Exhibition | Horace Walpole and Philanthropy
Now on view at The Walpole Library, with a rich and engaging online component:
‘Knight Errant of the Distressed’: Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century London
The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 11 May — 22 December 2022
Curated by Andrew Rudd
‘Knight Errant of the Distressed’: Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century London uses images, manuscripts, artefacts, and extracts from publications and correspondence to situate Walpole within the burgeoning philanthropic culture of his age. It reveals Walpole’s secret giving to prisoners and other good causes and examine the principles which underlay his philanthropy. A main aim of the exhibition is to stimulate discussion about philanthropy today.
Horace Walpole (1717–1797) lived in an age that prided itself on the extent of its philanthropy. His friend Hannah More described the era as the “age of benevolence.” Yet while Walpole was familiar with many leading philanthropists, he is not known as a supporter of good causes himself; indeed, after his death, he was accused of being uncharitable and even blamed for the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton, who had sought Walpole’s financial assistance in vain.
This exhibition seeks to situate Walpole in the context of eighteenth-century British philanthropy. An array of philanthropic organizations, fundraising initiatives, and ad hoc giving formed part of everyday life in Britain under the reigns of George II and III. The rich were expected to support the poor and needy in order to supplement the overstretched parish-based welfare system. Walpole frequently dispatched anonymous donations to victims of misfortune he read about in his daily newspaper.
Walpole was drawn personally toward outlandish cases, and this exhibition portrays his active involvement in several high-profile campaigns, including the ill-fated encounter with Chatterton. Walpole could be disparaging in his remarks about philanthropy, but visitors are encouraged to weigh his private generosity. Walpole regarded philanthropy as a means to cultivate the curious and eccentric, a discernibly queer philanthropic vision in which he himself played the role of “knight errant of the distressed.”
Andrew Rudd, of the University of Exeter, researches and teaches British literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic period. His monograph, Sympathy and India in British Literature 1770–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan), was published in 2011, and he is currently writing a cultural history of charity in the eighteenth century. He has held numerous fellowships (most recently at Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library and the School of Advanced Studies in English, University of Jadavpur) and speaks regularly at conferences, seminars, and public events. Since 2015, he has been a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College.
In addition to the online exhibition, a 24-page exhibition brochure by Dr. Rudd is available for download.
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Andrew Rudd | Horace Walpole and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century England
Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Tuesday, 20 September 2022, 7.00pm
In partnership with the Farmington Libraries, Dr. Rudd will explore the rich and exciting world of philanthropy in eighteenth-century England. The talk will focus on the collector and man of letters Horace Walpole (1717–1797), who was a generous, if sometimes eccentric, supporter of the era’s good causes. Walpole’s giving habits illuminate a thriving culture of charitable relief which still finds echoes in philanthropy today.
Registration is available here»
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The Charitable Impulse: Philanthropic Values from the Eighteenth Century to Today
Dwight Hall at Yale, Wednesday, 21 September 2022, 4.00–6.00pm
A conversation jointly organized by The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University and Dwight Hall at Yale: Center for Public Service and Social Justice
In the eighteenth century, charitable acts and societies in England and the American colonies were motivated by an understanding of moral and ethical obligations of the ‘better off’ to do good works on behalf of the ‘needy’. Philanthropic organizations from this time reveal historical attitudes toward the benefit to the individual and the public of charitable activities. This panel will explore how views on privilege, agency, status, and the responsibilities of members of society to others have evolved over time, and the ways in which certain implicit understandings of why and how people should care for others remain unchanged.
Exhibition | Threads of Power
Opening this week at BGC:
Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 16 September 2022 — 1 January 2023
Curated by Emma Cormack, Ilona Kos, and Michele Majer
“I love lace for evening dresses … for a cocktail frock … or for a blouse… . When a fabric is fancy in itself it needs simplicity of design to show it to its best advantage.” —Christian Dior
Point de France needle-lace frelange with lappets, Orne, France, ca. 1695, linen (Textilmuseum St. Gallen, acquisition from the John Jacoby Collection, 1954,01246; photo by Michael Rast).
Lace—delicate, sumptuous, enigmatic—takes over the Bard Graduate Center Gallery this fall. Trace the development of European lace from its sixteenth-century origins to the present day. See more than 150 examples of lace from the renowned collection of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen, including some of the world’s finest examples of handmade needle and bobbin lace that were favored by the wealthy and powerful of Bourbon France and Habsburg Spain. Learn about the women who crafted this sought-after status symbol by hand and about the evolution of Swiss chemical lace, known as guipure lace, made on embroidery machines. Explore new innovations in lace production, like laser-cut and 3D-printed lace, used in contemporary haute couture.
Curated by Emma Cormack, associate curator, Bard Graduate Center; Ilona Kos, curator, Textilmuseum St. Gallen; and Michele Majer, assistant professor, Bard Graduate Center. Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen is organized by Bard Graduate Center and the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. The exhibition will open at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York in September 2022 and will be available to tour after closing in January 2023.
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Emma Cormack and Michele Majer, eds., Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263497, $75.
