‘Plein Air’ Exhibition in Valenciennes
From the exhibition’s website:
Dessins d’Italie, Le XVIIIe siècle: l’expérience du plein air
Le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes, 17 March — 14 June 2010
Olivier Lemay, "View of the Villa Negroni"
L’Italie, terre d’inspiration incontestée depuis la Reniassance, où se mêlent et s’entrecroisent les vestiges d’un passé lointain et les traces des génies du Quattro- et du Cinquecento, fut, dans la seconde moitié du XVIII siècle, à l’origine d’une nouvelle revolution artistique. Celle-ci, en modifiant profondément la perception du paysage, bouleversa définitivement l’art moderne. De ce regard renouvelé sur la nature découla un langage pictural inédit, dégagé de toute préoccupation narrative, allégé de tous poncifs historiques. L’étude en plein air, soumise aux variations climatiques, incita les artistes à s’interroger d’abord sur des questions plastiques et chromatiques, à chercher des moyens dévoquer une sensation, une perception fugace, les variations infinies d’une nature qui change au fil des heures. . . (more…)
Exhibition and Conference on Louise Élisabeth of France
Fuochi di gioia e lacrime d’argento: An Exhibition Commemorating Louise Élisabeth of France
on the 250th Anniversary of Her Death
Palazzo Bossi Bocchi, Parma, 11 April — 16 May 2010
Louis-Michel Van Loo, "Louise Élisabeth, Duchess of Parma"
The oldest daughter of King Louis XV, Louise Élisabeth of France (1727-1759) was married in 1739 to Prince Philip of Spain (son of Philip V) at the age of 12 (she gave birth to her first child at 14). Following the War of the Austrian Succession, Philip and Élisabeth became Duke and Duchess of Parma. The exhibition includes a posthumous portrait of Élisabeth painted by Jean-Marc Nattier (now in a private collection), along with the more familiar portrait by Louis-Michel van Loo and a selection of prints and drawings from the Cariparma Foundation.
In addition to the exhibition, in September Parma will host an international conference dedicated to Louise Élisabeth and the first decade of Bourbon rule in Parma from 1749 to 1759. Organized by Professors Charles Mambriani (University of Parma) and Gianfranco Fiaccadori (University of Milan), the conference will explore the deep historical, artistic, and cultural ties between Parma and France.
Richard Wilson Exhibition in New York
From a press release from Richard Feigen:
Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia
Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York, 29 April – 25 June 2010
Richard Wilson, "View of Caernarvon Castle, Wales," 1744-45 (Detroit Institute of Arts)
Richard L. Feigen & Co. will present Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia, a loan exhibition dedicated to the first great British landscape artist, Richard Wilson (c.1713-1782). This will be the first exhibition to be devoted to the artist in North America in over 25 years.
Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia will feature approximately a dozen of the painter’s works from both public and private US collections. One of the highlights of the exhibition will be the great Destruction of the Children of Niobe, the key picture of Wilson’s career and a landmark in the history of British landscape paintings, which is being loaned by the Yale Center for British Art. Also included will be Wilson’s earliest known view of his native Wales, Caernarvon Castle, on loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as several seminal pictures painted during the artist’s sojourn in Italy, among them, The Temple of Clitumnus from a private US collection.
Wilson’s second English period will be represented by his perhaps most famous landscape, The White Monk, loaned by the Toledo Museum of Art, and a magnificent view of Tivoli from the Kimbell Art Museum. The exhibition will also feature several pictures by some of the seventeenth-century landscape masters whose work influenced Wilson’s. Claude Lorrain’s exquisite Pastoral Landscape, a small copper being lent by the Yale University Art Gallery, and Aelbert Cuyp’s idyllic Landscape with the Flight into Egypt from the Metropolitan Museum will be among the pictures shown in this context.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, to which the distinguished scholar of British art, Andrew Wilton, has contributed the introductory essay. Mr. Wilton is Visiting Research Fellow at Tate Britain, having formerly been Keeper of the British Collection and Curator of the Turner Collection in the Clore Gallery. The most recent of his many publications are Turner in His Time, Turner as Draughtsman, and Five Centuries of British Painting: From Holbein to Hodgkin. All proceeds from the sale of the catalogue will be donated to the Richard Wilson catalogue raisonné project, which is being undertaken by Dr. Paul-Spencer-Longhurst on behalf of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, the sister institution to the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
Palladio and His Legacy at the Morgan
From The Morgan’s website:
Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey
The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2 April — 1 August 2010
Villa Rotunda, from “The Architecture of A. Palladio,” 1715-20 (RIBA Library)
Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey features thirty-one original Palladio drawings from the Royal Institute of British Architects. These exquisite drawings, which were exhibited only once before in America and never in New York, will be on view to the public for the first time in over thirty years. They are being presented with rare architectural texts to illustrate the journey from Italy to North America of Palladio’s design principles of proportion, harmony, and beauty.
