Call for Papers: Rosa in Britain (witches and magic!)
Conference: Salvator Rosa in Britain
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 18 October 2010
Proposals Due by 30 December 2009
Salvator Rosa, "Soldiers Gambling," ca. 1658 (Dulwich Picture Gallery)
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art will be hosting a conference, Salvator Rosa in Britain, on October 18th, 2010, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, to accompany the exhibition Salvator Rosa (1615-1673): Bandits, Wilderness and Magic, to be held there from 15 September – 28 November 2010. Rosa has always had a double importance for art in Britain, as both painter and phenomenon, and the conference aims to explore his vast impact on both painters and writers. Possible themes might include
- collectors and collecting
- Rosa and concepts of the sublime, both in landscape and in magic, prophecy and enchantment
- the afterlife of some outstanding works once or still in Britain, such as the Democritus, Belisarius, Atilius Regulus, or Empedocles Leaping into Etna
- Rosa and the concepts of Romantic genius and the freedom of the artist
- the myths woven around Rosa’s biography
- bandits and witches.
Please send a 250 to 500-word outline of your proposal for a twenty-five minute presentation, along with a CV and a list of publications to Helenlangdon@hotmail.com.
Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection at the Frick
From the Frick’s website:
Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection
Frick Collection, New York, 6 October 2009 – 10 January 2010
Colin Bailey, Susan Grace Galassi, Mària van Berge-Gerbaud, $60
Frederik Johannes Lugt (1884–1970) was a Dutch art historian, connoisseur, and collector. His fame in scholarly circles derives from two pioneering publications, still in use today: his Les marques de collections de dessins et d’estampes, published in 1921, which identifies the collectors’ marks found on Old Master prints and drawings, and the Répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques intéressant l’art ou la curiosité, a comprehensive listing of nearly 90,000 auction catalogues from sales occurring between 1600 and 1925, published in four volumes between 1938 and 1987.
Frits Lugt, as he was known, was a born collector. By the age of eight, he had sold his shell collection to the natural history department of Amsterdam’s Royal Zoo; at fifteen, he acquired his first drawing. In his thirties, he began to collect in a more serious and systematic way, specializing in Dutch and Flemish drawings and prints, always his chief interest. During the 1920s, the decade in which he made his most important acquisitions, he also bought fifteenth-century Italian drawings and eighteenth-century French sheets.
Charles-Nicolas Cochin, "Portrait of Pierre-Jean Mariette," Graphite with stumping, 1756
Lugt was among the founders and principal supporters of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD), the institute devoted to the study of Netherlandish art and artists, established in The Hague in 1930. In 1947, he created the Fondation Custodia in Paris, to care for and to add to his collection of 6,000 Old Master drawings and 30,000 prints. The Frits Lugt Collection is widely regarded by specialists as one of the finest of its kind, but it is less well known to the general public.
Curators at The Frick Collection were invited to select for the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue Lugt’s finest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French drawings, and the sixty-four works featured in the exhibition illuminate both Lugt’s taste and that of his successors. Included are drawings and watercolors by well-known masters of the French School such as Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Ingres, and Degas, as well as by important figures who are less familiar to the general public. This is the first time that a group of French master drawings from the Fondation Custodia has traveled to New York.
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Stijn Alsteens (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY), Frits Lugt: Connoisseur and Collector of Drawings
Wednesday, 18 November 2009, 6pm
Colin Bailey (Frick Collection), Eighteenth-Century French Drawings from The Frits Lugt Collection
Saturday, 9 January 2010, 2pm
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The show’s illustrated checklist (available here) includes more than thirty eighteenth-century drawings. The Frick’s website also includes podcasts on the exhibition by Colin Bailey and Susan Galassi.
