverse common opinion that would contrast Utamaro’s connoisseurial appreciation of women with Hogarth’s overt moralizing.
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First Contact? Artists of the Cook Voyages
The McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, 26 August 2011 — 7 January 2012
As Australian art historian Bernard Smith wrote, the three voyages of Captain Cook (between 1768 and 1780) greatly enhanced the economic and political power of Europe in the Pacific, and added appreciably to a body of knowledge in the areas of botany, meteorology and a “nascent science of ethnography.”
The Cook voyages were not the absolute first contact, but they represented the first encyclopaedic and rigorous scientific exploration and documentation of the Pacific Rim and Antipodes. To this end, Cook was astute in enlisting professional artists to record plants, land, “effects” and people, and placed unprecedented demands on their skills and inventive responses, underscored by the instructions he gave; “to observe the Genius, Temper and Disposition…of the Natives and Inhabitants.” While this visual record is rarely considered within art history, Smith argued forcefully that it made a significant contribution to European empiricism of the 18th century. He proposed that it characterized a new respect and appreciation for drawing in the 18th century.
First Contact? is drawn from the collections of the Library and Archives Canada and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, including 2nd and 3rd voyage drawings by artists William Hodges and John Webber, and related works by Nathaniel Dance, James Basire, John Keyse Shirwin, and William Woollett. A complement component, from the McMaster Museum of Art collection, are works on paper by François Boucher, John Flaxman, Thomas Gainsborough, James Jeffreys and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
Exhibition: ‘Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India’
From the YCBA:
Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770-1830
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 11 October — 31 December 2011
Curated by Holly Shaffer with Gillian Forrester
Organized to complement the Center’s major exhibition on Johan Zoffany, who spent six productive years in India, Adapting the Eye explores the complex and multifaceted networks of British and Indian professional and amateur artists, patrons, and scholars in British India in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their drive to create and organize knowledge for both aesthetic and political purposes. Selected from the Center’s rich holdings, the exhibition includes a diverse range of objects from both high art and popular culture, including albums, scrapbooks, prints, paintings, miniatures, and sculpture, demonstrating how collecting practices and artistic patronage in India during that period constituted a complex intersection of culture and power.
The starting point and central focus of the exhibition is a remarkable and little-known archive in the Center’s collection assembled by Charles Warre Malet and the British artist James Wales. Warre Malet was the East India Company’s Resident in Pune between 1785 and 1798. He and Wales commissioned over a hundred works on paper by British and Indian artists, which are included in the archive together with extensive manuscript material and vivid sketches of landscape, architectural sites, scenes from everyday life, and diplomatic ceremonial events. An extensive selection of drawings from the archive, complemented by other works from the collections, provides a unique window into central India at a critical historical moment. A pivotal figure in this rich cultural interchange was the highly accomplished Indian draftsman and sculptor Gangaram Tambat, who drew on both indigenous and European artistic conventions; his remarkable hybrid drawings are juxtaposed with works by British artists, including William Hodges, William and Thomas Daniell, Robert Mabon, and James Wales.
Exhibition: ‘Luminous Paper, British Watercolors and Drawings’
From a Getty press release:
Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings
At the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, 19 July — 23 October 2011
Curated by Julian Brooks
Thomas Girtin, "Durham Cathedral and Castle," ca. 1800 watercolor over pencil heightened with gum Arabic (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum)
Watercolor is one of the most challenging artistic techniques—capable of extraordinary luminosity but often resistant to control. Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings presents more than 25 works of the 1700s and 1800s by some of the greatest masters of the medium, many on view for the first time.
Featuring the work of some of the most famous British artists, including J.M.W. Turner, William Blake, and Samuel Palmer, this exhibition reveals their multifaceted innovations in the field of drawing and watercolor painting. From Turner’s use of his thumbprint to roughen the texture of wash in a whirling seascape, to the reflected and re-reflected light built in layers by John Sell Cotman, the medium of watercolor was transformed beyond recognition. Other artists experimented with novel subject matter or new modes of representation, playing important roles in the development of European drawing and watercolor painting.
“Key works have been added to the Getty’s collection in the last few years as part of an ongoing initiative to build our holdings of British drawings and watercolors to better represent the wider European tradition,” said Associate Curator Julian Brooks, who curated the exhibition. “Many of these works have been recently acquired and we’re thrilled to be publicly displaying them for the first time in generations.”
Among the recent acquisitions is Durham Cathedral and Castle (about 1800) by Thomas Girtin, a dramatic view of a medieval cathedral and castle set on a rocky outcrop above the water, amid the moving light of a bright, cloudy sky. Girtin died of tuberculosis at the age of 27, two years after making this drawing. His rival J.M.W. Turner is reputed to have said “Had poor Tom lived, I would have starved.” Another is View of the Church of Our Lady of Hanswijk, Mechelen (1831) by Thomas Shotter Boys, a central figure in Anglo-French artistic exchange of the period, and one of the most sophisticated practitioners of watercolor. He excelled in capturing effects of atmosphere and mood. (more…)
Exhibition: ‘Sin and the City’, Hogarth at Princeton
From the exhibition website:
Sin and the City: William Hogarth’s London
Firestone Library, Princeton University, 26 August 2011 — 29 January 2012
William Hogarth, "Beer Street," 1751, etching and engraving (Princeton University: Graphic Arts Collection, Firestone Library)
This fall the Princeton University Library will celebrate eighteenth-century London as seen through engravings by one of its most popular storytellers. Sin and the City: William Hogarth’s London, on view 26 August 2011 to 29 January 2012, presents Hogarth’s unflinching chronicle of the city’s development from a medieval town to a swirling modern metropolis.