Tracing the history of lace in fashion from its sixteenth-century origins to the present, Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen offers a look at one of the world’s finest collections of historical lace. The book explores the longstanding connections between lace and status, addressing styles in lace worn at royal courts, including Habsburg Spain and Bourbon France, as well as lace worn by the elite ruling classes and Indigenous peoples in the Spanish Americas. Featuring new research, the publication covers a range of topics related to lace production, lace in fashion and portraiture, lace revivals, the mechanization of the lace industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and contemporary innovations in lace. With a focus on lace techniques, women lace makers, and lace as a signifier of wealth and power, this richly illustrated book includes wide-ranging contributions by curators and experts from major museums and academic institutions.
C O N T E N T S
Director’s Foreword, Susan Weber
Editor’s Note
Introduction, Emma Cormack and Michele Majer
The Emergence of Lace in Early Modern Europe
1 Barbara Karl — Lace and Status: Luxury, Power, and Control in Early Modernity
2 Femke Speelberg — Putting a Name to Lace: Fashion, Fame, and the Production of Printed Textile Pattern Books
3 Paula Hohti Erichsen — ‘Monstrous’ Ruffs and Elegant Trimmings: Lace and Lacemaking in Early Modern Italy
4 Frieda Sorber — Antwerp, A Center of Lace Making and Lace Dealing, 1550–1750
Lace in Spain and the Americas, 1500–1800
5 Amalia Descalzo Lorenzo — The Triumph of Lace: Spanish Portraiture of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
6 Mariselle Méléndez — ‘A desire of being distinguished by an elegant dress is universal’: Clothing, Status and Convenience in Eighteenth-Century Spanish America
7 James Middleton — A Prodigious Excess: Lace in New Spain and Peru, ca. 1600–1800
8 Laura Beltrán-Rubio — ‘Covered in much fine lace’: Dress in the Viceroyalty of New Granada
The Dominance of France, 1660–1790
9 Denis Bruna — Lace and Economy under Louis XIV
10 Lesley Miller — Lace à la Mode, ca. 1690–1790
Mechanization and Revivalism: The Nineteenth Century Lace Industries
11 Emma Cormack and Michele Majer — Fashion and the Lace Industries in France, Belgium, and England, 1800–1900
12 Annabel Bonnin Talbot — Ahead of the Curve: A. Blackbourne & Co. and the Late-Nineteenth Century British Lace Industry
13 Emily Zilber — Italy to New York: Making Historic Textiles Modern at the Scoula d’Industrie Italiane
14 Anne Wanner-JeanRichard and Ilona Kos — Imitation and Inspiration: The Leopold Iklé Collection in St. Gallen
Innovations in Lace, 1900 to Today
15 Catherine Örmen — Fashion and Lace since 1900
16 Annina Dosch, Interview with Tobias Forster, Hans Schreiber, and Martin Leuthold — Lace in St. Gallen Today: Tradition and Innovation at Forster Rohner and Jakob Schlaepfer
Illustrated Checklist of the Exhibition
Glossary, compiled by Kenna Libes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
The Burlington Magazine, August 2022
The August issue of The Burlington is rich for the eighteenth century, including Karin Wolfe’s obituary for Christopher Johns (details for his memorial service, on 17 September, are emerging here).
The Burlington Magazine 164 (August 2022)
A R T I C L E S
• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “A Borromini-Inspired Church Plan in Eighteenth-Century Lima,” pp. 740–51.
Built in 1758–66, the Church of Los Huérfanos, Lima, is unique in Spanish South America for its oval plan. Its designer is her identified as a master builder, Cristóbal de Vergas, who was inspired by prints of Francesco Borromini’s S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, exemplifying the revival of interest during the Rococo perios in Roman Baroque precedents.
• Adam Bowett, “The Floral Marquetry Floor at Burghley House,” pp. 752–59.
The possibility that five pieces of eighteenth-century furniture at Burghley House, Stamford, incorporate maquetry made for a floor in the house c.1685 is here confirmed by references in inventories. The marquetry can be linked to furniture in the Royal Collection, raising the possibility that the floor was mdade by Gerrit Jensen incorporating marquetry supplied by Jasper Braems.
• François Marandet, “A Modello by Louis Laguerre and the Programme of the Painted Hall at Chatsworth,” pp. 760–67.
With the help of a recently discovered modello, the subject of Louis Laguerre’s monumental painting on the east wall of the Painted Hall, Chatsworth, is here identified as Augustus Ordering the Closing of the Doors of the Temple of Janus. This allows the political allegory of the room’s decoration, completed in 1694, to be fully understood for the first time.
R E V I E W S
• Neil Jeffares, “Pastels in the Pandemic,” pp. 780–87.
The notoriously fragile medium of pastel has not been out of the public eye during the difficult circumstances of the past two years. Exhibition in San Francisco and Munich and a biography of Rosalba Carriera invite comparisons between the major pastellists of the eighteenth century: Joseph Vivien, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, and Jean-Étienne Liotard, as well as Carriera.