A Dutch Collection in New York
Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 18 September 2009 — 3 January 2010
Edited by Deborah Krohn and Peter Miller with Marybeth De Filippis, $75
This autumn the Bard Graduate Center will participate in a state-wide celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage and the legacy of Dutch culture in New York with a landmark exhibition, Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick. Organized by the BGC and the New-York Historical Society and curated by Marybeth De Filippis and Deborah Krohn, Dutch New York will make a major contribution to the quadricentennial and to the scholarship of colonial New York by focusing on the life and times of a woman who during the seventeenth century lived in the rural village of Flatbush on eastern Long Island, a neighborhood still known by that name in the borough of Brooklyn today. The exhibition helps elucidate what the historian Russell Shorto has called the “forgotten colony” in his book The Island at the Center of the World. Indeed, the British roots of New York City are recognized far more widely than the Dutch, despite the city’s visible connections to the Dutch founders, most evident in street names such as Amsterdam Avenue and Varick Street.
Covered Bowl from Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia), early 18th century, silver (Gemeentemuseum, The Hague)
Dutch New York offers an innovative approach to exhibition practice by using the probate inventory of Margrieta van Varick’s possessions compiled in 1696 as a means of examining life and culture in colonial New York. Born in Amsterdam in 1649, Margrieta spent several years at the other end of the Dutch colonial world in the Far East, primarily in Malacca (present day Malaysia) before returning to The Netherlands with her minister husband Rudolphus. In 1686 Margrieta and her family crossed the Atlantic to settle in Flatbush where Rudolphus was minister of the Dutch Reform Church and where she opened a textile shop, having brought with them an astonishing array of Eastern and European goods.
This exhibition is organized in five sections, each delineating a theme relevant to Margrieta van Varick’s life as well as exploring the wide range of goods in her possession when she died in late 1695. The exhibition first examines the inventory as a document of historical research and curatorial practice. A digital film (also available online) features an interview with renowned historian Natalie Zemon Davis in which she considers the various challenges confronting historians who use inventories for research purposes, as well as the role of women in the seventeenth century.
For the full description of the exhibition, click here»
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Lecture — Inventory: Text and Context, Bernard Herman
Thursday, 19 November 2009, 6-8 pm ($25 / $17)
RSVP required to 212.501.3011, programs@bgc.bard.edu
What can an inventory tell us? How can we use an artifact of the legal system to tease out relationships between people and their relationship to things? How does such a document translate into an exhibition? Bernard Herman, a leading scholar of American material culture, will draw on his vast knowledge of both things and people in a conversation with cultural historian Catherine Whalen and exhibition co-curator Deborah Krohn. The conversation will be followed by an exhibition viewing and reception. Bernard Herman is Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History, University of Delaware. Deborah Krohn is associate professor and coordinator for history and theory of museums at the Bard Graduate Center as well as co-curator of the Dutch New York exhibition. Catherine Whalen is assistant professor at the Bard Graduate Center.
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Study Day — Reflecting on Silver: Manufacture, Markets, and Meaning in Early New York
Friday, 20 November 2009 ($125 / $100 discount)
RSVP required to 212.501.3011, programs@bgc.bard.edu
This study day will focus on silver in New York in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as an object signifying wealth, cultivation, and mastery. Concentrating on works by silversmiths Benjamin Wynkoop, Cornelius Kierstede, and Peter Van Dyck, curators Marybeth De Filippis, Beth Carver Wees, and Debra Schmidt Bach will consider aspects of stylistic influence, marketing of silver, and workshop practices. A visit to the studio of master silversmith Ubaldo Ubaldo “>Ubaldo “>Vitali in Maplewood, New Jersey, will provide an examination of the technical knowledge and cultural influences surrounding the production of silver through the centuries. Admission to the study day includes lunch and round-trip transportation to the Ubaldo Vitale studio. Marybeth De Filippis is assistant curator of American art at the New-York Historical Society as well as co-curator of the Dutch New York exhibition. Beth Carver Wees is curator in the Department of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Debra Schmidt Bach is assistant curator of decorative arts at the New-York Historical Society and a PhD candidate at the BGC. Ubaldo Vitali is a fourth-generation Roman silversmith, conservator, and art historian.
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A helpful article about the exhibition written by Marybeth De Filippis appears in the September issue of The Magazine Antiques.