Palladio’s work has significantly influenced American architecture from colonial times to the present day. Focusing on the artist’s original drawings and following the trajectory of his ideas, the show also traces the story of American Palladianism. The drawings are supported by numerous architectural models. Three large examples—the Pantheon, Villa Rotunda, and Jefferson’s unrealized design for the White House—programmatically illustrate the journey from Rome to America. Smaller models, along with rare architectural texts and pattern books through which Palladio’s ideas were primarily transmitted, reinforce the themes of the exhibition.
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This book has been written to accompany the exhibition Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey and shows drawings, books and images from the peerless Palladio collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It shows how Palladio studied and reinterpreted the architecture of antiquity, how he developed his ideas, how his message spread, and how Palladianism developed and spread across America, where Palladio’s legacy has remained longest and most widespread. Andrea Palladio lived and worked some 500 years ago in the Veneto. Yet his international influence, and particularly his impact on American architecture, has been greater than that of any architect since. Simplicity and proportion formed the basis of his idea of architecture; the villas he created in the Veneto around Venice, together with his writings, which were widely disseminated after his death, have helped shape European and American buildings for more than 400 years.
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As noted by The Art History Newsletter, the exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times by Nicolai Ouroussoff on 8 April 2010. There’s also an interview by Suzanne Stephens and William Hanley at Architectural Record.
The Chapel at Versailles Turns 300
Une Chapelle pour le Roi / A Chapel for the King
Château de Versailles, 20 April — 18 July 2010
To mark the tercentenary of the Royal Chapel, the Château de Versailles is devoting an exhibition that presents the genesis of this building and the highlights of its history. Among the works exhibited, the liturgical furniture donated by Louis XIV to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem will be exceptionally on view to the public. The work was undertaken by Jules Hardouin-Mansart in 1687 and completed in 1710 by Robert de Cotte, and the Royal Chapel of Versailles, a masterpiece of sacred art, became the theatre of the religious ceremonies of the Court. In accordance with the tradition of the Palatine Chapels, it has two levels. The principal gallery, above the entrance, was reserved for the royal family, while the side galleries were for the princes of royal blood and principal dignitaries of the Court; the other faithful were on the ground floor. The organ was placed in the loft over the high altar. Designed by Clicquot, its most famous organist was François Couperin.
The exhibition is divided into four sections:
- An evocation of the first Chapel (1672), a brilliant prefiguration of the definitive building.
- The Chapel of 1682, particularly well known from paintings and engravings because it was the religious building used for the longest time in the reign of Louis XIV. Located on the present site of the Salon d’Hercule, it was the scene of the Court’s religious life until 1710.
- The designing of the definitive Chapel, with drawings and engravings relating to the astonishing project for the dome in the centre of the north wing, up to the final magnificent drawings of the architectural office of Jules Hardouin-Mansart.
- The decor and the furniture of the Chapel when completed in 1710: sketches and preparatory paintings for the sumptuous compositions of La Fosse, Jouvenet and Coypel will be presented alongside drawings of the carved trophies on the ground floor and documents enabling visitors to get a clearer idea of the furniture that has not survived.
To accompany the celebration of this tercentenary, the annexes of the Chapel will be opened for guided visits (in French): the sacristies, the oratory of Madame de Pompadour, as well as the rooms used by the choristers and the members of the King’s orchestra. These preserved annexes will enable visitors to get a glimpse of the conditions of the daily life of the various incumbents of the Royal Chapel during the Ancien Régime.
Houdon Exhibition in Montpellier
From the Musée Fabre’s website:
Jean-Antoine Houdon, la sculpture sensible
Musée Fabre de Montpellier, 17 March — 27 June 2010
Portraitiste à succès, Jean-Antoine Houdon a exécuté les bustes des personnalités les plus éminentes de l’Europe et de l’Amérique des Lumières : Voltaire, Diderot, Buffon, Franklin, Glück, Condorcet, Cagliostro… mais aussi l’impératrice Catherine II de Russie, Louis XVI, Napoléon Ier… On louait ainsi son talent inégalé pour saisir la vie, l’esprit et le caractère de son modèle. Houdon traitait aussi avec virtuosité les sujets religieux, antiques et allégoriques.
