Enfilade

Gaspar van Wittel, known as Vanvitelli, The ‘Casino’ of Cardinal Annibale Albani on the Via Aurelia, 1719, oil on canvas, 74 × 135 cm
(Private Collection, United Kingdom)

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From the press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:

Hub of the World: Art in 18th-Century Rome
Nicholas Hall Gallery, New York, 6 October — 30 November 2023

This fall, Nicholas Hall presents Hub of the World: Art in 18th-Century Rome, organized in association with the Milanese Galleria Carlo Orsi. Presented at the Upper East Side gallery in New York, the exhibition celebrates the legacy of esteemed American scholar, connoisseur, and artist Anthony M. Clark (1923–1976), who would have turned 100 this year.

Pompeo Batoni, Saint Louis Gonzaga, ca. 1744, oil on canvas, oval, in an 18th-century frame, 81 × 67 cm (Private Collection, NY).

Considered one of the most influential and admired museum professionals of his generation, Clark made a profound impact on American collecting trends in the 1950s and 1960s through his taste for art made in 18th-century Rome, especially the paintings of the Pompeo Batoni. The exhibition brings together more than 60 works by artists who lived in or traveled to Rome in the 18th century, along with a selection of Clark’s personal notebooks and a portrait photograph on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

After graduating from Harvard, Clark began his career in 1955 at the Rhode Island School of Design before going on to prominent curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, of which he later became director. He also taught art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and at Williams College, Williamstown. During his tenure at Mia and The Met, Clark made significant acquisitions for the institutions and organized world-class exhibitions as a pioneering American scholar of 18th-century Rome.

The Hub of the World brings to light the fundamental role Clark played in the revival of interest among American museums in collecting work from this period. Clark deeply believed in the importance of Roman Settecento painting, drawing, and sculpture, and this passion is brilliantly reflected in his scholarship and writings. As a curator, he consistently created a historic context for art by showing sculpture and decorative arts alongside paintings and drawings at a time when it was customary to maintain a ‘hierarchy’ of the arts by studying and displaying the mediums separately.

Domenico Corvi, The Liberation of Saint Peter, 1770, oil on canvas, 63 × 49 cm (Private Collection, Paris).

Tragically Clark succumbed to a heart attack at age 53 while jogging in his favorite city, where, at the time, he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Born in Philadelphia, Clark worked closely with curators at the Philadelphia Museum of Art over the course of his career; and, in 2000, the PMA—in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston—mounted The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome, which was dedicated to his memory.

In the words of Nicholas Hall: “Anthony Clark was a larger-than-life character who changed the way we look at Old Masters. He rescued the art of 18th-century Rome from obscurity by dint of his own personal enthusiasm and brilliant scholarship. He had enormous personal charm: the son of the owner of two works in the exhibition remembers how, as a boy, he enjoyed Clark’s visits to see his parents. Clark, an avid ornithologist, later bequeathed to him a stuffed Green Woodpecker. Our exhibition is an homage to a great scholar, a tastemaker, and a dedicated museum professional.”

Hub of the World highlights the richness of the culture of 18th-century Rome with its extraordinary mixture of patronage, from popes and cardinals, to Roman aristocrats and visiting foreigners—including the German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from whom the exhibition borrows its title. Goethe deemed Rome the “hub of the world,” writing that “the entire history of the world is linked up with this city.” Hall and Orsi have gathered a diverse selection of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and decorative arts that will provide a rare opportunity to experience the cosmopolitan appeal of 18th-century Rome.

Hubert Robert, Colonnade and Gardens at the Villa Medici, 1759, oil on canvas, 75 × 64 cm (Assadour O. Tavitian Trust).

Headlining the exhibition is View of the Villa Medici by Hubert Robert (1733–1808), painted in 1759 during the artist’s transformative time in Rome and on loan from the Assadour O. Tavitian Trust. A recent discovery, the exceptional work has rarely been on view to the public—previously only exhibited in the U.S. briefly at the National Gallery of Art. Other works on view include the Hemp Harvest in Caserta, executed by Jackob Philipp Hackert for the King of Naples; a portrait of the Cardinal Carlo Rezzonico by Anton Raphael Mengs that remained in the sitter’s family until the last decade; a unique view of the Villa Albani by Vanvitelli, recorded in the inventory of Cardinal Albani; a pair of oil on coppers by Angelika Kauffmann based on James Thomson’s pastoral poetry that newly resurfaced from a private Kenyan collection; a caricature painting by Joshua Reynolds, recently discovered at the estate where it has hung for over two centuries; A Vestal by Jacques-Louis David painted in Rome; a harbor scene painted on copper by Claude Joseph Vernet; Anton von Maron’s Portrait of Two English Gentlemen before the Arch of Constantine; the Rockingham Silenus, a 1st-century sculpture reworked by the celebrated Roman sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi; a set of candelabras in the form of Antonius-Osirus by Luigi Valadier; and a console table designed by Antonio Asprucci, made for the Egyptian Room of the Palazzo Borghese. The exhibition pays tribute to Clark as an expert on Pompeo Batoni, as represented by a painting of Saint Louis Gonzaga and its preparatory drawing in red chalk, among several other works. Once belonging to Clark, a painting of the artist Paolo de Matteis by Pier Leone Ghezzi will also be showcased.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Nicholas Hall and Galleria Carlo Orsi will publish a fully illustrated catalogue with original essays by Italian art experts and renowned historians Edgar Peters Bowron, Alvar Gonzáles-Palacios, Melissa Beck Lemke, and J. Patrice Marandel.

