Enfilade

In addition to the following articles related to the eighteenth century in the current issue of the Journal of the History of Collections , I would draw your attention to Stefan Krmnicek’s article on coins from the Tux Collection and Jessica Priebe’s article on Boucher, both of which have been published online but will also appear as part of forthcoming issues in the coming months. They serves as a useful reminder that with the advantages of digital advance access, ‘current issue’ no longer tells the whole story. –CH

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Stefan Krmnicek, “‘Nummus aliquantulum suspectus’: The Counterfeit Coins of the Tux Collection (1715–1798) at the University of Tübingen,” Journal of the History of Collections, first published online: 8 February 2015.

The coin collection of the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Tübingen contains some fifty counterfeits, imitations and fabrications of ancient coins which can be traced back to the bequest of the Stuttgart senior civil servant (Regierungsrat) Carl Sigmund Tux (1715–1798) at the ducal court of Württemberg. These coins are of particular historical value, for all fabrications in the Tux collection are fixed with a terminus ante quem through the bequest of 1798. A selection of the most interesting counterfeit specimens is presented and discussed against the background of the history of the Tux collection and the early development of numismatics at the University of Tübingen. Additionally, Tux’s descriptions of the counterfeit coins provide first-hand insight into the abilities, knowledge and limitations in ancient numismatics of the most passionate coin collector and leading coin specialist at the ducal court of Württemberg in the Baroque period.

Jessica Priebe, “The Artist as Collector: François Boucher (1703–1770),” Journal of the History of Collections, first published online: 28 January 2015.

The name François Boucher is synonymous with the visual and material culture of luxury in mid eighteenth-century France. His paintings are filled with desirable objects that informed the tastes of collectors. What is less known is that Boucher was a prolific collector of art and nature, with more than 13,000 different objects in his collection at the time of his death in 1770. Despite this, a formal study of his collection is almost entirely absent from the existing field of historical scholarship. This article aims to bring to light Boucher’s activities as a collector, in particular his interest in natural objects for which he was especially well known. It also considers the extent to which Boucher’s passion for collectable objects had an impact on his practice as an artist.

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Journal of the History of Collections 27 (March 2015)

A R T I C L E S

Rachel Finnegan, “The Travels and Curious Collections of Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath,” pp. 33–48.
This article examines the collecting career of the Revd Richard Pococke (1704–1765), some time Bishop of Ossory and subsequently Bishop of Meath, who travelled extensively in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean from 1733–41 and accumulated a modest yet important collection of antiquities, coins, medals and natural curiosities. Using evidence from his recently published Grand Tour correspondence, together with other contemporary sources such as letters and sale catalogues, this article considers his foreign travels and mode of collecting and also the scholarly uses to which his foreign collections were put, including his contribution to learned societies, and the publication of his eastern travels.

Leanne Zalewski, “Fine Art for the New World: Thomas Jefferson, Collecting for the Future,” pp. 49–55.
Of Thomas Jefferson’s many accomplishments—President of the United States, co-author of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of the University of Virginia—his art collection fails to top the list. However, Jefferson’s vision for the developing nation involved a strong interest in the arts. As such, he assembled his own art collection and planned an ideal, but ultimately unrealized, sculpture gallery. His collection, neither vast nor impressive, included portraits, busts, engravings, and copies after Old Master paintings. Although it included not a single work of European or American art could be called a masterpiece or canonical work, yet his collection was the first significant art collection in the United States. Why? This article examines the legacy of his trailblazing assemblage through an analysis of his fine art collection both real and ideal within the broader context of the history of collecting in the United States.

Richard Scully, “A Serious Matter: Erwin D. Swann (1906–1973) and the Collection of Caricature and Cartoon,” pp. 111–122.
This paper explores the origins and development of the Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon, begun by Erwin D. Swann in 1966, and currently held by the Library of Congress in Washington, dc. One of the world’s few collections dedicated to the preservation of original comic art by caricaturists and cartoonists from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Swann’s collection also transcends national boundaries, and embraces comic art as one of the ‘universal folk expressions’. An established art collector, Swann sought to give caricature and cartoon the same status as ‘high’ art, and worked hard to achieve this prior to his death in 1973. His work has been continued, and his collection maintained, in subsequent years. A closer investigation of the collection’s genesis, and the intentions of Swann himself, sheds light on the significance of this unique archive, and its utility for the continuing, ‘serious’ scholarship of comic art worldwide.

R E V I E W S

• Elizabeth Williams, Review of Tessa Murdoch and Heike Zech, eds., Going for Gold. Craftsmanship and Collecting of Gold Boxes (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), pp. 124–25.

• Tom Stammers, Review of Alexandra Stara, The Museum of French Monuments 1795–1816: ‘Killing Art to Make History’ (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), pp. 125–26.

• Tom Stammers, Review of Andrea Meyer and Bénédicte Savoy, eds., The Museum is Open: Towards a Transnational History of Museums, 1750–1940 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), pp. 127–28.