• Reinier Baarsen, Review of Calin Demetrescu, Les ébénistes de la Couronne sous le règne de Louis XIV (La Bibliothèque des Arts, 2021), pp. 818–19.
• Daniel Fulco, Review of Andreas Schumacher, ed., Venezianische Malerei: Staatsgalerie in der Residenz Würzburg (Schnell & Steiner, 2021), pp. 819–21.
• Howard Coutts, Review of Patricia Ferguson, ed., Pots, Prints, and Politics: Ceramics with an Agenda, from the 14th to the 20th Century (British Museum Press, 2021), pp. 821–22.
• Sophie Rhodes, Review of Tessa Murdoch, Europe Divided: Huguenot Refugee Art and Culture (V&A Museum, 2021), pp. 827–28.
• Patrick Bade, Review of Charles Dellheim, Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (Brandeis University Press, 2021), p. 828.
O B I T U A R I E S
• Karin Wolfe, Obituary for Christopher M.S. Johns (1955–2022), pp. 829–31.
Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, since 2003, Christopher M.S. Johns published widely on Italian art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His determination to demonstrate the falsity of the belief that the settecento was a period of cultural decline had a substantial influence on both scholarship and academic curricula.
Exhibition | Dare to Know
Alexandre-Evariste Fragonard, A Centurion Begging for Protection from Marc Antony during a Seditious Revolt, ca. 1800, black ink and black and gray wash, probably over graphite, framing lines in black ink, on off-white antique laid paper (laid down), 20 × 48 cm (Harvard Art Museums, 2018.210).
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Opening this week at Harvard:
Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, 16 September 2022 — 15 January 2023
Curated by Elizabeth Rudy and Kristel Smentek
See how the graphic arts inspired, shaped, and gave immediacy to new ideas in the Enlightenment era, encouraging individuals to follow their own reason when seeking to know more.
What role did drawings and prints play during the Enlightenment era, from roughly 1720 to 1800? Dare to Know explores many nuances of this complex time—when political and cultural revolutions swept across Europe and the Americas, spurring profound shifts in science, philosophy, the arts, social and cultural encounters, and our shared sense of history. Indeed, the Enlightenment itself has been described as a “revolution of the mind.” Novel concepts in every realm of intellectual inquiry were communicated not only through text and speech, but in prints and drawings that gave these ideas a visual, concrete form. They made new things visible—and familiar things visible in powerful new ways. They wielded the potential to visually articulate, reinforce, or contradict beliefs as well as biases, while also arguing for social action and imagining new realities.
In 1784, in response to a journal article asking “What Is Enlightenment?,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the Enlightenment’s main impulse was to “dare to know!”: to pursue knowledge for oneself, without relying on others to interpret facts and experiences. But is this ever truly possible?
Bringing together 150 prints, drawings, books, and other related objects from Harvard as well as collections in the United States and abroad, this exhibition offers provocative insights into both the achievements and the failures of a period whose complicated legacies reverberate still today. Dare to Know asks new and sometimes uncomfortable questions of the so-called age of reason, inviting visitors to embrace the Enlightenment’s same spirit of inquiry—to investigate, to persuade, and to imagine.
Curated by Elizabeth M. Rudy, Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Harvard Art Museums, and Kristel Smentek, Associate Professor of Art History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With special thanks to Heather Linton, Curatorial Assistant for Special Exhibitions and Publications, Division of European and American Art, and Christina Taylor, Associate Paper Conservator, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Research contributions by Austėja Mackelaitė, Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow (2016–18), and by PhD candidates in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture and former graduate interns in the Division of European and American Art: J. Cabelle Ahn, Thea Goldring, and Sarah Lund.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Melvin R. Seiden and Janine Luke Fund for Publications and Exhibitions, the Robert M. Light Print Department Fund, the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Support Fund, the Catalogues and Exhibitions Fund for Pre-Twentieth-Century Art of the Fogg Museum, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The accompanying catalogue was made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Publication Funds, including the Henry P. McIlhenny Fund. Related programming is supported by the M. Victor Leventritt Lecture Series Endowment Fund.
The catalogue is distributed by Yale UP:
Edouard Kopp, Elizabeth Rudy, and Kristel Smentek, eds., Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2022), 334 pages, ISBN: 978-0300266726, $50.
Are volcanoes punishment from God? What do a fly and a mulberry have in common? What utopias await in unexplored corners of the earth and beyond? During the Enlightenment, questions like these were brought to life through an astonishing array of prints and drawings, helping shape public opinion and stir political change. Dare to Know overturns common assumptions about the age, using the era’s proliferation of works on paper to tell a more nuanced story. Echoing the structure and sweep of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the book contains 26 thematic essays, organized A to Z, providing an unprecedented perspective on more than 50 artists, including Henry Fuseli, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Francisco Goya, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, William Hogarth, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Giambattista Tiepolo. With a multidisciplinary approach, the book probes developments in the natural sciences, technology, economics, and more—all through the lens of the graphic arts.
