Yvan Loskoutoff on the Medallic History of the Sun King
A lunchtime lecture at the Society of Antiquaries:
Yvan Loskoutoff, The Medallic History of the Sun King
In-person and online, Society of Antiquaries of London, 7 November 2023, 1–2pm
The Sun King and his councilors considered his medals as the summit of his propaganda. The reason is simple: they thought that, like Roman coins, the medals would last more than other media to perpetuate the royal memory. More than 300 were coined to celebrate the great events of Louis XIV’s reign (1638–1715), and a luxurious folio book was printed by the Royal Press in two editions of 1702 and 1723 (the lecturer being happy to own a duplicate copy of king George III, 1702, he might bring it to show, provided there are no customs problems). A group of about ten scholars, writers, and artists—the so-called Small Academy—looked after the medals and the book. From 1694 to 1702, they gathered twice a week in the palace of the Louvre dealing only with this subject. The proceedings of their meetings are preserved in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. This lecture will address the Small Academy, the medals, and the book. Most medals were inspired by Imperial Roman coins. Some of them deal with events in relation with the United Kingdom (which produced satirical medals as an answer). A set of the medals is owned by the British Museum and another one by the Duke of Northumberland. Presently the leading specialists on the subject are English: Sir Mark Jones FSA for the medals and Professor James Mosley (Reading University) for the book. Professor Loskoutoff has directed two volumes on the subject in which they participated (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre in 2016 and 2023).
Presented both online and in-person at Burlington House, the event is free and open to the public. Please reserve tickets here.
18th-Century Hearth Cooking at the Queens County Farm Museum
From Eventbrite and Queens County Farm Museum:
Chris Lord-Barry, 18th-Century Hearth Cooking
Queens County Farm Museum, Floral Park, New York, Saturday, 4 November / 11 November 2023, 11am — 2pm
Join us in the kitchen of the Adriance Farmhouse at Queens County Farm Museum to learn how settlers prepared food over an open hearth.
Original 18th-century recipes, seasonal ingredients, traditional cooking utensils, and the warm embers of the fire will bring history to life as participants assist in preparing and sampling several delightful dishes. Participants will receive modern adaptations of all recipes to try at home. Advance online tickets ($53) are required as space is limited. The class is part of the Public Education Program at Queens Farm and is open to ages 18 and up. In the fall the session is offered on November 4 and then repeated on November 11.
Chris Lord-Barry is an educator with over 20 years of experience, who specializes in teaching 18th-century cooking. Over the past 10+ years, she has studied historic cookery and foodways specific to early America and has designed this popular class to share her passion for early American recipes with others.
The Queens County Farm Museum is a New York City Landmark, is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City. Dating back to 1697, it occupies New York City’s largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland and is one of the longest continuously farmed sites in New York State. The site includes historic farm buildings, a greenhouse complex, livestock, farm vehicles and implements, planting fields, an orchard, and an herb garden. Queens Farm connects visitors to agriculture and the environment through the lens of its 47-acre historic site, providing learning opportunities and creating conversations about biodiversity, nutrition, health and wellness, climate change and preserving local history. The centerpiece of the farm complex, the Adriance Farmhouse was first built as a three-room Dutch farmhouse in 1772. The house and surrounding area mirror the evolution of this unique tract of land from a colonial homestead to a truck farm that served the needs of a growing city in the early twentieth century. . .
Printmaking for Change: Past and Present
Thomas Rowlandson, The Contrast (detail), 1793, hand-coloured etching and letterpress, 25 × 35 cm
(London: The British Museum)
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From the Paul Mellon Centre:
Printmaking for Change: Past and Present
In-person and online, London, 2–12 October 2023
Join us for a festival of free events exploring how different communities have used, and continue to use, printmaking to enact change, share knowledge, and challenge ideas. With talks, workshops, and behind-the-scenes visits, the two-week festival will explore the potential of printmaking as both a means of mass communication and a radical art form. From the fifteenth century to the present day, the programme will cover a broad range of topics from gender, sexuality and race, to politics, activism, and health. The programme is an introduction to the subject and is open to all. Talks and workshops will take place at the Paul Mellon Centre, the British Museum, PageMasters, and the Royal College of Physicians. Talks at the Paul Mellon Centre will be streamed live via Zoom. Off-site workshops will be in person only.
Registration (required) via Eventbrite opens 8 September.