Strawberry Hill
The Walpole show at the YCBA opened yesterday in New Haven with a lecture by Michael Snodin (Senior Research Fellow at the V&A). From the museum’s website:
Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 15 October 2009 — 3 January 2010
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 6 March — 4 July 2010
Ed. by Michael Snodin (Yale University Press), $85
Horace Walpole (1717–1797) was the youngest son of Robert Walpole, first earl of Orford and prime minister under both George I and George II. Horace’s birthright placed him at the center of society and politics, and of literary, aesthetic, and intellectual circles. His brilliant letters and other writings have made him the best-known commentator on social, political, and cultural life in eighteenth-century England. In his own day, he was most famous for his personal collections, which were displayed at Strawberry Hill, his pioneering Gothic-revival house on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham, outside London, and through which he constructed narratives of English art and history.
This groundbreaking exhibition seeks to evoke the breadth and importance of Walpole’s collections at Strawberry Hill by reassembling an astonishing variety of his objects, including rare books and manuscripts, antiquities, paintings, prints and drawings, furniture, ceramics, arms and armor, and curiosities. These will be drawn frominternational public and private collections as well as those of the Center and Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut.
Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill has been organized by the Center, The Lewis Walpole Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by an array of distinguished international scholars. The Center is the only U.S. venue. The exhibition has been generously supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Michael Snodin, Discovering Strawberry Hill
Wednesday, 14 October, 5:30pm
Peter Inskip, Revealing Strawberry Hill House
Tuesday, 20 October, 5:30pm
Cynthia Roman, Works of Genius: Amateur Artists at Strawberry Hill
Wednesday, 11 November, 5:30pm
Drawings at the Getty
From the Getty’s website:
Capturing Nature’s Beauty: Three Centuries of French Landscapes
Getty Center, Los Angeles, 28 July – 1 November 2009
Édouard Kopp, exhibition catalogue (Getty, 2009) $19.95
This selection of over 40 drawings from the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute highlights key moments in the French landscape tradition, from its emergence in the 1600s to its preeminence in the 1800s. The exhibition showcases drawings by some of the masters of the genre, including Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Camille Pissarro, and Vincent van Gogh. Together these works reveal a tension between a passion for the real and the quest for an ideal. They demonstrate different facets of the relationship between the artist and the land: from simple record to creative transformation, if not pure invention. . . .
Fragonard, "Ruins of an Imperial Palace," 1759
Jean-Honoré Fragonard made this accomplished drawing while he was a student at the French Academy in Rome. The curriculum was relatively unusual because it actively promoted the practice of sketching outdoors, a sign of landscape’s increasingly elevated status as an artistic genre. In this view of the Palatine Hill as seen from the Roman Forum, the artist adopted a low viewpoint and a wide angle that allowed him to create a bold, forceful composition. Using red chalk, he brilliantly rendered the complex formal interaction between buildings and nature.
Boissieu, "Château Galliard," 1796
Jean-Jacques de Boissieu is best known for his large and delicately washed picturesque views. A trip to Italy inspired his practice of illuminating his compositions with bright sunlight. Yet his palette—dominated by grays—and meticulous attention to detail are reminiscent of earlier Dutch landscape drawings. This style enabled de Boissieu to work quite independently from the artistic trends of his time, exemplified by the works of Fragonard and Hubert Robert. The draftsman carefully framed his motif: an abandoned fortified house in Lyon, his native city, perched on a craggy hill and overgrown by nature. While capturing the atmosphere of the locale, Boissieu rendered the variety of textures with a compelling sense of materiality.
Furniture at the Wallace
The Wallace Collection highlights the cabinet-maker, Johann Gottlob Fiedler with a small exhibition and study day. From the museum’s website:
Study Day: Johann Gottlob Fiedler, Eighteenth-Century German Cabinet Maker
Wallace Collection, London, Thursday 15 October 2009 (£7)
Johan Gottlob Fiedler, Commode, ca. 1786 (Wallace Collection)
Achim Stiegel, Curator of Furniture at the Kunstgewerbe Museum Berlin, will present latest research on the cabinet making of Johann Gottlob Fiedler and the small group of cabinets made for patrons such as Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, later King Friedrich Wilhelm II. Jürgen Huber, Senior Furniture Conservator, Wallace Collection, will discuss the recent conservation of the Collection’s superb Fiedler commode from c.1786 and the innovative features in its construction. See the commode in a special exhibition in the Conservation Gallery,
Vorsprung durch Technik: The Innovative Work of the Cabinet-maker Johann Gottlob Fiedler (6 June – 29 November 2009).