Edouard Kopp is the John R. Eckel, Jr., Foundation Chief Curator at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston; Elizabeth M. Rudy is the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; and Kristel Smentek is associate professor of art history in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
With contributions by J. Cabelle Ahn, Elizabeth Saari Browne, Rachel Burke, Alvin L. Clark, Jr., Anne Driesse, Paul Friedland, Thea Goldring, Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Ashley Hannebrink, Joachim Homann, Kéla Jackson, Penley Knipe, Edouard Kopp, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Heather Linton, Austėja Mackelaitė, Tamar Mayer, Elizabeth Mitchell, Elizabeth M. Rudy, Brandon O. Scott, Kristel Smentek, Phoebe Springstubb, Gabriella Szalay, and Christina Taylor.
R E L A T E D E V E N T S
Dare to Know: An Introduction
15 September 2022, 5.30pm
Join us for a series of brief presentations and a discussion about the special exhibition Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment, with curators Elizabeth Rudy and Kristel Smentek, along with several contributors to the exhibition catalogue.
Exhibition Tours by Elizabeth Rudy
18 September, 2 and 23 October, 11 December, and 15 January, noon
Join exhibition co-curator Elizabeth Rudy for a tour of the exhibition. She will share insights about how works on paper played a critical role in the 18th century, wielding the power to visually articulate, reinforce, or contradict beliefs as well as biases.
Gallery Talk by Morgan Grasselli
22 September 2022, 12.30pm
Join Margaret Morgan Grasselli for a discussion about the 18th-century invention of the multicolor, multiplate printing technique that laid the foundation for today’s CMYK process.
Gallery Talk by Sam Nehila
30 September 30, 2022, 12.30pm
Join Sam Nehila, curatorial assistant in the Division of European and American Art, for a discussion of William Hogarth’s print series The Four Stages of Cruelty.
Printed by James Phillips, Description of a Slave Ship, 1789, engraving (Harvard University, Houghton Library, Gift of O. Peck, 1845, p EB75 A100, TL42422.5).
Gallery Talk by John Overholt
25 October 2022, 12.30pm
Join Houghton Library curator John Overholt for a discussion of one of the most important and consequential prints of the 18th century, Description of a Slave Ship.
Gallery Talk by Joachim Homann
27 October 2022, 12.30pm
Join curator Joachim Homann for a discussion about a rare, intact example of French inventor Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle’s multi-sheet drawings on translucent paper. The work was originally attached to rollers, lit from behind with candles, and unfurled for a captive audience.
Gallery Talk by Horace Ballard
3 November 2022, 12.30pm
Join curator Horace Ballard for an exploration of the observation and documentation of astronomical events in the 18th century as exemplified in a drawing by British artist Paul Sandby.
Gallery Talk by Ben Sibson
5 November 2022, 12.30pm
Join Ben Sibson, PhD candidate in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, for a discussion about the depiction of the human body in selected works on view in the exhibition.
Gallery Talk by Paris A. Spies-Gans
6 November 2022, 12.30pm
Join art historian Paris A. Spies-Gans, of the Harvard Society of Fellows, for a discussion about works of art made by women in the exhibition. Spies-Gans will examine objects by a range of artists, with particular attention given to Marguerite Gérard and Marie-Gabrielle Capet.
Unidentified artist, American, Lottery Ticket: The Endless Knot, ca. 1785–95, woodcut (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Walter S. Poor, Class of 1905, M20297).
Gallery Talk by Casey Monahan
8 November 2022, 12.30pm
Join curatorial assistant Casey Monahan for a discussion of a dynamic display of ball invitations, advertisements, trade cards, and currency notes in the exhibition. Monahan will share insights about the acquisition of these small prints and the story behind their creative installation.
Gallery Talk by Joachim Homann
10 November 2022, 12.30pm
Join curator Joachim Homann for a discussion of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s drawing The Girls’ Dormitory.
Gallery Talk by Sarah Mallory
20 November 2022, 12.30pm
Join Sarah Mallory, PhD candidate in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, for a discussion of the emergence of the modern notion of ecology in the 18th century as articulated in selected works in the exhibition.
Gallery Talk by Yi Bin Liang
6 December 2022, 12.30pm
Join conservation technician Yi Bin Liang for an exploration of 18th-century methods and techniques of book binding in a close examination of works on view.
Exhibition | Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic
Closing this month at The British Museum:
Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic
The British Museum, London, 19 May — 25 September 2022
Curated by Belinda Crerar and Lucy Dahlsen
The first exhibition of its kind, Feminine Power takes a cross-cultural look at the profound influence of female spiritual beings within global religion and faith. Explore the significant role that goddesses, demons, witches, spirits and saints have played—and continue to play—in shaping our understanding of the world.
How do different traditions view femininity? How has female authority been perceived in ancient cultures? For insights, the exhibition looks to divine and demonic figures feared and revered for over 5,000 years. From wisdom, passion and desire, to war, justice and mercy, the diverse expression of female spiritual powers around the world prompts us to reflect on how we perceive femininity and gender identity today.
Worship of Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes, reveals how her destructive capacity is venerated alongside her ability to create. The Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, who transcends gender and is visualised in male form in Tibet and female in China and Japan, uncovers the importance of gender fluidity in some spiritual traditions. And the terrifying Hindu goddess Kali, depicted in art carrying a severed head and bloodied sword, is honoured as the Great Mother and liberator from fear and ignorance.