Pier Leone Ghezzi, Four Samples of Classical Polychrome Marbles, 1726, watercolor on paper; from top left clockwise: ‘Diaspro Verde Fiorito, 16 × 21 cm, ‘Bianco e negro antico’, 19 × 24 cm, ‘Broccatello’, 19 × 21 cm, ‘Alabastro Orientale’, 19 × 23 cm (Private Collection, Italy). To be published by Dr. Adriano Aymonino in his upcoming book from MIT press, Paper Marbles: Pier Leone Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726).

The exhibition opens this fall at The National Gallery (with the press release available here) . . .

Discover Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast
The National Gallery, London, 16 November 2023 — 3 March 2024

In the second of our ‘Discover’ exhibitions, which explore well-known paintings through a contemporary lens, we reunite for the first time in 250 years Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard’s pastel and oil versions of The Lavergne Family Breakfast. With the pastel and oil works side by side, the exhibition presents a rare opportunity to compare the difference in technique and effect between the two.

Jean-Etienne Liotard, The Lavergne Family Breakfast, 1754, pastel on paper stuck down on canvas, 80 × 106 cm (London: National Gallery, accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government from the estate of George Pinto, 2019, NG6685).

Long regarded as Liotard’s masterpiece, The Lavergne Family Breakfast (executed in Lyon in 1754) is the artist’s largest and most ambitious work in pastel. Despite the medium’s notorious delicacy, Liotard skilfully reproduced complex textures: the sheen on the metal coffee pot, the shiny ceramic jug, the silky fabrics and reflections, in the black lacquer tray. Liotard was extremely versatile, producing works in pastel, oil, enamel, chalk, and even on glass. Highly unusually, he returned to The Lavergne Family Breakfast 20 years later to make an exact replica in oil.

Liotard (1702–1789) worked across the length and breadth of 18th-century Europe. Following four years in Constantinople, he grew a long beard, adopted Turkish dress, and nicknamed himself ‘the Turkish painter’. The exhibition showcases the raw materials used to make pastels as well as drawings, paintings, and miniatures that seek to bring this idiosyncratic artist to life.

Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, with contributions by Iris Moon, Discover Liotard & The Lavergne Family Breakfast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 120 pages, ISBN: 978-1857097023, $20.

Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), from Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, late 1831, color woodblock print (London: The British Museum, acquired with the assistance of Art Fund and a contribution from the Brooke Sewell Bequest, 2008,3008.1).

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Opening in October at the Bowers Museum:

Beyond the Great Wave: Works by Hokusai from the British Museum
The British Museum, London, 25 May — 13 August 2017
Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California, 21 October 2023 — 7 January 2024

Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849) is the renowned artist behind The Great Wave, one of the most iconic prints ever made. Originally part of the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, this seminal vision of man in nature is just one of the estimated 30,000 prints that Hokusai designed over his 70-year career. This exhibition includes a beautiful early example of The Great Wave and ventures beyond to feature a broad selection of works that Hokusai produced right up to his death at the age of 90.

Visitors will be able to examine Hokusai’s personal beliefs through more than 100 paintings, drawings, woodblock prints, and illustrated books that speak to his early career, rise to fame, interest in the natural and supernatural worlds, personal life, and search for immortality. Distinct from the art of his Japanese contemporaries, Hokusai’s work is intensely individual, subjective, energized, and sublime; and the exhibition will provide a powerfully emotional and spiritual experience.

Hokusai never left Japan, but his work traveled around the globe to inspire many European artists and collectors such as Monet and Van Gogh. The exhibition includes biographical portraits of six individuals who helped build the Hokusai collection at the British Museum and shows how these scholars and proponents of Japanese art understood and appreciated Hokusai’s genius, skill, and invention.

The presentation of this exhibition is a collaboration between the British Museum and the Bowers Museum.

Timothy Clark, ed., Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0500094068, $65.

Opening this fall at The Getty:

William Blake: Visionary
Getty Center, Los Angeles, 7 October 2023 — 14 January 2024

A remarkable printmaker, painter, and poet, William Blake (1757–1827) developed a wildly unconventional world view, representing universal forces of creation and destruction—physical, psychological, historical—through his own cast of characters. By combining his poetry and images on the page through radical graphic techniques, Blake created some of the most striking and enduring imagery in British art. This major international loan exhibition explores the artist-poet’s imaginative world through his most celebrated works.

Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in cooperation with Tate.

Edina Adam and Julian Brooks, with an essay by Matthew Hargraves, William Blake: Visionary (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020), 168 pages, ISBN‏: ‎ 978-1606066423, $35.

Celebrated for his boundless imagination and unique vision, William Blake (1757–1827) created some of the most striking and distinctive imagery in art, often combining his poetry and visual images on the page through innovative graphic techniques. He has proven an enduring inspiration to artists, musicians, poets, and performers worldwide and a fascinating enigma to generations of admirers. Featuring over 130 color images, this catalogue brings together many of Blake’s most iconic works. Organized by theme, it explores Blake’s work as a professional printmaker, his roles as both painter-illustrator and poet-painter, his relationship to the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque artists that preceded him, and his legacy in the United States. It also examines his visionary prophetic books, including all eighteen plates of America a Prophecy.

A specialist in works on paper, Edina Adam is assistant curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Julian Brooks is senior curator and head of the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and is the author of many books, most recently The Lure of Italy: Artists’ Views (Getty Publications, 2017) and Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action (Getty Publications, 2015). Now the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Matthew Hargraves was previously chief curator of art collections and head of collection information and access at the Yale Center for British Art.