Enfilade

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»

From the FHS (membership information is available here) . . .

Furniture History Society, Annual General Meeting
The East India Club, St James’s Square, London, 25 November 2023

The FHS Annual General Meeting for the year ending 30 June 2023 will be held at the East India Club. The meeting will start at 11.00am, with coffee from 10.30am. Talks will follow the business of the day. Admission to the AGM is free for members, but all members wishing to attend should notify the Events Secretary at least seven days in advance. Tickets for a sandwich lunch with a glass of wine (£22 per head) should also be booked with the Events Secretary at least seven days in advance. We plan to record the talks for those who cannot attend in person.

t a l k s

• Louis Platman (Curator at the Museum of the Home) will talk about Real Rooms, a massive redevelopment project that will see the construction on many new period rooms and immersive displays at the Museum. He will also provide updates on the Cotton Collection of English Regional Chairs and the recently acquired Cotton Archive.

• Dr Tessa Kilgariff (English Heritage Curator of Collections and Interiors, South London). Marble Hill is a villa situated on the banks of the river Thames in Twickenham, London. Built in the 1720s, it was home to the courtier Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk. In the spring of 2022, English Heritage re-opened Marble Hill following an extensive National Lottery Heritage funded project. This talk will explore that project, Marble Hill Revived, by detailing the restoration of the house and gardens and sharing discoveries made in the course of research in the villa’s interiors, collections, and occupants. With a particular focus on the conservation of some important pieces of furniture, we will explore the history of Henrietta Howard’s riverside home.

• Stacey Clapperton (Curator of Works of Art for the Palace of Westminster) and Lucy Odlin (Collections Conservation Manager for the Palace of Westminster) on the history of the design and use of the Speaker’s State Coach (ca. 1690s). Full details will be in the November issue of the Newsletter and also on the website later in the year.

• Dr Amy Frost (Senior Curator at Bath Preservation Trust) will reveal the work currently underway at Beckford’s Tower in Bath to conserve the building and refit the museum, including how William Beckford’s collection and furniture will be presented and interpreted when the museum reopens in March 2024.

Modified version of Charles Williams, after George Moutard Woodward, The Conclusion of the First Volume of the Caricature Magazine, published by Thomas Tegg, 1807, hand-colored etching.

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Sponsored by The Lewis Walpole Library:

Panel Discussion | Caricature Collectors in Conversation
Sterling Memorial Library, New Haven, Thursday, 16 November 2023, 3pm

Please join us for a panel of distinguished private collectors and print curators for lively conversation about their interests, expertise, and adventures in building their collections of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British caricature and satiric prints. They will share stories of discovery and the pursuit of coveted acquisitions, and we will invite their thoughts on the role of appreciation, connoisseurship, and learning that grows along with the collection and the value that they find in engagement with fellow collectors and curators, and in research at library and museum print rooms. The program is free and open to the public.

This Thursday at Yale’s History of Art Department:

Iris Moon | Blue Milk: Mary II, Porcelain, and the Queen’s Body at the Hampton Court Dairy
Yale University, 2 November 2023, 4pm

In this talk Iris Moon will explore the porcelain and delftware collection of Mary II (1662–1794) and how these artificial blue and white objects shaped the image of the queen and co-ruler of England with William III. After taking the throne in 1689, Mary II became actively involved in the extensive renovation of Hampton Court, the dilapidated Tudor residence. This included the creation of spaces designed for the queen’s pleasure, in particular the dairy in the Water Gallery, constructed out of the Tudor Watergate, a former royal retreat. Dairies in the early modern period, as the work of Meredith Martin has suggested, were not only gendered retreats of pleasure and privacy, but strategic sites of power. This presentation argues that these sites, premised upon an endless flow of milk and the promise of maternal fecundity and provisioning, also functioned as the architectural means through which female rulers worked through the anxieties of dynastic succession and the pressures to reproduce an heir. Bringing feminist theories of the body to bear upon the rare survivals from Mary II’s now destroyed dairy, such as a blue and white earthenware tile in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dr. Moon looks at how Mary’s extensive ceramics collection of Dutch earthenware and Asian export porcelain shaped her public persona after her sudden death in 1694. More than this, it created a surrogate, artificial body of blue and white that became mapped onto memories of the queen.

Iris Moon is an assistant 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.

Designed by Jean Jans, the Younger (active 1668–1723), after Albert Eckhout (c. 1610–1666), The Battle of the Animals, detail, Gobelins Manufactory, ca. 1723 (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, WA1901.1).

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Next week at Harvard:

Mei Mei Rado | European Tapestries at the Qing Court: Global Textiles and a Cross-cultural Medium
Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, 7 November 2023, 6pm

This presentation draws from Dr. Rado’s forthcoming book The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, early 2025). Large-scale pictorial tapestries ranked among the most precious art forms in the early modern period. While their circulations and functions among European courts have been well studied, less known are their journeys to China and subsequent roles in stimulating new developments in Qing imperial arts.

The first part of this talk uncovers the history of French tapestries that entered the Qing court during the eighteenth century as diplomatic gifts and trade goods, including the first and second Tentures chinoises woven by the Beauvais Manufactory and the Tenture des Indes made by the Gobelins Manufactory. Their trajectories reconstructed from both the French and Qing sides offer a window into the complexity of global networks and contingency of cultural encounters. These tapestries’ themes, marked by idealized exoticism compressing distance and time, functioned as a kind of diplomatic lingua franca adaptable to express divergent cultural and political visions. The second part of the presentation examines how European tapestries gave rise to a new type of textile art form in the Qing imperial workshops and an innovative mode for furnishing the palace interiors. The medium’s architectonic tension and interactive visual potential enabled the Qianlong emperor to envision his own physical presence in relation to the tapestry in space and offered him new ways to reenact narratives charged with imperial significance.

Mei Mei Rado is Assistant Professor at the Bard Graduate Center, specializing in textile and dress history, with a focus on China and France from the 18th through early 20th century. Before joining BGC, Dr. Rado was Associate Curator of Costume and Textiles at LACMA, having previously held fellowship positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and the Palace Museum in Beijing.