Porcelain Figure of Guanyin, China, 18th century, 41 cm high (London: The British Museum, 1980,0728.93).
Enhanced by engagement with contemporary worshippers, faith communities and insights from high-profile collaborators Bonnie Greer, Mary Beard, Elizabeth Day, Rabia Siddique, and Deborah Frances-White, the exhibition considers the influence of female spiritual power and what femininity means today.
Bringing together sculptures, sacred objects and artworks from the ancient world to today, and from six continents, the exhibition highlights the many faces of feminine power—ferocious, beautiful, creative or hell-bent—and its seismic influence throughout time.
Belinda Crerar, Feminine Power: The Divine to the Demonic (London: The British Museum, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0714151304, £30 / $45.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Forces of Nature
2 Passion and Desire
3 Evil
4 Justice and Defence
5 Compassion and Salvation
Conclusion
Notes and Bibliography
Acknowledgements and Credits
Exhibition | Fuseli and the Modern Woman
Henry Fuseli, Sophia Fuseli, Her Hair in Large Rolls, with Pink Gloves, in Front of a Brown Curtain, detail, 1790
(Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings)
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From The Courtauld:
Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 14 October 2022 — 8 January 2023
Kunsthaus Zürich, 24 February – 21 May 2023
One of the most original and eccentric artists of the 18th century, Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) will be the subject of a new exhibition at The Courtauld, opening 14 October 2022.
Henry Fuseli, Half-length Figure of a Courtesan with Feathered Head-dress, ca. 1800–10 (Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Prints and Drawings).
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Fuseli spent a formative period in Rome in the 1770s before settling in London, where he was elected Professor of Painting at The Royal Academy and served for 21 years as Keeper of the RA Schools, working and living at Somerset House in what is now The Courtauld Gallery.
While Fuseli was famous in his lifetime for stylised paintings depicting fantastic and supernatural scenes drawn from his imagination and literature, The Courtauld’s exhibition explores an altogether different dimension to his art. Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism will reveal the artist’s secret lifelong obsession with the female figure through fifty of his strange and striking private drawings, many of which depict the spectacularly extravagant hairdos and fashions of the day. The exhibition will explore Fuseli’s fascination with female sexuality and the modern woman—as a figure of mystery, transgression, and dangerous allure—and provides an insight into late 18th- and early 19th-century anxieties about gender, identity, and sexuality during a transformative period in European history.
Organised in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, the exhibition will showcase drawings brought together from international collections. Following its presentation at The Courtauld, the exhibition will travel to Zürich, the city where Fuseli was born.
The catalogue is published by PHP and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
David Solkin, ed., with contributions by Jonas Beyer, Mechthild Fend, and Ketty Gottardo, Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1913645298, £30 / $40.
Best known for his notoriously provocative painting The Nightmare, Fuseli energetically cultivated a reputation for eccentricity, with vividly stylised images of supernatural creatures, muscle-bound heroes, and damsels in distress. While these convinced some viewers of the greatness of his genius, others dismissed him as a charlatan, or as completely mad.
Fuseli’s contemporaries might have thought him even crazier had they been aware that in private he harboured an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of the modern woman, which he pursued almost exclusively in his drawings. Where one might have expected idealised bodies with the grace and proportions of classical statues, here instead we encounter figures whose anatomies have been shaped by stiff bodices, waistbands, puffed sleeves, and pointed shoes, and whose heads are crowned by coiffures of the most bizarre and complicated sort. Often based on the artist’s wife Sophia Rawlins, the women who populate Fuseli’s graphic work tend to adopt brazenly aggressive attitudes, either fixing their gaze directly on the viewer or ignoring our presence altogether. Usually they appear on their own, in isolation on the page; sometimes they are grouped together to form disturbing narratives, erotic fantasies that may be mysterious, vaguely menacing, or overtly transgressive, but where women always play a dominant role. Among the many intriguing questions raised by these works is the extent to which his wife Sophia was actively involved in fashioning her appearance for her own pleasure, as well as for the benefit of her husband.
By bringing together more than fifty of these studies (roughly a third of the known total), The Courtauld Gallery will give audiences an unprecedented opportunity to see one of the finest Romantic-period draughtsmen at his most innovative and exciting. Visitors to the show and readers of the lavishly illustrated catalogue will further be invited to consider how Fuseli’s drawings of women, as products of the turbulent aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, speak to concerns about gender and sexuality that have never been more relevant than they are today.
The exhibition showcases drawings brought together from international collections, including the Kunsthaus Zürich, in Zurich, the Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand, and from other European and North American institutions.
David Solkin is Emeritus Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Jonas Beyer is Curator of Drawings at the Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.
Mechthild Fend is Professor of Art History at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main.
Ketty Gottardo is Martin Halusa Curator of Drawings at The Courtauld Gallery, London.
