Lecture | Iris Moon on Stubbs and Wedgwood
Wednesday’s Research Semainar, from the Mellon Centre:
Iris Moon | A Body for Stubbs
Online and in-person, Paul Mellon Centre, London, 6 March 20224, 5.00–7.00pm
This talk focuses on the relationship between the painter George Stubbs and the potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, and the work Reapers (1795). Alongside his commercial work making horse pictures for the landed gentry, Stubbs set out to create pictures of a more experimental nature executed on atypical surfaces, among them the oval ceramic tablets that Wedgwood created for him on demand. These were of an unusually large size, equally difficult to paint on, and fire in the kiln. Why was the horse painter drawn to the potter’s platters? Based on new material from Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024), this talk questions traditional readings of Wedgwood and the heritage paintings of Stubbs and, more broadly, notions of the eighteenth century as a foundational moment in Britain’s rise as a global commercial, financial, and industrial power. At the centre of this revisionist story is capitalism, empire, and exploitation. Found there too are babies, women, animals, and ceramics, among other lost figures not usually at the centre of eighteenth-century British art. Stubbs and Wedgwood take on new meanings when seen through the twisted prism of our own moment, amidst the ruins of late capitalist modernity.
Registration is available here»
Iris Moon is associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is responsible for European ceramics and glass. At the Met, she participated in the reinstallation of the British Galleries, and she is currently planning an exhibition on Chinoiserie, women, and the porcelain imaginary that will open in 2025. She is the author of Luxury after the Terror, and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France. A new book on Wedgwood, generously supported by a publication grant from the Paul Mellon Centre, will be published next year with MIT Press. In addition to curatorial work, she teaches at Cooper Union.
Image: George Stubbs, Reapers, 1795, enamel on Wedgwood biscuit earthenware (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.618).
Lecture | Annette Richards on the ‘Blind Virtuosa, Mademoiselle Paradis’
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).
New Book | Bluestockings
Susannah Gibson will give a lunchtime lecture related to her new book at London’s National Portrait Gallery on 7 March 2024. The volume is scheduled for publication in the United States this summer. From John Murray Press:
Susannah Gibson, Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement (London: John Murray Press, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1529369991, £25 / $30.
In Britain in the 1750s, women had no power and no rights—all money and property belonged to their fathers or husbands. A brave group risked everything to think and live as they wished, despite the sneers of contemporaries who argued that books frazzled female brains and damaged their wombs.
Meet the Bluestockings:
• Elizabeth Montagu hosted a series of glittering salons in her London drawing room, where a circle of women and men discussed theatre, philosophy and the classics, competing to outdo each other in wit and brilliance. Discover how she took on Voltaire and won.
• Whilst nursing twelve children and helping run her bullying husband’s brewery, Hester Thrale took key writers under her wing—Dr Johnson moved into her house for several years. Her vivid diaries offer a powerful chronicle of what happened when she finally decided to follow her heart.
• Find out how poetess and former milkmaid Ann Yearsley fought back when her snobbish patron refused to hand over her earnings because she was working class and thus irresponsible . . .
• Or how Catherine Macauley’s eight-volume history of England caused such a sensation that she became a leading light in the American Revolution—while her unorthodox love-life scandalised her contemporaries . . .
Susannah Gibson explores the lives and legacies of these and other figures who went on to inspire writers and thinkers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf and lead the way for feminism.
Susannah Gibson is an Irish writer and historian. She is the author of The Spirit of Inquiry and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge in eighteenth-century history and lives in Cambridge, England.
Lecture | Women Artists at Goodwood
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.
Online Talk | Ivan Day on Ice Cream Coolers
From the Connecticut Ceramics Circle (with the full 2023–24 lecture schedule available here). . .
Ivan Day | Frozen Treats: The Development of the Ice Cream Cooler
Online, Connecticut Ceramics Circle, Monday, 12 February 2024, 2pm (Eastern)
Worcester Ice Cream Cooler (Ice Pail), ca. 1770, ‘Jabberwocky’ design, soft-paste porcelain (Houston: Rienzi Collection, 84.584.1.A-.C). Images of the bucket, liner, and cover pulled apart are available at Day’s Instagram account here.
Ice creams and water ices evolved in Italy in the second half of the seventeenth century. Initially they were a high-status luxury confined to court entertainments. Serving ices at table was not easy, as they had to be kept in a frozen state. Eventually, attractive three-part tin-glazed earthenware vessels called seaux à glace started to appear in France in the 1720s. Only a few of these faïence examples have survived, the earliest from Rouen dating from 1700–25. Another from Moustiers made in the Clérissey manufactory dates from circa 1725.
In order to keep the contents frozen, ice mixed with salt needed to be placed in the lower pail and the lid, with the ice cream contained in a bowl between. However, earthenware was not an ideal material for this purpose. It is likely that salt eventually found its way through any crazing in the glaze and was absorbed by the porous clay body, resulting in the glaze flaking off. Soft-paste and later hard-paste porcelain proved to be a much more durable material for making these beautiful vessels. The Sèvres manufactory based their porcelain seaux on the earlier faïence shapes, but developed a range of new forms closely allied to their own wine cooler designs. At first other European factories based their designs on the Sèvres model. In this illustrated Zoom lecture, Ivan Day will not only outline the development of these wonderful vessels, but demonstrate how they were used with an example from his collection.