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Monday, 2 October, 6–8pm
Introductory Session | Printmaking for Change, with Ben Thomas and Marcelle Hanselaar at the Paul Mellon Centre
Prints are multiple yet individual, unpredictable and hard to regulate, often critical, funny, ephemeral, frightening, irreverent, angry or just plain weird. They can be popular or obscure, sophisticated or clumsy, beautiful or ugly or, when responding to market demand, repetitive and dull. They are hard to define and categorise and for that reason tend to be ignored by curators in their displays, yet every national art collection will have far more prints than paintings. Prints are also cheap by comparison with other artworks and can be collected by ordinary people, disseminating their message widely. In this introductory session, art historian Ben Thomas and painter and printmaker Marcelle Hanselaar will discuss the properties of prints that challenge our expectations, and how as an artform they can be democratic, undisciplined and consequently forces for change.
Wednesday, 4 October, 2–4pm
Collections Visit | Printmaking and Politics, with Esther Chadwick and Richard Taws at the Prints and Drawings Study Room of The British Museum
Go behind the scenes at the British Museum to experience a selection of prints from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that explore the varied and complex relationships between printmaking and politics. We will look at prints designed to persuade and effect political change and consider printmaking as a link between politics and ‘high art’. Ranging from woodcut to lithography, line engraving to aquatint, our selection will also highlight how print was used around the world at a time of social, political, and economic unrest.
Saturday, 7 October, 10am–12.30pm or 1.30–4pm
Risograph Workshop | Printmaking and Protest at PageMasters, Lewisham
This workshop will introduce you to risograph printing—a technique often described as a cross between screen printing and photocopying, which uses spot colours and stencils to create multiple prints. Taking place at PageMasters in Lewisham, the session will begin with an introduction to risograph and tour of the studio. This will be followed by an exploration of PageMasters’ archive of protest prints and the opportunity to create your own two-colour A4 print to take home.
Monday, 9 October, 10.30am–noon and 1–2.30pm
Collections Visit | Printmaking and Health, with Jack Hartnell and Katie Birkwood at the Royal College of Physicians
Using the fascinating early print collections of the Royal College of Physicians, this session will explore the roles played by printing, printers and print technology in the world of health. From diagrams in surgical manuals to moveable flap books demonstrating the body’s inner anatomical workings, printed objects have long helped medics debate how to care for changing bodies. The Royal College of Physician’s materials will provide us with a window into how bodies past were understood by artists, physicians, midwives and surgeons alike.
Tuesday, 10 October, 6–8pm
Talk | Mezzotint Engraving and the Making of Race, with Jennifer Chuong, Martin Myrone, and Mechthild Fend at the Paul Mellon Centre
How have prints shaped our understanding of bodies and, specifically, our understanding of race as a bodily attribute? In this session we will explore how a particular print technique, mezzotint engraving, contributed to racial theories between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The mezzotint, which can produce smooth tonal areas with dots or lines, became hugely popular in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century as a means of reproducing portraits. We will discuss how this technique resonated with new anatomical and racial ideas in this period and subsequently how we can better understand print’s role in developing ideas of race and the body.
Thursday, 12 October, 6–8pm
Talk | Printmaking and LGBTQIA+ Communities, with Zorian Clayton at the Paul Mellon Centre
Join V&A curator of prints, Zorian Clayton, to explore LGBTQIA+ liberty and visibility through the varied history of printmaking. Via seventeenth-century radicals, eighteenth-century flamboyance, and nineteenth-century scandal, to contemporary understandings around diverse gender and sexuality, prints and ephemera, Zorian will provide a unique snapshot into a rich and radical history. Through looking at portraits and zines celebrating pioneering activists, writers and artists, as well as highlighting significant Queer spaces in Britain through the centuries, this session will provide an overview of the considerable contribution to printmaking made by the LGBTQIA+ community and its many ancestors.
Book Launch in Honour of Peter Borsay
From Eventbrite:
Book Launch in Honour of Peter Borsay
Online and in-person, University of Leicester, 29 September 2023, 3pm
The Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester will mark the publication of Peter Borsay’s last book, The Invention of the English Landscape c. 1700–1939, with a symposium in honour of the late professor, who passed away in 2020. Free and open to all, the event will take place on Friday, 29th September 2023, from 15.00 until 17.00, via Teams Live and in person in the Attenborough Film Theatre. Please contact hypirfinance@le.ac.uk with any questions.
The symposium will be chaired by Professor Rosemary Sweet with the following panel of speakers:
• Penelope J. Corfield (President of the International Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies)
• Richard Coopey (Emeritus Senior Lecturer, Department of History & Welsh History, Aberystwyth University)
• Katy Layton Jones (School of History, Open University)
• Keith Snell (Emeritus Professor of English Local History, University of Leicester)
Online Talks | Digital Art History
From the series webpage:
Narrowing the Divide: A Dialogue between Art History and Digital Art History
Artl@s Conversation Series in Digital Art History, Visual Contagions, 2023–24
Organized by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Catherine Dossin, and Nicola Carboni
The the Artl@s Lectures are a series of conversations that Artl@s will organize throughout the 2023–2024 academic year on the theme of Narrowing the Divide: A Dialogue between Art History and Digital Art History.