Exhibition | Füssli: The Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic
Henry Fuseli, The Dream of Queen Catherine of Aragon (Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act 4, Scene 2), detail, 1781, oil on canvas, 147 × 211 cm
(Borough of Fylde, Lancashire: Lytham St Annes Art Collection, no. 52).
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Opening this month at the Musée Jacquemart-André:
Füssli: The Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic / Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique
Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, 16 September 2022 — 23 January 2023
Curated by Christopher Baker and Andreas Beyer
This autumn discover the oeuvre of the Swiss-born British painter Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1741–1825). Comprising sixty works from public and private collections, the exhibition presents a selection of the most emblematic of works by Füssli, the artist of the imaginary and the sublime. From Shakespearean themes to representations of dreams, nightmares, and apparitions, and mythological and Biblical illustrations, Füssli forged a new aesthetic that shifted between reality and the fantastic.
Henry Fuseli, Self-Portrait, 1780s, black and white chalk on buff paper (London: V&A Museum, E.1028-1918).
The son of a painter and art historian, Henry Füssli was trained as a priest and started his artistic career relatively late, during a first trip to London, where he was influenced by the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. After a long stay in Italy, during which he was especially fascinated by the power of Michelangelo’s works, he settled in London at the end of the 1770s. An atypical and intellectual artist, Füssli drew his inspiration from the literary sources that he interpreted imaginatively. In his paintings he developed a dreamlike and dramatic pictorial language, with its blend of the marvellous and the fantastic, the sublime and the grotesque.
Come explore Füssli’s oeuvre, which has not been the subject of a monographic exhibition in Paris since 1975: from works that represent Shakespeare’splays (particularly Macbeth), onto those depicting mythological and biblical tales, the female figures represented in his graphic works and the themes of nightmares, a truly Füselian obsession, dreams, and apparitions.
Füssli developed a fantastic vein that was quite marginal at the time, as it distorted academic rules. In 1782, he presented his first version of Nightmare, an emblematic work drawn from his imagination that truly established his career as a painter. Elected Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1788, and Academician in 1790, Füssli, while working in a serial fashion, embodied the quest for the sublime that was all the rage in England at the time.
Discover the striking works of the artist—works that are all too rare in French collections—by a highly original painter whose oeuvre was paradoxical, inspired by an imagination in which terror and horror were combined, forming the aesthetic origins of Dark Romanticism (‘romantisme noir’).
Christopher Baker and Andreas Beyer, et al., Füssli, entre rêve et fantastique (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2022), 208 pages, €40.
In addition, works from the exhibition are featured in a 44-page special edition of Connaissance des Arts (€11) and an 84-page special edition of Beaux-Arts magazine (€14).
More information is included in the full press packet.
Exhibition | Eighteenth-Century Pastels
From the press release (1 August) for the exhibition:
Eighteenth-Century Pastels
Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 30 August 2022 — 26 February 2023
Curated by Emily Beeny and Ellie Bernick, with Julian Brooks
Pietro Antonio Rotari, Young Woman with a Fan, early 1750s, pastel on blue-green paper, mounted on canvas, 18 × 15 inches (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2019.111).
Exhibition highlights the Pan-European popularity of pastels with recently acquired works and loans from the Mauritshuis museum.
The J. Paul Getty Museum presents Eighteenth-Century Pastels, an exhibition that explores the popularity of pastels across eighteenth-century Europe and showcases their striking physical properties. Presenting works from the Getty Museum collection along with four loans, the exhibition is on view at the Getty Center from 30 August 2022 to 26 February 2023.
By the mid-eighteenth century, pastels reached an unprecedented peak of popularity and acclaim. The dry, satiny pigments, manufactured in sticks of every hue, were portable and allowed for swift execution—allowing artists to essentially ‘draw’ a painting.
“Working with pastels differs greatly from painting with oils, which require cumbersome equipment, long sittings, and extensive drying times,” says Emily Beeny, curator of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and former associate curator of drawings at the Getty Museum. “Their relative ease and portability made pastels an especially desirable medium for traveling artists seeking to expand their portfolio with portraits.”
Pastelists were often very mobile, traveling far and wide in search of commissions. The artists and sitters represented in Eighteenth-Century Pastels hail from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Netherlands—a testament to the Pan-European nature of the pastel phenomenon. The exhibition highlights works from the Getty Museum collection by Jean-Étienne Liotard, John Russell, and Rosalba Carriera, among others. The show also includes recently acquired works by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Pietro Antonio Rotari, as well as seldom-seen works by Cornelis Troost on long-term loan from the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands.
With standout pieces like Rotari’s Young Woman with a Fan and Liotard’s Portrait of Maria Frederike van Reede-Athlone at Seven Years of Age, the pastels in this exhibition will entrance audiences with their rich hues and ethereal quality.
“Featuring works by many of the most talented pastel portraitists of the age, this exhibition is a sumptuous feast for the eyes,” says Ellie Bernick, graduate intern at the Getty Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. “Plus, the exhibition features several works by female pastelists like Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Rosalba Carriera, and Mary Hoare, exemplifying the important role the medium played in bringing women artists into the profession.”