Birthday Surprises — Watteau Turns 325 Today
On this, the 325th birthday of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), it’s worth recalling the circumstances surrounding the recent discovery and sale of La Surprise, which is, incidentally, included in the Watteau, Music, and Theater exhibition now on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. From ArtDaily.org, 9 July 2008:
Jean-Antoine Watteau, “La Surprise,” oil on panel, 14.1/2 x 11.1/2 inches, ca. 1718
LONDON — A recently rediscovered masterpiece by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) sold at Christie’s auction of Important Old Master and British Pictures this evening for £12,361,250 / $24,376,385 / €15,513,369, a world record price for any French Old Master painting sold at auction. La Surprise had been missing for almost 200 years, presumed to have been destroyed, and was previously known only by a copy in the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace and through a contemporary engraving. It was found in the corner of a drawing room in a British country house during a Christie’s valuation last year.
Richard Knight, International Director of Christie’s Old Master Department and Paul Raison, Director and Head of Old Master Pictures at Christie’s, London: “We are thrilled to have realised a record price for La Surprise by Jean-Antoine Watteau, who is recognised as one of the most influential artists in the history of European art. It was extremely exciting to have rediscovered the painting last year, its whereabouts having been a mystery for almost 200 years, and it has been a great honour to have shown the picture to the public for the first time in over two centuries during pre-sale exhibitions in London, Paris, New York and St Petersburg. This is not only one of the most extraordinary rediscoveries of recent years, but also the most expensive French Old Master painting ever sold at auction, and we are pleased to have welcomed international interest from a number of collectors and institutions at this evening’s sale” . . .
La Surprise by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was painted circa 1718 and was first owned by Nicolas Henin (1691-1724), an Advisor to the French King who was one of Watteau’s best and most constant friends. It is likely that the work was painted for Henin together with its pendant L’Accord Parfait, now in the Los Angeles Museum of Art. The legendary connoisseur and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) noted in his Abecedario of 1746 that La Surprise is “one of [Watteau’s] most beautiful paintings.” On Nicolas Henin’s death in 1724, the two paintings went to the artist’s friend and biographer Jean de Jullienne (1686–1766) who had them engraved and published in the Recueil Jullienne, and who seems to have split the pair and sold them before 1756. La Surprise next appears in the celebrated collection of Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully (1725-1779), who is recognised as assembling the first serious art collection dedicated to the encyclopedic display of French painting. The catalogue of his collection was published in 1764 and describes La Surprise as executed “with a piquant touch and richly tinted with the color of Rubens.” The picture had left the collection by 1770 and amidst the turmoil of the French Revolution, it is not recorded until it appears in a Lady Murray’s probate valuation of 1848, by whom it was bequeathed to the family of the vendors at this evening’s auction. The painting’s attribution and significance had remained lost until its rediscovery last year. . .
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was born in the Flemish town of Valenciennes, which had passed to France from Spanish rule just six years earlier, and left for Paris in about 1702. He was to be influenced by Flemish art throughout his career, and was often considered a Flemish painter by his contemporaries. In Paris, he worked with Claude Gillot (1673-1722) and became fascinated by theatre costume and stage design, before moving to the workshop of Claude Audran III, curator of the Palais du Luxembourg where Watteau was introduced to Rubens’s magnificent and inspirational canvases painted for Queen Marie de Medici. The work of Rubens was to influence Watteau throughout his career as he revitalised the Baroque style and became a pioneer of Rococo art. Watteau was frail and subject to ill health throughout his life and in 1720, he travelled to London to visit Dr. Richard Mead, a celebrated physician, in the hope of medical relief. Unfortunately, the climate and air quality in the city hindered any progress and he returned to France where he died in 1721 at the age of 37.