Whether examining scenes along the impoverished roads of St. Giles parish, peering into the dark cellars of Blood Bowl Alley, or accompanying a procession to the Tyburn gallows, Hogarth’s engravings plunge us into a city that is not only grand and powerful but also chaotic, crime-ridden, and sometimes even heartbreaking.
The exhibition includes 70 engravings by Hogarth, along with the work of his contemporaries, such as Jonathan Swift, John Gay, and Henry Fielding, among others. Period maps and original documents from the first production of The Beggar’s Opera will also be on view.
A full exhibition checklist is available here»
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Afternoon Roundtable Discussion: A Midnight Modern Conversation
Princeton University, 7 October 2011
With
Linda Colley, Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University;
Mark Hallett, Professor of History of Art, University of York;
Tim Hitchcock, Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, University of Hertfordshire; and
Claude Rawson, Maynard Mack Professor of English, Yale University.
James Steward, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum will moderate.
A reception will follow.
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Additional information is available at the Events page. The exhibition organizers have also created a useful map detailing key locations for Hogarth’s prints.
Exhibition: American Colonial Revival Style in New York
From the Museum of the City of New York:
The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis
Museum of the City of New York, 14 June — 30 October 2011
Curated by Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis brings together extraordinary furniture, decorative objects, and photographs to survey, in New York City and beyond, the Colonial Revival movement in the realms of architecture and design. The exhibition covers the fertile period from the 1890s to the present, focusing on the years from 1900 to the 1930s, when New York City, through department stores, museums, and more, was the center for the style’s promotion nationwide.
Exhibition Catalogue: Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins, The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis (New York: Monacelli Press, 2011), 224 pages, ISBN: 9781580932851, $50. Easily the most recognizable architectural style in America, with its brick or shingled facades trimmed in white and ornamented with restrained classical detail, the Colonial Revival emerged in the late nineteenth century and is still the basis for classical
design today. The American Style surveys the evolution of the Colonial Revival from the 1890s to the present, focusing on the period from 1900 to the 1930s when New York City was a major center of architecture and decorative arts. Leading architects, including McKim Mead & White, Delano & Aldrich, and Mott B. Schmidt, used its vocabulary for private residences and clubs as well as institutional buildings—banks, schools, churches, and museums.
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As Edward Rothstein writes in his review for The New York Times (13 June 2011) . . .
National Design That’s Hidden in Plain Sight
One sign of a powerful style is its invisibility. It is so familiar it is scarcely noticed. It is so natural, how could things be otherwise? We don’t really pay attention to the style itself. Instead we notice contrasts, variations, violations.
One of the achievements of the illuminating exhibition “The American Style,” which opens on Tuesday at the Museum of the City of New York, is that it helps make the invisible visible. With photographs of grand mansions and suburban residences; with images of high schools, apartment buildings, town halls and post offices; with examples of mass-market furniture and finely made cabinetry; with pewter candlesticks and pictorial wall murals and floor plans, the exhibition gradually helps us see what is all around us. Its subtitle defines the terrain: “Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis.”. . .
The style embraces both authority and intimacy, proclaiming the hopes of ordinary citizens as well as the heritage of those well established.
There is also a historical aspect to its appeal. The revival developed after the nation’s centennial celebrations in 1876, when the scars of the Civil War and the struggles of Reconstruction were salved by these allusions to an almost pastoral colonial past. Reproductions were made of early furniture. Paintings, vases and decorative plates incorporated images of Washington.
On display here is a hand-tinted photograph from the studio of Wallace Nutting, a minister who at the turn of the 20th century became something of a revival missionary, staging domestic tableaus in colonial-era homes and photographing them. The style gained another wave of energy from the renovation of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s, which even influenced architects of new urban developments.
The style, as the exhibition shows, eventually evolved into a national style meant “to invoke a national experience and express national values.” When the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its American Wing in 1924, its first curator, R. T. H. Halsey, said the displays of early decorative arts would counter “the influx of foreign ideas” and present traditions “invaluable in the Americanization of many of our people.” . . .
