Enfilade

Joseph Farington, Dumbarton Rock from the South, 1788, pen and gray ink and watercolor; sheet: 38 × 68 cm
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Raymond Lifchez Living Trust Gift, 2014.148)

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Now on view at The Met:

British Vision, 1700–1900: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 7 December 2023 — 5 March 2024

This rotation from the Department of Drawings and Prints celebrates recent additions to the collection by British artists who worked across two centuries, from 1700 to 1900. Landscape is a focus, with the genre becoming closely allied to the growing popularity of watercolor during this period. Around 1760, artists like Paul and Thomas Sandby, Francis Towne, and Thomas Jones began to explore the medium’s expressive potential. In the nineteenth century, dedicated watercolor societies were established and held regular exhibitions to promote their members’ work. Increasingly developed and poetically resonant compositions sought to challenge the preeminence of oil painting.

In this display, watercolors made rapidly out of doors by John Constable and Peter De Wint may be compared to finished compositions by John Brett, Samuel Palmer, and Alfred William Hunt. Travel’s ability to spur creativity is demonstrated by works that respond to sites in Britain, France, Italy, Caucasia, and North Africa. Nature studies, conversely, affirm how foreign flora became increasingly available at home. Finally, the sustained importance of the figure is represented by early chalk and pastel renderings by Joseph Wright of Derby and Allan Ramsay, vibrantly colored later portraits by David Wilkie and John Frederick Lewis, and representations of Black models by Lewis, William Henry Hunt, and Simeon Solomon.

Images of the works are available here»

From the press release (6 March 2023), from the Château de Versailles:

The Palace of Versailles and the Forbidden City: French-Chinese Relations in the 18th Century
Palace Museum, Forbidden City, Beijing, 1 April — 30 June 2024
Hong Kong Palace Museum, 18 December 2024 — 4 May 2025

Fontaine à parfum, porcelaine à glaçure céladon craquelé et céramique brune, Jingdezhen, début de l’époque Qianlong (1736–1795), monture en bronze doré, Paris, vers 1743 (Château de Versailles).

Initially scheduled for 2020 and postponed due to the pandemic, the exhibition entitled The Palace of Versailles and the Forbidden City: French-Chinese Relations in the 18th Century will run from 1 April 2024 at the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum. On 6 April 2023, Palace of Versailles Chair Catherine Pégard and Xudong Wang, Chair of the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum, met at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to reiterate their enthusiasm in seeing this joint project through to completion before Presidents Xi and Macron.

The Palace of Versailles is honoured to be working with the Forbidden City’s Palace Museum in Beijing in organising this exhibition surrounding the relationship between France and China in the 18th century and due to run from 1 April to 30 June 2024. The exhibition is a more in-depth version of the one that was rolled out at the Palace of Versailles in 2014 to mark fifty years of diplomatic relations between the two countries, initially sparked by General de Gaulle on 27 January 1964.

Louis XIV put in place in the context of his relations with Emperor Kangxi, which took the form of initiatives such as French Jesuits dispatched to China in 1685 to serve at the Chinese court as mathematicians to the King. This process paved the way for the two nations to begin forging a relationship built on mutual trust and admiration, one that remains unfamiliar to many, and lasted until the 18th century. This special diplomatic relationship and mutual respect helped usher in French appreciation for modern China and Chinese artistry.

In France, the court’s love affair with China and Chinese art shines through in a variety of different ways, and four key phenomena: importing Chinese artworks and pieces; altering certain imported artworks, notably by adding gilt-bronze frames to porcelain pieces and using lacquered panels on French furniture; imitating Chinese products, such as the frenzied quest to track down the secret to making kaolin porcelain; and Chinese art’s marked influence on French art, particularly in the field of decorative arts. The exhibition will illustrate how Chinese art served as a bottomless source of inspiration for French artists and intellectuals, in everything from painting, art objects, and interior design to architecture, landscape design, literature, music and the sciences.