Recapping the Récamier Exhibition and Colloquium in Lyon
By HEATHER BELNAP JENSEN
Juliette Récamier, muse et mécène
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 27 March – 29 June 2009
Colloquium: Historiennes et critiques d’art à l’époque de Juliette Récamier, international colloquium organised by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 26 June 2009
J. Chinard, "Portrait of Juliette Récamier," 1805-06 (Lyon: Musée de Beaux-Arts)
Juliette Récamier: Muse et mécène, recently mounted by the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Lyon, was surely one of the highlights of this past summer’s exhibition season. Thoughtfully conceived and beautifully executed, this show did much to restore Récamier to her rightful place as a key arbiter of taste in post-Revolutionary France. Upon entering the foyer, one was immediately transported to the refined and graceful realm of this cultural luminary. Art, fashion, and furnishings were disposed so as to emphasize her various powers. This exhibition compellingly argued that Récamier not only inspired some of the most enchanting art of the period (one thinks immediately of the portraits of this figure by Jacques-Louis David and François Gérard—neither of which were able to travel, unfortunately), but that she also figured as a formidable patron of the arts. The most exquisite space in this show was the re-creation of Récamier’s salon, as detailed in François Louis Dejuinne’s painting of 1826. To see in conversation some of the most iconic paintings of the age, including Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Chateaubriand, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s Portrait of Mme de Staël as Corinne, and Gérard’s Corinne at Cape Miseno, was a truly captivating experience. Attesting to the enduring interest in the figure of Recamier was the 1928 film of Gaston Ravel that played in an adjacent room, along with the twentieth-century works by René Magritte that paid homage to ‘la dame au sofa’. The accompanying catalogue (available here via Amazon.ca) was as exquisitely crafted as the exhibition, with contributions by the curator, Stéphane Paccoud, as well as other notable French and American scholars including Laura Auricchio. The essays attest to the complexities of Récamier’s roles as muse and patron and point to the need to reconsider conventional characterizations of such well-positioned women in the fashioning of artistic sensibilities. In sum, I must concur with Didier Rykner’s assessment of the exhibition made in La Tribune de l’Art: it did indeed approach perfection.
Robert Smirke, "Chambre de Juliette Récamier,” 1802 (London: Royal Institute of British Architects Library)
In conjunction with the exhibition, Historiennes et critiques d’art à l’époque de Juliette Récamier, a colloquium dedicated to the women writing about the arts in France, c. 1800, was held on June 26 in Lyon. This international colloquium was sponsored by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art and convened by Mechthild Fend (University College, London), Melissa Hyde (University of Florida), Anne Lafont (INHA), and Stéphane Paccoud (MBA-Lyon). Many of the presenters discussed the place of individual figures in the construction of the post-Revolutionary art world. American scholars were well represented. Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina) argued for Vigée-Lebrun’s position as an art historian and addressed her Souvenirs as a critical historical enterprise. Susan Siegfried (University of Michigan) gave careful consideration to the role of la presse féminine in the formation of female subjectivity, and Sarah Betzer (University of Virginia) engaged Marie d’Agoult’s critical work. In my own paper, I discussed the significance of Julie Candeille’s activities as critic and agent in the career of Anne-Louis Girodet. That no one treated the contributions made to art writing by the uncontested doyenne of the era, Germaine de Staël, was much commented upon. The lively discussion that ensued after the presentations testified to the need for a continued dialogue regarding women as art historians and critics at this historical juncture. There are plans to publish the proceedings.
Heather Belnap Jensen received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Kansas. She is currently assistant professor of art history at Brigham Young University. For more information about her recent scholarly activities, click here». Images are drawn from the exhibition website; other HECAA members who participated in the exhibition or colloquium are indicated with bold type.
Tiepolo in Motion at the Kimbell
Director Philip Haas (Angels & Insects, Blood Oranges, and Up at the Villa) partnered with the Kimbell for the current series of installations. From the Kimbell’s website:
Butchers, Dragons, Gods, & Skeletons: Film Installations by Philip Haas Inspired by the Works in the Collection
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, 18 July – 25 October 2009
"Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons: Film Installations by Philip Haas" with an essay by A. S. Byatt, $24.95
Commissioned by the Kimbell, Philip Haas’s film installations interpret and elaborate upon selected works in the Museum’s permanent collection:
- Douris, Red-Figure Cup Showing the Death of Pentheus (exterior) and a Maenad (interior), ca. 480 BCE
- Arhat Taming the Dragon, Yuan dynasty, early fourteenth century
- Annibale Carracci, The Butcher’s Shop, 1580s
- Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Apollo and the Continents, ca. 1739
- James Ensor, Skeletons Warming Themselves, 1889.