Ivan Day is an independent historian of the social history and culture of food. He is celebrated for his reconstructions of historical table settings, which combine museum objects with accurate re-creations of period dishes. His work has been exhibited in many major museums in the UK, Europe, and North America, including the Getty Research Institute, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gardiner Museum, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 2007, he worked on a re-creation of an imperial table featuring a Meissen Parnassus by Johann Joachim Kändler for the BGC exhibition Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63, curated by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger.
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As Day notes through his Instagram account,
“The lecture is a much revised version of one that I once delivered at a symposium at the Gardiner Museum in honour of the truly great porcelain scholar Meredith Chilton. Meredith is a close friend and colleague, but also a highly valued mentor. I have learnt so much from her. So my presentation is in honour of this wonderful woman.”
Exhibition | Is It Any Good?
Now on view at The Walpole Library with a talk from Dr Roman on February 4:
Is It Any Good? Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library
The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 22 September 2023 — 28 June 2024
Curated by Cynthia Roman
Art historians, curators, and connoisseurs often pose the question, ‘Is it any good?’ evoking a sense of quality manifest in canonical works of art. By contrast, when building a collection of 18th-century prints that would become a cornerstone for research at the Lewis Walpole Library, W.S. and Annie Burr Lewis envisioned a visual collection that is essentially archival. Prints were valued foremost as documents that would improve their library dedicated to the life and times of Horace Walpole and to 18th-century studies. The Lewises’ iconographic approach, however, does not preclude the importance of assessing what is good. Aesthetic, material, and technical attributes are integral to understanding the power of visual art and artifacts to communicate the eighteenth-century histories they document. Asking Is it any good? this exhibition presents a selection of prints, drawings, and paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library to explore the intersections of quality and documentary value.
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Cynthia Roman, Curating the Caricature Collection at the Lewis Walpole Library
Sunday, 4 February 2024, 2.00pm
Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library will present the story of the library’s internationally recognized print collection. Often in W.S. Lewis’s own words, this talk will explore the commitment that he and Annie Burr Lewis shared to “make more use of political and personal caricatures” when building a research collection for 18th-century studies that included Annie Burr’s celebrated chronological and subject-based card catalog. Reflecting on more than twenty years of stewarding the print collection, Roman will present both the Lewises’ vision of caricature as archival documents and subsequent curatorial initiatives to acquire prints that more deliberately embrace material, technical, and aesthetic considerations; circumstances of production, marketing and circulation including prolific practices of copying; as well as the legacy of caricature today.
Cynthia E. Roman, PhD, is Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Her research focuses on 18th-century British art, particularly prints. She has published essays on graphic satire, collecting history, and ‘amateur’ artists, and has edited and co-edited collected volumes including Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Collection with Michael Snodin (2009–10), Hogarth’s Legacy (2016), Staging ‘The Mysterious Mother’ with Jill Campbell (2024), and Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830, with Cristina Martinez (2024).
Lecture | Pascale Ballesteros on Painters Historicizing 18th-C Fashion
This spring at BGC:
Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros, Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Decisive Museological Action of French Historicizing Painters
A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 3 April 2024
Dress detail from the collection of the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, formerly known as Musée Galliera.
On January 10, 1907, the Société de l’Histoire du Costume was founded in Paris to create a ‘Musée du Costume’. Sixteen of the founders were painters, and most of them were artists that historicized the eighteenth century. In this lecture, curator and scholar Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros considers the influence of artists such as Maurice Leloir (1853–1940), Gustave Jean Jacquet (1846–1909), and François Flameng (1856–1923) in the formation of the eighteenth-century fashion collection of the Palais Galliera and the construction of its image.
Responsible for the nineteenth-century collections at Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros has curated several exhibitions including Fastes de cours et cérémonies royales in 2009 at the castle of Versailles and L’art de paraître au 18e siècle at Nantes and Dijon Fine Arts Museums in 2021 and 2022. She teaches fashion history and fashion materials at Sorbonne Université. Her next exhibition will deal with women, travels, art, and fashion in the Enlightenment.
Registration is available here»
Online Talk | Julie Park, Lady Scott’s Landscape in a Dark Room
Paul Sandby, Roslin Castle, Midlothian, ca. 1780, gouache on medium laid paper, mounted on board, sheet: 46 × 68 cm
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1975.4.1877)
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This afternoon from 12.30 to 1.00, from the Yale Center for British Art:
Julie Park | Lady Scott’s Landscape in a Dark Room
Online, Tuesday, 5 December 2023, 12.30pm
Julie Park will discuss the role of the camera obscura used by Lady Frances Scott as depicted in Paul Sandby’s landscape painting Roslin Castle, Midlothian (ca. 1780) and the dynamics of interiority and looking that it mediates. Park chose a detail from this painting for the cover of her recent monograph My Dark Room, which explores the camera obscura as a paradigm for the designs and experiences of interiority in eighteenth-century England’s spaces of the built environment. Please register here»
Julie Park is Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of My Dark Room (2023) and The Self and It (2009).