The field of Digital Art History (DAH) is currently experiencing a notable shift towards establishing its autonomy as a distinct discipline. However, its survival is challenged by the limitations of its investigations. The lack of relationships between computational effort and traditional analysis often limits the generation of novel insight. Digital art history risks becoming a mere spectacle when it relies solely on stunning visualizations without engaging in rigorous research questions. Conversely, art history limits itself from harnessing robust methodologies by disregarding computational approaches.
The digital approach increasingly demands advanced technical skills, thereby often placing art historians in a position where they lack the means and expertise to engage with it. Yet, art historians possess a keen awareness of the pressing issues within the discipline and possess the knowledge of which corpuses are relevant for addressing them. They could potentially provide their questions and corpuses to experts in digital art history. Hence, it is crucial to establish more frequent and substantive opportunities for collaboration between these two approaches. The 2023–2024 Artl@s Conversation Series aims to cultivate a convergence between the field of digital art history and the discipline of art history. The exchange of ideas and results among digital art history specialists, art historians, and the audience will foster a deeper understanding of the possibilities and implications of computational methodologies in the study of art history.
Each event will facilitate a unique encounter between two experts engaged in overlapping subject areas but employing markedly different methodologies. Within this framework, art historians will put forth inquiries and collections to experts in digital approaches, while scholars in digital art history will present the outcomes of their methodologies, along with the aspects they would readily suggest for monographic or non-digital explorations. The aim is to foster collaborations and a heightened mutual understanding of the outcomes between the realms of art history and digital art history. These gatherings provide valuable opportunities for aspiring PhD students in digital humanities and art history to discover new subjects and gain insights into the notable progress being made in both disciplines.
Organizers: Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (UNIGE), Catherine Dossin (Purdue University), and Nicola Carboni (UNIGE)
s e s s i o n s
AI for Art History, Art History of AI
Online, Friday, 8 September 2023, 14.15–15.45 (Paris and Geneva time) / 8.15–9.30am (EST)
• Leonardo Impett, University of Cambridge
• Pascal Griener, Université de Neuchatel
Click here to join us on Zoom || Read more about the speakers.
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Do We Need Digital Visual Studies?
Online, Friday, 29 September 2023, 14.15–15.45 (Paris and Geneva time) / 8.15–9.30am (EST)
• Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Université de Geneve
• Leora Auslander, University of Chicago
Click here to join us on Zoom || Read more about the speakers.
Lecture | Pascal Bertrand on Boucher and the Decorative Arts
From BGC:
Pascal Bertrand | Boucher and the Decorative Arts: Promoting and Maintaining His Fame
A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 20 September 2023, 6.00pm
One of a pair of perfume vases, Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory (British, Gold Anchor Period, 1759–69), ca. 1761, soft-paste porcelain, burnished gold ground, 36 cm high (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 64.101.509a, b). The vase depicts three nymphs after the painting La Source by Francois Boucher.
In this lecture, Pascal Bertrand will explore the role of the decorative arts in the process of making and maintaining an artist’s fame, using the example of the quintessentially Rococo painter François Boucher. Boucher’s art was translated to a wide range of mediums—primarily tapestry and porcelain, but also gold and lacquer objects as well as printed fabrics and fans. How did he use these decorative arts to build his own reputation? And how did the decorative arts transmediate his paintings, prints, and drawings to disseminate them during his lifetime and preserve them after his death, right up to the present day? While the first question has been the subject of specific in-depth studies in one medium or another (porcelain in particular), Dr. Bertrand’s lecture considers the second question and the significance of intermediality.
Registration is available here»
Pascal Bertrand is Professor of Art History at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne in Pessac. His areas of research include the history of European tapestries, furniture, and the decorative arts generally.
Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.
Lecture | Peter Burke on the Invention of Connoisseurship
From BGC:
Peter Burke | The Invention of Connoisseurship
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 6 September 2023, 6.00pm
Carlo Maratti, Padre Sebastiano Resta Examining a Folio of Drawings (The Devonshire Collections). The drawing was included in the exhibition Lines of Beauty: Master Drawings from Chatsworth, on view in the fall of 2021 at The Lightbox in Woking, Surrey.
Connoisseurship—a bundle of practices combining a sense of the quality of works of art, the ability to attribute them to their makers, and to discriminate between originals, copies, and forgeries—is a contested term with a contested history. In this lecture, Peter Burke argues that the ‘invention’ of connoisseurship happened gradually rather than suddenly and took place in the West neither, as has sometimes been argued, in the nineteenth century, nor—perhaps surprisingly—in the Renaissance, but in the seventeenth century when treatises on the subject begin to appear.