Meanwhile, in the Chinese court, many French Jesuits also followed after the arrival of the ‘Mathematicians of the king’ sent by Louis XIV in China, some of whom served the court for a long time. With them as the intermediary, French culture had an important influence on many fields such as science, art, architecture, medicine, mapping and so on in the Qing court. Therefore, juxtaposed with French Exhibits in the Exhibition are also clocks, scientific instruments, prints, porcelain, bronzes, books, and other objects from the Palace Museum collection, directly reflecting the achievements of exchanges and cultural exchanges between the two sides.

The exhibition in Beijing will bring together a selection of pieces taken from the Palace of Versailles and Palace Museum collections, designed to serve as broader examples of the veritable fascination for Chinese art that took root at the court of Versailles and among French enthusiasts. It showcases the efforts and achievements made by China and France to achieve mutual understanding and cultural exchanges in the 18th century, and vividly restores the splendid cultural and artistic exchanges between the two countries for more than a century.

Exhibition commissioned by Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, Curator at the Palace of Versailles, and Guo Fuxiang, Curator at the Palace Museum.

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Note (added 18 December 2024) — The posting was updated to include the Hong Kong venue.

Eighteenth-century women’s shoes (Hampshire Cultural Trust’s Collection).

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Now on view at The Arc:

Shoes: Inside Out
Willis Museum and Sainsbury Gallery, Basingstoke, Spring 2023
The Arc, Winchester, 24 November 2023 — 6 March 2024

From the functional and practical to the fashionable and extravagant, shoes have played an intriguing role in our social history and modern lives. They can tell us about a person’s work, leisure choices, status, and aspirations—but the story is not always straightforward. Conformity to gender stereotypes is blurred, power statements conceal repression, and the utilitarian merges with the frippery. Shoes: Inside Out is an exhibition featuring footwear from our past, as far back as 11 AD, to the present. Through the themes of work, protect, play, empower, transform, identify, and aspire, 70 pairs of shoes from Hampshire Cultural Trust’s Collection explore how shoes have shaped—and have been shaped by—society. From Georgian high society shoes to 1970s platforms and current high-end designer heels to everyday boots there is a shoe to fit all interests. Alongside the footwear, a display of high-definition x-rays of some of the shoes allow us to glimpse the story within, uncovering developments in the shoes’ construction and revealing an ethereal reminiscence of a life lived.

La fête de la Fédération textile, 1790
(Musee de la Toile de Jouy)

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Now on view at the Fashion and Textile Museum:

The Fabric of Democracy: Propaganda Textiles from the French Revolution to Brexit
Fashion and Textile Museum, London, 29 September 2023 – 3 March 2024

Curated by design historian Amber Butchart, this exhibition explores printed propaganda textiles over more than two centuries. Discover how fabric designers and manufacturers have responded to political upheaval from the French Revolution through to Brexit.

The mechanisation of textile industries from the mid-18th century led to the development of printing techniques that could create more detailed imagery on cloth, quicker than ever before. These increasingly affordable processes ‘democratised’ textile decoration, allowing governments, regimes, and corporations to harness the power of print to communicate, from wartime slogans to revolutionary ideals.

While propaganda is usually associated with public art and monumental sculpture, this exhibition explores how fabrics have been used as a political medium both in the home and on the body, through furnishing and fashion. Find out how textiles were used as a tool of the state across the political spectrum, from communism to fascism. Discover how a fraternal crisis in the monarchy played out on cloth, and how democracies promote national identity through textile design. On display will be textiles from countries including Britain, America, Italy, Germany, and Austria—ranging from French toile de Jouy to Japanese robes from the Asia-Pacific war, to Cultural Revolution-era Chinese fabrics rarely exhibited in the UK.

Amber Butchart is a curator, writer, and broadcaster who specialises in the cultural and political history of textiles and dress. She is a former Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London and is a regular public lecturer across the UK’s leading arts institutions. She researches and presents documentaries for television and radio, including the six-part series A Stitch in Time for BBC Four that fused biography, art, and the history of fashion to explore the lives of historical figures through the clothes they wore, and she is the history consultant and regular on-screen historian for BBC One’s Great British Sewing Bee. Amber is an external adviser for the National Crime Agency as a Forensic Garment Analyst, working on cases that require investigation of clothing and textiles. She has published five books on the history and culture of clothes, including The Fashion of Film, Nautical Chic, and a history of British fashion illustration for the British Library.