Exhibition | Pleasing Truths: Power and Portraits in the American Home
Closing this month at the DAR Museum, with a curatorial talk scheduled for the 12th.
Pleasing Truths: Power and Portraits in the American Home
Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, Washington, DC, 17 March — 31 December 2023
Curated by William Strollo
Unidentified French artist, Portrait of Elisabeth Has Haley, ca. 1810, oil on canvas, 32 × 38 inches (Washington, DC: DAR Museum, Gift of Sarah Hawkes Thornton, 75.189.2).
In 1754, artist Lawrence Kilburn advertised that “all Gentlemen and Ladies inclined to favour him in having their pictures drawn, that he don’t doubt of pleasing them in taking a true Likeness.” Kilburn’s advertisement, loaded with meaning, is one of many examples of advertisements placed by artists in the 18th and 19th centuries to garner portrait commissions. This ad reveals a lot about his, and other artists, potential clients, and their desires for being represented on canvas. In looking closer at portraits, subjects, artists, and the context in which they were produced, a deeper understanding of society is revealed—a society that valued power, personal leisure, and prescribed gender roles. This exhibition takes a deeper dive into the context and symbolism of early portraits to better understand the transmission of ideas and their impact on people over time.
William Strollo, Pleasing Truths: Power and Portraits in the American Home (Washington, DC: Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, 2023), 135 pages, $35.
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As noted at Events in the Field, the calendar maintained by The Decorative Arts Trust:
Curator’s Talk: William Strollo on Pleasing Truths
Online and in-person, DAR Museum, Washington, DC, 12 December 2023, noon
The exhibition Pleasing Truths: Power and Portraits in the American Home features over 50 portraits from the DAR Museum’s collection, dating from the 17th to the 19th centuries. In this talk, William Strollo, Curator of Exhibitions, will discuss the use of portraits to convey power and prestige and to reinforce traditional gender roles in the early American home. This free event will take place in-person and will also be streamed online; pre-registration is requested.
Lecture | Maxime Georges Métraux on Jean-Michel Papillon
As noted at the blog for the ApAhAu:
Maxime Georges Métraux | Jean-Michel Papillon: Artiste, encyclopédiste et historien de l’estampe
Online and in-person, École du Louvre, Paris, 6 December 2023, 10am
Issu d’une importante dynastie de graveurs, Jean-Michel Papillon (1698–1776) ambitionne de redonner du prestige à la gravure sur bois durant la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Outre sa foisonnante production graphique, cette entreprise se concrétise principalement par une volonté de transmettre les savoirs liés à son art. Il s’est notamment fait théoricien en rédigeant un imposant Traité historique et pratique de la gravure en bois. Bien qu’à manier aujourd’hui avec parcimonie, celui-ci n’en demeure pas moins une ressource extraordinaire et constitue une référence essentielle pour l’histoire de l’estampe et plus largement pour la culture visuelle du XVIIIe siècle.
Cette vaste somme de connaissances n’est pourtant pas sa seule contribution à l’histoire de l’art puisque Jean-Michel Papillon est aussi rédacteur de nombreuses entrées dans l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert. Il est non seulement l’auteur de plusieurs articles dédiés à la gravure mais il fournit également des ornements typographiques pour celle-ci.
Conscient de l’importance de l’accès au savoir et du rôle de l’écrit dans la transmission des techniques artistiques, Jean-Michel Papillon est une figure dont l’étude permet de saisir pleinement le phénomène de « réduction en art », concept théorisé par Hélène Vérin et Pascal Dubourg-Glatigny. Membre de la Société des Arts, le graveur s’est grandement intéressé aux monogrammes mais aussi à de nombreux domaines en lien avec la pratique de la gravure. Son riche témoignage sur sa formation d’historien autodidacte renseigne avec précision sur sa manière d’acquérir ses connaissances, de restituer son savoir et d’écrire sur son art en tant que praticien, dans un champ alors majoritairement dominé par les hommes de lettres.
Séminaire de recherche en partenariat entre l’École du Louvre, l’Université de Poitiers (Criham) et l’Université Rennes 2, adossé au projet « Amateurs et réseaux savants en France (1700–1914). Histoire intellectuelle, culturelle et sociale des amateurs et collectionneurs d’images gravées et enluminées » (UR Histoire et critique des Arts, Université Rennes 2). Les séances ont lieu simultanément à l’École du Louvre et en visio-conférence. Pour tout renseignement et inscription, merci d’écrire à pascale.cugy@univ-rennes2.fr.
Organisation
• Pascale Cugy (Université Rennes 2)
• Estelle Leutrat (Université de Poitiers, Criham)
• François-René Martin (École du Louvre)
Enfilade 
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