Eighteenth-Century Pastels is curated by Emily Beeny, curator of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and former associate curator of drawings at the Getty Museum, and Ellie Bernick, graduate intern at the Getty Museum, with the assistance of Julian Brooks, senior curator of drawings at the Getty Museum.
Exhibition | (Re)Inventing the Americas
Denilson Baniwa, The Celebration of the Lizard (detail), Spirit Animals (detail), 2022, digital intervention on Columnam à Praefecto prima navigation locatam venerantur Floridenses (Column in Honor of the First Voyage to Florida) (detail), from Jacques de Morgues Le Moyne (French, ca. 1533–before 1588), Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americæ provincia Gallis acciderunt (Frankfurt, 1591), pl. 8 (Getty Research Institute, 87-B24110). Courtesy the artist. Design © 2022 J. Paul Getty Trust.
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From the press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:
(Re)Inventing the Americas: Construct. Erase. Repeat.
Getty Center, Los Angeles, 23 August 2022 — 8 January 2023
Curated by Idurre Alonso with Denilson Baniwa
America is a European invention. Between 1492 and the late 1800s, European conquistadors, travelers, and artists produced prints, books, and objects that illustrated the natural resources and Native peoples of the Americas, often constructing fantastic and fictional ideas. Mixing reality with their own conventions and interpretations, they created portable and reproducible images that circulated around the world, fueling the spread of stereotypes and prejudices. (Re)Inventing the Americas: Construct. Erase. Repeat., on view from 23 August 2022 until 8 January 2023, analyzes the creation of the mythologies that arose during the conquest and exploration of the continents and reveals the influence that those myths and utopian visions have had on defining the Americas.
“This exhibition reframes the colonial and 19th-century materials in the Getty Research Institute collections, challenging European representations of the American continents,” says Mary Miller, director of the Getty Research institute. “It proposes that the Americas were reinvented utilizing European conventions and imaginaries.”
Re)Inventing the Americas is divided into five thematic sections. The first one examines the allegorical construction of America and the sources and evolution of these images. The second section explores the natural wealth of the Americas, while highlighting the exploitation of those resources. The third part looks at the construction of archetypes by analyzing recurring topics, such as the depiction of local people with feathers and hammocks and the portrayal of idolatry and cannibalism. The fourth section is devoted to images of the conquest, emphasizing the political overtones of certain narratives. The final section looks at the work of European travelers, stressing the differences and commonalities with previous constructions.
The exhibition features a collaboration with Denilson Baniwa, a contemporary artist from the Brazilian Amazon region who will generate different artistic interventions throughout the show. Baniwa’s work prompts us to critically reevaluate the materials from the past to help us navigate the colonial traumas, generating new reinventions of the Americas. Additionally, commentary on exhibition objects by Latinx and Indigenous members of the Los Angeles community gives a multi-perspectival approach to the pieces.
“Our collections illustrate the construction of an image of the Americas based on the European perspective,” says Idurre Alonso, curator at the Getty Research Institute. “Thus, it was important to me to analyze and counter that European view by introducing a multilayered presentation of the exhibition objects. To do that, I collaborated with Denilson Baniwa and our local Latin American and Latinx community. Their voices became part of the narrative of the show, challenging the persistence of certain notions. The outcome of these collaborations is a multifaceted exhibition that showcases the complex reinventions of the Americas from the Colonial time to today.”
Denilson Baniwa (born 18 April 1984) is an Indigenous artist who was born in the village of Darí, in Rio Negro, Amazonas, in the tri-border area between Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. His artistic practice includes graphic design, drawings, performances, and urban interventions. His oeuvre seeks points of intersection between Indigenous culture and the contemporary art world. Through his art he questions the colonial past and stereotypical representations of Indigenous people, often layering components from colonial and nineteenth-century art with elements from his own cultural traditions. Some of the themes he approaches include the relationships of Indigenous peoples and technology as well as the harmful effects of agri-business for Native peoples.
Esta exhibición se presenta en inglés y en español.
Louis Bouquet, Chimborazo Seen from the Plain of Tapia, engraving from Alexander von Humboldt, Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique (Paris, 1810), between pp. 200 and 201 (Getty Research Institute, 85-B1535).
Exhibition | Making Music in Early America
From the press release (11 July 2022) for the exhibition:
Making Music in Early America
DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, 20 August 2022 — December 2025
Organized by Amanda Keller
Organized piano by Longmen, Clementi & Company, London, 1799 (Colonial Williamsburg: Museum Purchase. Conservation of this instrument is made possible by a gift from Constance Tucker and Marshall Tucker in memory of N. Beverly Tucker, Jr. 2012-150).
In the 18th century, music was everywhere: in the workplace, the military campsites, the quarters of the enslaved, the church, the theater, the ballroom, and the home. Music was an essential part of life that helped foster a sense of community, whether people were accompanying the organ in song at church or enjoying an impromptu concert at home. Making Music in Early America, a new exhibition to open on August 20, 2022, in the Mark M. and Rosemary W. Leckie Gallery at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, will envelop visitors in the musical world of the 18th and 19th centuries.