Now on view at the Fashion and Textile Museum:

Oh Boy! Boy’s Dress, 1760–1930
Fashion and Textile Museum, London, 29 September 2023 – 3 March 2024

The Fashion and Textile Museum is excited to present Oh Boy!, an exploration into historical boy’s dress. Curated by leading fashion historian Amy de la Haye, alongside renowned expert collector Alasdair Peebles, the exhibition presents an unrivalled collection of an often-undervalued area of fashion history, spread over two acts.

29 September — 16 December 2023
Act One: Breeched, No More Dresses explores the ceremony of entry into the masculine world, taking place after six years of age, as boys abandoned dresses in favour of breeches. Focusing on the period from 1760 to 1810, Act One presents a dimity gown and coat, a robust three-piece fustian breeches suit, and a block-printed skeleton suit, alongside other fascinating pieces.

21 December 2023 — 3 March 2024
Act Two: Ship Shape delves into the vogue for nautical wear dating from 1860 to 1930. Starting with a miniature suit that an admiral had made for his young son and including linen and wool serge suits, loosely inspired by naval dress, accompanied by accessories. The space will be imaginatively adorned, showcasing Alasdair’s skills as a decorative period interior painter and exploring the topic of collecting as narrative.

Amy de la Haye is Professor of Dress History & Curatorship, and joint director of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion (LCF). Recent and current projects include Gluck: Art & Identity at Brighton Museum (2017), Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion at MFIT (2021), Wild & Cultivated: Fashioning the Rose at London’s Garden Museum (2022), Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain at Compton Verney (2023), and Making More Mischief… at LCF Stratford (2024). She has published extensively and writes for SHOWstudio. Formerly she served as curator of 20th-century dress at the Victoria and Albert Museum with exhibitions including the radical Streetstyle: from sidewalk to catwalk (1994).

Alasdair Peebles works as a freelance decorative painter, specialising in hand-painted wallpapers and the restoration of painted finishes in Historic houses. For the last thirty years, he has built a private collection focused exclusively on boy’s and youth’s clothes from 1750 to 1950. He is currently co-authoring a book on men’s and boys’ dress for Bloomsbury. He has lectured widely, regularly lends clothing to museums for exhibitions and works with costume designers on period film projects including Little Women and Mary Poppins.

Now on view at the Concord Museum:

Interwoven: Women’s Lives Written in Thread
Concord Museum, 29 September 2023 — 25 February 2024

Our current special exhibition, Interwoven: Women’s Lives Written in Thread, highlights needlework produced by young women in New England and specifically the extraordinary collection of samplers at the Concord Museum. Featuring 30 samplers sewn in the early 1700s to mid-1800s, Interwoven explores how young women created records of their own lives and experiences, written in thread.

Detail of Sampler by Phebe Bliss, 1749 (Concord, MA: Concord Museum, gift of Mrs. Richard D. Boyer, T18).

The exhibition explores the history of needlework and embroidery, its importance as an art form, and its significance to women in the 18th and 19th centuries. Intended to showcase young women’s accomplishments, the samplers also communicate details of their lives and education, their communities, and their families. The exhibition provides a unique view into their private lives. For most of these young women, their samplers are the only objects that survive from their lives. Many of the samplers have never been displayed before.

Learn about the education of privileged young women in the early republic and understand how wealth and enslaved labor enabled them to pursue decorative arts. Explore the materials used in constructing samplers, such as linens, dyes and silk, and how and where these materials were produced. View samplers that demonstrate how women recorded family history and the loss of loved ones through needlework. Understand how they incorporated the importance of community and a strong sense of place in their samplers. The gallery includes areas for hands-on and interactive activities. Exhibition programs connect the history of samplers to contemporary work through visiting artists, demonstrations, workshops, and more.