• Clare Barlow, Review of Rosie Dias, Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 128–29.

The eighteenth century in the current issue of West 86th:

West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 21 (Fall–Winter 2014).

Charles Alan Watkins, “The Tea Table’s Tale: Authenticity and Colonial Williamsburg’s Early Furniture Reproduction Program,” pp. 155–91.

The CW-8 Tea Table as it appeared in Kittinger’s 1940 catalogue Colonial Williamsburg Incorporated Approved Reproductions of Furniture by Kittinger Company.

In July 1936 Tomlinson of High Point, a mid-priced North Carolina furniture manufacturer, began a franchising and marketing concept called the Williamsburg Galleries that gained broad national acceptance in stores and among consumers. Outraged by Tomlinson’s actions and unwilling to abandon the retail market to those it felt were interlopers, Colonial Williamsburg set up a subsidiary corporation, Williamsburg Craftsmen, Inc., that licensed manufacturers to create reproductions of objects owned by the Restoration. Furniture was the most important part of the plan, and Williamsburg licensed the Kittinger Company of Buffalo, New York, as the manufacturer. Selected department stores were encouraged to build sales spaces that were period replicas of Raleigh Tavern rooms, and craft shops were developed in the historic area to promote the work of the various manufacturers. Because a number of stores sold both Tomlinson and Kittinger products, Williamsburg developed the concept of ‘authenticity’ to distinguish the copies being made by Kittinger from Tomlinson’s generic eighteenth-century adaptations. Virtually handmade, said the Restoration, these Kittinger pieces were line-by-line reproductions, inside and out, of originals on display in Williamsburg, Virginia. Regardless of what Colonial Williamsburg said and believed, however, recent examination of individual pieces of Kittinger furniture made for the Restoration reveals that the New York factory relied far more on modern machine production methods than on craft methods of the eighteenth century.

Charles Alan Watkins holds a PhD in American cultural history and museum studies from the University of Delaware. Until his recent retirement from teaching, he was professor and coordinator of Salve Regina University’s Cultural and Historic Preservation Program in Newport, Rhode Island, and, prior to that, was the director of the graduate and undergraduate public history programs at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

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Alain Schnapp, as translated by Martina Dervis, “The Birth of the Archaeological Vision: From Antiquaries to Archaeologists,” pp. 216–29.

Greek antiquities of Anne Claude Philippe, Comte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1761), facing p. 85. INHA, Paris.

Focused on a series of French scholars and travelers, this article proposes that a distinct approach to history and antiquarianism developed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasizing the importance of artifacts as bearers of historical evidence. Beginning with the circle around Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the article introduces aspects of the work of the Marquis de Nointel, Jacob Spon, Bernard de Montfaucon, Michel Fourmont, the Comte de Caylus, and the scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. The article concludes with a discussion of Abel Blouet’s expedition to the Peloponnese (Morea) in Greece in 1829–31 that, in its scientific management of fieldwork, can be regarded as a landmark in the development of modern archaeological research.

Alain Schnapp is professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). In 1999, he was the founding director of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), the premier research center for art history in France. He has held many visiting professorships, including those at the universities of Princeton, Naples, Cambridge, and Heidelberg. The history of archaeology is one of his primary interests, on which he has published widely, including La conquête du passé: Aux origines de l’archéologie (Paris: Éditions Carré, 1993), which was translated into English as The Discovery of the Past (London: British Museum Press, 1994).

The eighteenth century in The Burlington:

The Burlington Magazine 156 (December 2014)

A R T I C L E S

• Pilar Dies del Corral, “The Beginnings of the Real Academia de España in Rome: Felipe de Castro and Other Eighteenth-Century Pioneers,” pp. 805–10.

R E V I E W S

• Marjorie Trusted, Review of David Bindman, Warm Flesh, Cold Marble: Canova, Thorvaldsen and their Critics (Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 824–25.

• Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Review of Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cooke’s Voyages (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013), pp. 827–28.

• James Ayres, Review of the exhibition Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 14 October 2014 — 25 January 2015; and Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 31 March — 12 July 2015), pp. 840–41.

• Xavier F. Salomon, Review of three Veronese exhibitions in the Veneto, including Veronese Inciso: Stampe da Veronese dal XVI al XIX Secolo (Museo della Stampa Remondini, Bassano del Grappa,14 September 2014 — 19 January 2015), pp. 842–43.

In the current issue of The Art Bulletin:

• Claudia Mattos, “Whither Art History? Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History,” pp. 259–64.

• Aaron Wile, “Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood,” pp. 319–37.

Watteau’s fêtes galantes break with key aspects of academic art theory in early eighteenth-century France—particularly as put forward by Roger de Piles—to elicit an experience of reverie in the spectator. Watteau’s formal innovations inaugurated a new relationship between painting and beholder that opened up a new sphere of subjective experience, linking the artist’s enterprise with the rise of modern interiority.

• Ebba Koch, Review of Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture (Duke UP, 2011), pp. 362–65.