Though based on deep research into the original artists and cultures, Haas’s films are poetic and sensuous in approach rather than factual like a documentary. Between seven and twenty minutes in length and running continuously, they are projected on screens of various unconventional formats and configurations. All are accompanied by original music, and several appear in elaborate architectural and sculptural sets, further immersing the viewer in the experience. The installations complement a full display of the Kimbell’s permanent collection, each occupying a space near the work to which it relates.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Apollo and the Continents is probably a sketch for a large fresco ceiling at the Palazzo Clerici in Milan; the ceiling was commissioned by Antonio Giorgio Clerici to celebrate his impending marriage. In the most elaborate and technically challenging of his installations, Haas combines filmed images projected on both walls and ceiling with real architectural elements, responding in his own terms to the spectacular, playful illusionism of a Tiepolo ceiling: “My intention has been to create the film installation as if it were designed and directed by Tiepolo himself, translating painterly trompe-l’oeil into cinematic visual effect.” On one of the walls we see Tiepolo with a young assistant in the studio. Occasionally he looks across to other walls, where models are posing for him.
The models are played by the actresses Anna Walton — as a reclining Venus — and Rachael Stirling. Above, we see classical figure groups come to life as Tiepolo has visions, piece by piece, of a grand ceiling decoration in splendidly theatrical style. It is an assembly of the divinely beautiful, the strong, and the statuesque: Venus and Mars, Jupiter and Hebe, Juno, Ceres, river gods, and a host of numerous personages from classical myth and allegory. Finally Apollo the sun god appears, hovering in the center of the whole, breathtaking ensemble that has come together over our heads. Meanwhile Tiepolo has been working on a portrait of a betrothed couple. The climax of the piece is an apotheosis in which, through the power of the artist’s imagination, the couple become classical figures themselves and ascend into the heavens.
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The Butcher’s Shop appeared at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 2008.
A six-minute video clip with Malcolm Warner and Philip Haas summarizing the project is available via YouTube (posted by WRR101FM). It supplies a useful sense of the project, though it, unfortunately, doesn’t address the Tiepolo installation.
N.B. — One of the models for Apollo and the Continents, the actor Rachael Stirling — perhaps best known for her role in Tipping the Velvet — holds, incidentally, a B.A. in art history from the University of Edinburgh. Proof of the utility of the major for undergraduates? Comments are especially welcome from anyone who’s seen the installation at the Kimbell.
Delany Exhibition Is Here!
The highly anticipated Delany show opened earlier this week. Mark Laird (Harvard University) kicked things off on Wednesday with a talk on Delany as “A Lady of Singular Ingenuity.” Alicia Weisberg-Roberts will speak on October 7 (see below for programming details). The following description is drawn from the press release from the Yale Center for British Art:
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Mary Delany: Mrs. Delany and Her Circle
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 24 September 2009 — 3 January 2010
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 19 February — 1 May 2010
Curated by Alicia Weisberg-Roberts and Mark Laird
Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 416 pages, ISBN-10: 030014279X
At the age of seventy-two, Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700–1788), a botanical artist, woman of fashion, and commentator on life and society in eighteenth-century England and Ireland, embarked on a series of one thousand botanical collages, or “paper mosaics.” These were the crowning achievement of a life defined by creative accomplishment. The delicate hand-cut floral designs, made by a method of Mrs. Delany’s own invention, rival the finest botanical works of her time.
An ambitious exhibition, Mrs. Delany and her Circle, at the Yale Center for British Art, is the first to survey the full range of Mary Delany’s creative endeavors, revealing the complexity of her engagement with natural science, art, and design. Her prolific craft activities served to cement bonds of friendship and allowed her to negotiate the interlinked artistic, aristocratic, and scientific networks that defined her social world. A range of approximately 130 objects, including drawings, collages, embroidered textiles, shells, botanical specimens, and manuscripts related to her interest in landscape gardening, will reflect the variety of her activities. The exhibition will also feature a floral display inspired by Mrs. Delany’s designs, as well as a site-specific installation by London-based artist Jane Wildgoose.