The full review is available here»
Exhibition: A Subersive Art – Prints of the French Revolution
This exhibition, held at Waddesdon Manor, elaborates upon the the PhD research of co-curator, Claire Trevien (“Revolutionary Prints as Spectacle”). As she describes it, the thesis “undertaken at the University of Warwick, aspires to investigate the notion of spectacle and theatricality within the visual culture of the French Revolution. The aim of the thesis is to not reduce prints to simple historical witnesses or illustrations conveniently presented to suit an argument. Instead, it is a study of the metaphors used in the prints, a method that sheds new light on the links that exist between theatre, politics and visual culture during the French Revolution.” –FG
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From Waddesdon Manor:
A Subversive Art: Prints of the French Revolution
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire
Isaac Cruikshank, “The Martyrdom of Louis XVI, King of France” 1 February 1793 (Waddesdon, The Rothschild Collection)
Curated by Paul Davidson and Claire Trévien
This display features an extraordinary collection of prints about the French Revolution, acquired by Baron Ferdinand. Bound into four large volumes, they record major events (such as the storming of the Bastille and the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette), but also some of the more ephemeral episodes, often with a highly satirical, political eye. The prints are being catalogued as part of a collaborative research project with the Universities of London (Queen Mary) and Warwick, and will eventually be available to study online.
In addition to the display on the second floor, visitors will be able to follow a trail around the house, highlighting objects depicting or associated with significant figures of the French Revolution. The wealth of French material at Waddesdon reflects the interest of the Rothschild family in that turbulent period of history.
Exhibition: Toile de Jouy, Printed Gardens and Fields
I’m happy to welcome one more addition to the Enfilade team! The Paris-based Ph.D. student Hélène Bremer will be weighing in with occasional contributions. She completed her M.A. in Art History at the University of Leiden in 2000 and is now working on her dissertation (also at Leiden) “Grand Tour, Grand collections: The Influence of the Grand Tour Experience on Collection Display in the Eighteenth Century.” She’ll be reporting not only on events in France but also sharing news from the Netherlands. We start things off with an exhibition sketch in response to the Musée de la Toile de Jouy. -CH
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Parties de Campagne, Jardins et champs dans la toile imprimée XVIIIe-XIXe siècle
Musée de la Toile de Jouy, Jouy-en-Josas, 29 April — 20 November 2011
Exhibition sketch by Hélène Bremer
Founded in 1977, the Musée de la Toile de Jouy moved into its current home, the nineteenth-century Château d'Eglantine in 1991. The museum's holdings include some 5000 objects.
The Musée de la Toile de Jouy at Jouy-en-Josas is an ideal destination for anyone taken with wonderful fabrics and eighteenth-century history. Just a few kilometers from the Château de Versailles (though far from its tourist throngs), the museum is located at the Château d’Eglantine. While this charming setting is alone worth a visit, the museum’s interiors offer lovely rooms full of toile-covered furniture. Not only do you find here a vast collection of Toile de Jouy, the displays explain the industrialization of toile-making, particularly the printing innovations of factory founder Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, the German immigrant who introduced to Jouy-en-Josas, the use of engraved copper plates (1770) and then copper rollers (1797), replacing the older wood blocks.
For the spring and summer, the staff of the museum have organized a delightful exhibition, Parties de Campagne, Jardins et champs dans la toile imprimée XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. The curators have assembled over 200 examples of fabrics depicting a wide variety of subjects: the four seasons, workers in the fields, shepherds and hunting scenes, children playing, landscapes with ruins, and fête champêtre motifs. There is also a nice, small fabric-covered balloon — to my mind, just begging to be shown with the fabric, Le Ballon de Gonesse, an example of which can be found nearby in the museum’s permanent display.
The sheer quantity of fabrics on display is impressive, suggesting at times the feel of a densely packed closet. The quantity indicates how much there is to explore on this interesting topic of la vie champêtre and how rich the museum’s holdings are, given that all the material comes from the museum’s own collection.
Having seen the exhibition, I’m curious about the accompanying book, edited by Anne de Thoisy-Dallem, which unfortunately was not yet available when I visited in early May. It promises to be a useful publication with two fully-illustrated volumes, addressing not only the exhibition themes but also outlining new research on rare costumes, the gardens of Toile de Jouy, and precious botanical books that provided inspiration for the pattern designers.
For more information, including terrific images, the press release (in French) is available here»
Exhibition: East Meets West, Cross-Cultural Influences in Glass
The Corning Museum of Glass’s current exhibition examines cross-cultural currents in glassmaking during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lee Lawrence’s review for The Wall Street Journal (9 August 2011) is available here». -FG
East Meets West: Cross-Cultural Influences in Glassmaking in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, 18 November 2010 — 30 October 2011
Francesco Vezzi, Bowl with cover, Venice, 1720-1724
East Meets West: Cross-Cultural Influences in Glassmaking in the 18th and 19th Centuries explores influences in glassmaking that resulted from cultural exchange between the East and West, and documents stylistic developments in Western Europe and East Asia during the early modern period.
In Western Europe, the influence of East and South Asian products imported by the English, Dutch, and French East India Companies in the 18th and 19th centuries had a significant impact on style and art. European artists, fascinated by Oriental designs, architecture, and decorative arts, developed a chinoiserie style (characterized by use of Chinese motifs, shapes, and materials) that gained popularity in Europe in the second half of the 17th century.
The allure of the “exotic” and the appeal of materials unknown to the West—such as hard-paste porcelain and lacquer—stimulated the production of glass objects imitating the treasured Eastern imports.
Western scientists did not know porcelain was a clay-based substance
and mistakenly assumed it must be a vitreous one. . . .
Read more here»
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