Près d’une cinquantaine de pièces sont exposées, dont dix-huit sculptures de Houdon, au premier étage des collections permanentes (salles 19-20-21). Le coeur de cette rétrospective unique est constitué autour de trois chefs-d’oeuvre : les allégories en marbre de l’Hiver, appelé la Frileuse (1783), et de l’Eté (1785) appartenant au musée Fabre, puis sa version en bronze réalisée en 1787 prêtée par le Metropolitan Museum of Art de New York. Ces statues sont parmi les plus célèbres de son temps et révèlent admirablement le passage du Baroque aux Lumières. Un ensemble de sculptures, gravures, peintures de Houdon, Clodion, Greuze… les accompagne pour expliciter ces représentations liées à l’Amour et à la Mort. (more…)
Early Modern Art Markets: Flemish & Dutch Paintings in Geneva
From the Geneva museum’s website:
L’art et ses marchés: La peinture flamande et hollandaise, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles
Les Musées d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, 1 October 2009 – 29 August 2010
Frédéric Elsig (Paris: Somogy, 2009), ISBN: 9782757202500
This exhibition is in follow-up to La naissance des genres (2005-2006), and it similarly has two objectives. On the one hand, it will present a part of the Museum’s collection that is as important as it is little known: a selection of Flemish and Dutch paintings from the 16th to the 18th centuries that have been treated for purposes of conservation and restoration, and of which the catalogue raisonné will be published on the same occasion. On the other hand, it will illustrate a consequential phenomenon that first emerged during this period in the former Low Countries: the rapid expansion of the art market. With different sections devoted to what were then perfectly constituted categories, the display will highlight the new development’s principal characteristics as well as the predilection of Geneva collectors for Dutch paintings of the Siècle d’Or.
Walpole and Strawberry Hill
The March issue of Apollo Magazine includes a review by Hugh Belsey of the Walpole exhibition now at the V&A in London:
John Carter, "View from the Hall at Strawberry Hill," 1788, pen and ink, and watercolour on laid paper, from Horace Walpole’s extra-illustrated copy of "A Description of the Villa…at Strawberry-Hill" (Strawberry Hill, 1784). Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Folio 49 3582, fol. 24.
In 1818 William Hazlitt cruelly remarked that Horace Walpole’s ‘mind as well as his house, was piled up with Dresden china, and illuminated through painted glass’. Twenty-four years later the contents of his house, Strawberry Hill on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, including the china, were sold. It took the auctioneer, George Robins, 24 days to complete the sale and gave the public the last opportunity to sample Walpole’s mind and taste – or not quite the last opportunity, as many of the rich, strange and beautiful lots have been reassembled in an exquisite exhibition . . . It is a display that sparkles, enchants and entrances. . . .
The full review can be found here»
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In conjunction with the exhibition, there is an outstanding digital component that includes virtual tours and immensely useful search functions for the database (including provenance). As noted on the site:
John Carter, "Tribune from Strawberry Hill", 1789
Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Collection was initially developed by the Lewis Walpole Library to support research for the exhibition Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and for the renovation of the house itself, undertaken by the Strawberry Hill Trust. Dispersed since the famous sale in 1842, Walpole’s collection was one of the most significant in eighteenth-century Britain, numbering several thousand items. This database encompasses the entire range of art and artifacts from Walpole’s collections, including all items whose location is currently known and those as yet untraced but known through a variety of historical records. This information is now made available for public access. The database is an ongoing project: the Library will continue to add and enhance records as further discoveries are made. Queries and comments are invited.
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Finally, it’s worth noting that Strawberry Hill will itself be open to visitors, starting in September, after extensive renovations (projected to cost £8.9 million). For details, see the website of the Strawberry Hill Trust.
Small Show of Watercolours in London
Eighteenth-Century Watercolours from the Royal Academy Collection
Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London, 9 March — 16 May 2010
Francis Wheatley "Figures and Cattle by a Lake," 1795. Pencil and watercolour. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London.
This display features watercolours by leading British artists of the eighteenth century including J. M. W. Turner, Paul Sandby and Michael ‘Angelo’ Rooker. The works on display were originally part of a collection assembled by the architect John Yenn RA (1750–1821) who bought watercolours, prints and drawings from his friends and fellow artists. Yenn gravitated towards topographical scenes and the display includes impressive views of Durham Cathedral and Battle Abbey. He also shared in the late eighteenth-century enthusiasm for historic ruins, represented here by watercolours of Valle Crucis Abbey and Kenilworth Castle.
Upcoming: A Visual Puzzle at the Yale Center for British Art
Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies, and Exhibitions in 1820s London
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 24 June — 19 September 2010
John Scarlett Davis, "Interior of the British Institution Gallery" detail 1829 (YCBA)
In 1829, the young artist John Scarlett Davis sought to make a splash on the London art scene with his painting, Interior of the British Institution. An image of an art exhibition, the painting is also an elaborate visual puzzle. Seeing Double: Portraits, Copies and Exhibitions in 1820s London invites viewers to decode this puzzle and in the process explore the relationship between display and replication in early nineteenth-century Britain. Davis’s painting has long been recognized as a valuable record of an early nineteenth-century exhibition venue, representing in miniature works by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, among others. What has less often been recognized is that the figures who chat amiably or stoop to examine canvases are themselves replicas of paintings: Davis copied the figures from pre-existing portraits, notably by Sir Thomas Lawrence. By examining this practice, the exhibition reveals hitherto unknown connections between works in the Center’s collection. Seeing Double has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art and curated by Catherine Roach, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of the History of Art, Cornell University. The organizing curator at the Center is Cassandra Albinson, Associate Curator of Paintings and Sculpture.
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