Mrs. Delany’s tools from needlework pocket-book, given by Queen Charlotte to Mrs. Delany, 1781, satin, colored silks, and enamelled gold (The Royal Collection)
While Mrs. Delany is best known for her botanical collages, she created bold new garden designs, decorated her home and garden with shell decoupage, fashioned paper silhouettes, and was an accomplished embroiderer who produced elaborate designs for dresses and furnishings. The exhibition will reunite a significant number of Mrs. Delany’s textiles. Among her most extraordinary designs was a court dress embroidered with a cascade of naturalistic flowers on black satin, ca. 1739–40. This garment was disassembled and preserved by Mrs. Delany’s heirs and represents a marriage of art and nature that vividly foreshadows her later accomplishments. Pieces of the dress, reunited here for the first time, will be accompanied by didactic material that allows visitors to understand the garment as a whole and explains the equally interesting story of its survival. Also on view will be embroideries by Mrs. Delany and her circle that demonstrate the importance of the art of the needle to eighteenth-century female society.
Mary Delany, Pancratium maritinum, 1778, collage of colored papers, with bodycolor and watercolor on black ink background, British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, © Trustees of the British Museum
The exhibition will show thirty of Mrs. Delany’s “paper mosaics,” generously lent by the British Museum, which houses nearly one thousand of her works. Unlike most botanical illustrations, these collages were created from hundreds of tiny pieces of cut paper. Horace Walpole called them “precision and truth unparalleled,” and Sir Joshua Reynolds admired their “perfection and outline, delicacy of cutting, accuracy of shading and perspective, and harmony and brilliance of color” (Ruth Hayden, Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers, London: British Museum Press 2000).
Through comparison with the works of her contemporaries the exhibition will explore the context of Mrs. Delany’s striking collages and the relationship between her close attention to the natural world and the visual culture of natural history. Mrs. Delany and her Circle will feature works by professional botanical artists, including Georg Dionysius Ehret and Barbara Regina Dietzsch, as well as amateur botanical artists such as Mary Capel Forbes. Also on view will be objects representing the wider world of eighteenth-century collecting and classifying, ranging from mineralogy to conchology. Through drawings, maps, and topographical paintings, the exhibition will evoke the design and experience of gardens Mrs. Delany knew well, including those at Kew and Bulstrode, the remarkable estate of Margaret Cavendish Holles Harley Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715–1785), with whom Mrs. Delany lived and worked. The Duchess was one of the most important collectors of naturalia of the eighteenth century. Their friendship was one of the defining relationships of Mary Delany’s life.
Mrs. Delany and her Circle has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art and Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (where it will be on display from 18 February — 1 May 2010). The curators are Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Assistant Curator of 18th- and 19th-Century Art, Walters Art Museum, and Mark Laird, Senior Lecturer, Department of Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design. Elisabeth Fairman, Senior Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Center, has served as the organizing curator for Jane Wildgoose’s installation, Promiscuous Assemblage. New Haven is the only North American venue for the exhibition.
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Tuesday, September 29, 12:30 pm
Mary Delany: A Woman Begins Her Life’s Work at the Age of 72
A thirty-minute gallery talk led by Molly Peacock, poet and non-fiction author.
Wednesday, September 30, 5:30 pm
Musical Tastes in Eighteenth-Century London as Seen by Mrs. Mary Delany, Horace Walpole, and Their Friends
Lecture and performance by Nicholas McGegan, renowned baroque music specialist and conductor.
Tuesday, October 6, 12:30 pm
Mrs. Delany’s Flowers: Entrance
A thirty-minute gallery talk led by Jason Siebenmorgen, landscape architect
Wednesday, October 7, 5:30 pm
‘She who bless’d the friend and grac’d the page’: Friendship and Self-fashioning in Mrs. Delany’s Circle
Lecture by Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Assistant Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Art, The Walters Art Museum
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