Enfilade

Image for the talk taken from Marie-Françoise Constance Mayer La Martinière (possibly with Pierre-Paul Prud’hon), Innocence Prefers Love to Wealth (L’Innocence préfère l’Amour à la Richesse), 1804, oil on canvas, 243 × 194 cm (St. Petersburg: Hermitage Museum).

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Next month at Harvard:

Paris Spies-Gans | Zerner Lecture — Imprints and Erasures: A New Story of Art
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 23 April 2024, 6.00pm

In countless ways, women have been erased from the history of art. Their exhibited works have been reattributed to their male peers; their once-collected paintings have been left to deteriorate in museum storerooms; and many art historical accounts have questioned their very ability to create “great” art. We can even track the gradual removal of women’s names from the historical record in moments of deliberate, posthumous eradication. However, a growing mountain of evidence demands we recognize that women artists may have always existed—and were often quite prominent in their own places and times. In her lecture, Paris Spies-Gans will share this troubling history and present a series of recent discoveries to challenge the powerful, gendered assumptions that continue to inflect our views of the past. By recovering the traces of women artists—the imprints they left behind—we can update essential parts of art history’s most enduring narratives.

Paris A. Spies-Gans is a historian of art with a focus on women and the politics of artistic expression. She holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, an MA in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and an AB in History and Literature from Harvard University. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Yale Center for British Art, among other institutions. Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830, was published by Yale University Press in 2022. It has won several prizes in the fields of British art history and eighteenth-century studies, and was named one of the top art books of 2022 by The Art Newspaper and The Conversation. She is currently working on her second book, A New Story of Art (Doubleday/Penguin Random House).

At the Huntington in connection with USC’s 18th-century seminar series:

Eugenia Zuroski, A Funny Thing: An Undisciplined 18th Century
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 22 March 2024

Eugenia Zuroski of McMaster University presents “A Funny Thing: An Undisciplined 18th Century,” as part of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute’s ‘Long 18th Century’ seminar series.

Friday, 22 March 2024
10.00–noon, with coffee available at 9.30am

In support of the Venice in Peril Fund:

Caroline Campbell | Reflections of Venice: How Water Inspired Her Artists
Royal Geographical Society, London, 14 May 2024

John Singer Sargent, Venetian Canal, watercolour and pencil, 25 × 36 cm (Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images).

Ruskin famously wrote of the stones of Venice, but what of its water? Venice would be nothing without water. The lagoon and canals were the core of her trading activity and wealth, from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century made manifest in the continuing annual tradition of the city’s marriage to the sea. From the late 19th century, the Lido also became an important element of Venice’s appeal and in particular as a tourist attraction. In this, the 17th Venice in Peril Kirker Spring Lecture, Caroline Campbell will explore the creative impulse of water—canal, river, lagoon, sea—in the work of Venetian artists and visitors to the city, from Carpaccio and Titian, Canaletto and Tiepolo, to John Singer Sargent, Thomas Mann, and John Lavery. Tickets for the lecture will be posted by the end of April; all tickets are non-refundable. A prosecco reception will begin at 6.30, with the lecture starting at 7.15. Standard tickets are £30; a recording, to be sent via email a week after the event, can be purchased for £10.

Caroline Campbell is Director of the National Gallery of Ireland. She was previously Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery in London, a curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Curator of Paintings at the Courtauld Gallery, and the Jacob Rothschild Head of the Curatorial Department at the National Gallery, London. Dr. Campbell has curated several exhibitions devoted to Venetian art, including All Spirit and Fire: Tiepolo’s Oil Sketches (Courtauld Gallery, 2005); Bellini and the East (National Gallery and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2005–06); and Bellini and Mantegna (National Gallery and Gemaldegalerie, Berlin, 2018–19). Her love for Venetian art was honed as an MA student of Jennifer Fletcher’s at the Courtauld Institute of Art and through the experience of working as Assistant Curator of the National Gallery’s Titian exhibition in 2003. Campbell has written widely on Renaissance art—in exhibition catalogues, academic publications, and scholarly journals. Her first book, The Power of Art: A World History in Fifteen Cities, appeared in 2023. She is a Trustee of City and Guilds of London Art School, London, and of the Alfred Beit Foundation.

In March at the Yale University Art Gallery, from The Walpole Library:

Annette Richards | Music on the Dark Side of 1800:
Listening to the Blind Virtuosa, Mademoiselle Paradis
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 28 March 2024, 5.30pm

The 26th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture will be delivered by Annette Richards, the Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist at Cornell University.

In concerts across Europe in the 1780s, the young Viennese virtuosa Maria Theresia Paradis made blindness visible, even audible. Her performances invited listeners and viewers primed by horror ballads and literary romance to experience her story of trauma and misfortune within the frame of fictional narratives of doomed innocence and victimized Gothic heroines. Yet her outspoken views on blindness—informed by her own experience and contemporary philosophical discourse (by Diderot, Condillac, and Herder, among many others)—explicitly resisted the language of victimization, even as she sold pity for profit. This lecture brings to sounding life the Paridisian contradiction between performing disability for money and resisting pity. It asks what 18th-century music culture can tell us about contemporary views on blindness and explores the ways the public performances of a young female virtuoso simultaneously embraced and critiqued a culture of gawking spectatorship, freak show aesthetics, and the ethics and economics of pity. How did this Gothic musical heroine capture the public imagination, and what does she reveal about how music looked and sounded on the dark side of 1800?

Annette Richards is Professor of Music and University Organist at Cornell, and the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is a performer and scholar with a specialty in 18th-century music and aesthetics, and interdisciplinary research into music, literature, and visual culture. Dr. Richards was educated at Oxford University (BA, MA), Stanford University (PhD), and the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam (Performer’s Diploma, Uitvoerend Musicus).

Next month at Goodwood (as noted at Art History News). . .

Clementine de la Poer Beresford | Women Artists at Goodwood
Goodwood House, Chichester, West Sussex, 19 March 2024

Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Mary Bruce, Duchess of Richmond, ca. 1775, oil on canvas, 75 × 62 cm (Goodwood House).

Join us for a talk by Goodwood’s Curator, Clementine de la Poer Beresford about women artists at Goodwood, with a welcome by the Duchess of Richmond and a champagne and canapé reception in the State Apartments of Goodwood House on Tuesday, 19 March at 6.30pm.

The Goodwood Collection has works by 18th-century female artists including Angelica Kauffman, Anne Damer, and Katherine Read, as well as pictures by contemporary artist Holly Frean. The evening is an opportunity to hear about these women and to see some of their works. A highlight includes Angelica Kauffmann’s portrait of Mary, Duchess of Richmond, which is not usually on public display. £45.