As told through more than 60 instruments and their accessories, the social history and material culture of early American music will be revealed. This is the first exhibition to show the full scope of Colonial Williamsburg’s musical instruments collection including some pieces that were recently acquired. It is scheduled to remain on view through December 2025. Organized in five sections featuring music in the home, in religion, in education, in public performance, and in the military, Making Music in Early America will include harps, organs, violins and other string instruments, fifes, flutes, a bassoon, a grand harmonicon, drums, horns, and much more. While the instruments are fascinating in and of themselves, the musicians who played them and their roles in society take center stage in this exhibition.
“Colonial Williamsburg has been collecting early musical instruments for more than 90 years, but we have never before had the opportunity to show the full range of the collection,” said Ronald Hurst, the Foundation’s Carlisle H. Humelsine chief curator and vice president for museums, preservation, and historic resources. “Supported by examples of original sheet music and paintings of early Americans playing their instruments, this exhibition will place these remarkable objects in their rich, historic context.”
Among the many highlights of Making Music in Early America is a barrel organ, or hand organ, made by Longman, Clementi & Co. in London, England, ca. 1789–1801. It is a hand-cranked organ that could be played inside the home on demand with no musical talent required. The organ barrels operated much like a music box and included dance music, religious music, and military marches. They produced music on demand similar to a juke box or record player, if one had the strength to crank the handle and switch out the barrels to change the tunes. In the 17 September 1767 edition of The Virginia Gazette, an item advertising a similar instrument read: “Just Imported from London, a VERY neat HAND ORGAN, in a mahogany case, with a gilt front, which plays sixteen tunes, on two barrels; it has four stops, and every thing is in the best order. The first cost as 16£ sterling, and the Lady being dead it came in for, any person inclining to purchase it may have it on very reasonable terms. Inquire at the Post Office, Williamsburg.”
“This incredibly diverse collection of musical instruments offers us ways to tell the stories of the people who lived here during the 18th and early 19th centuries by examining who interacted with these instruments and why,” said Amanda Keller, Colonial Williamsburg’s manager of historic interiors and associate curator of household accessories who organized this exhibition. “The instruments become even more fascinating when you discover who played them and what role music played in society.”
One of the earliest hunting horns known in American collections is another featured object in the exhibition. Simple hunting horns were being made in the American colonies as early as 1765, but the majority were imported from Europe like this brass horn, made by Johannes Leichamschneider in Vienna, Austria, ca. 1715. As hunting horns were worn by the rider, they were easily battered. As a result, early hunting horns rarely survived, and this is an outstanding example that scholars come to The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to study. Although the horn section may have been modified over time and updated, the bell is original. Only one other just like this example survives with a history of use at Mount Vernon. It is recorded that George Washington’s enslaved valet, William Lee, performed the important duties of Huntsman, tending to the horses and hounds, as well as blowing the hunting horn during fox hunts at Mount Vernon and other estates. Although the history of Colonial Williamsburg’s hunting horn is unknown, it illustrates the once-prominent role played by free and enslaved huntsmen in the early South.
Revolutionary War military instruments are especially rare, and this brass ‘Hessian’ drum, from the Frebershausen area in the Hesse-Kassel region of what is now Germany, ca. 1770–85, is another featured object to be on view in Making Music in Early America. It was brought over by one of the many so-called Hessian units hired by the British to fight in the American Revolution and was most likely captured by American forces. Made of brass, this drum still has some secrets to reveal: Colonial Williamsburg’s experts, with the aid of colleagues across the Atlantic, are researching to which regiment it belonged and are using the painted colors around the top and bottom bands to help solve its mystery.
Also included in the exhibition will be ways for visitors to be able to hear the sounds of four of the instruments (banjo, harpsichord, organized piano, and musical glasses) as well as an opportunity to see a musician play an organized piano (the period term indicating the addition of several organ stops playable from the same keyboard).
Additionally, guests will be able to use an interactive touch screen to view an extraordinary music book in the Colonial Williamsburg collection that was owned by Peter Pelham (1721–1805), an English-born American organist, harpsichordist, teacher, and composer. Born in London, Pelham and his family immigrated to Boston in 1730. While there, Pelham’s father apprenticed him to Charles Theodore Pachelbel, son of composer Johann Pachelbel who is known for “Canon in D,” which is still popular today. Pelham followed Pachelbel to Charleston in 1736 and remained there for a number of years, studying with Pachelbel and later becoming a harpsichord teacher himself. Pelham returned to Boston in 1744 to serve as the first organist of Trinity Church. In 1750 Pelham moved to Williamsburg, to serve as organist at Bruton Parish Church. While in Williamsburg Pelham actively participated in the city’s musical life, giving concerts and teaching young ladies to play the spinet and harpsichord. Additionally, he supported himself and his family by serving as clerk to the royal governor, supervisor of the printing of money, and keeper of the Public Gaol. The music book that will be on view includes music that Pelham enjoyed as well as some of his original compositions. It has never been on view before, and although the original book is too fragile to be placed on view, this digital interactive will allow visitors to page through the book and see the music for themselves.
Making Music in Early America is generously funded by an anonymous donor.
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