Registration is available here»
Peter Burke is a cultural and social historian who was born in 1937, studied at Oxford (1957–62), and taught at the Universities of Sussex (1962–78) and Cambridge (1979–2004). He is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College. His publications have focused in turn on historiography, the Renaissance, popular culture, and the history of knowledge, including the distinctive roles of exiles and polymaths. His latest book is a history of ignorance, and his next will be a history of connoisseurship.
Chris Schüler on the Wood that Built London
An evening lecture at the Society of Antiquaries:
Chris Schüler, The Wood That Built London
In-person and online, Society of Antiquaries of London, 12 October 2023, 5pm
Drawing on historic documents, maps and environmental evidence, The Wood That Built London charts the fortunes of the Great North Wood that once covered much of what is now South London [‘north’ relative to Croydon]. It records its botany, ecology, ownership and management, the gradual encroachment of the metropolis, and the battles fought by locals and the London Wildlife Trust to save what remained.
The lecture will discuss the documentary research into historic land ownership and management in the medieval and early modern periods that informed the book, which draws on a wide range of primary sources, some never previously cited. These include 16th-century Court of Exchequer depositions in a dispute over land ownership in the National Archives at Kew; Archbishop Morton’s 1492 survey of the Manor of Croydon and a 1678 plan of the Archbishop’s woods in Croydon Museum; Archbishop Cranmer’s 1552 survey of the Manor of Croydon in the Bodleian Library; estate maps in the British Library and London Metropolitan Archives; parish accounts; and records of woodland management in Dulwich College Archive and Lambeth Palace Library. Considered together, these scattered records combine to create a picture of the former extent of the wood, which stretched from Deptford to Croydon, its ownership by religious bodies such as Bermondsey Abbey and the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and its management by rotational coppicing, which generated income for its owners over several centuries. Tudor Acts of Parliament and the publications of 16th– and 17th-century agronomists such as Thomas Tusser and Barnaby Googe are examined to provide insight into the theory and practice of woodland management at this period.
The book also records how that income dwindled as the Industrial Revolution rendered many woodland products obsolete, leading landowners to grub up coppices, at first for farmland and then, as the railways brought the area within commuting distance of London, for housing development, to the fury of commentators such as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill.
Presented both in-person at Burlington House and online, the event is free and open to the public. Please reserve tickets here.
Museum Tour | Art and Aroma at the Met: 18th-C. France
François Boucher, The Toilette of Venus, detail, 1751, oil on canvas
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
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From Eventbrite:
Jessica Murphy, Art and Aroma at the Met: 18th-Century France
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Saturday, 9 September 2023, 2.00–3.30pm
Engage your senses of sight and smell in a gallery tour that explores the history of French perfumery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sophisticated … seductive … classic. The phrase ‘French perfume’ often evokes these ideas. But how did France become known as the center of Western perfumery? This genre-blending gallery tour will illustrate France’s fragrant history in the 1700s through works of art and design in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spotlighting some of the events and individuals behind perfume’s ascendance as one of France’s signature luxury goods. Experiencing these spaces and objects as a small group, we’ll sample and sniff aromatic materials while we simultaneously educate our eyes and noses. A ticket for this 90-minute gallery tour ($45) includes access to the rest of the Met after the event. Please arrive 30 minutes early to allow time for security checkpoints and weekend crowds.
Jessica Murphy is a museum professional with a passion for perfume. She holds a PhD in art history and has worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. Meanwhile, she has also been writing about fragrance since 2007 at Now Smell This and her own blog Perfume Professor. Since 2015 she has taught and lectured about the history and culture of fragrance through venues including the Brooklyn Brainery, the Institute for Art and Olfaction, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the Timken Museum, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. You can follow her on Instagram @tinselcreation.
Lecture | Alessia Attanasio on Neapolitan Art in English Collections
Pietro Fabris, The Bay of Naples from Posillipo, detail, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, 75 × 128 cm
(Compton Verney, Warwickshire)
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From The Wallace Collection:
Alessia Attanasio, The Fortunes of Baroque Neapolitan Art in English Collections during the Grand Tour, 1680–1800
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online and in-person, The Wallace Collection, London, Monday, 26 June 2023, 5.30pm
This talk aims to provide an overview of the history of collecting Baroque Neapolitan art in England from 1680s to 1800s, a period when many English artists and collectors travelled to Naples during the Grand Tour. Based on Alessia Attanasio’s PhD research, it will introduce artists from the Kingdom of Naples who enjoyed considerable success among English patrons, demonstrating how the Grand Tour influenced the market for Baroque Neapolitan art—not just for the newly discovered antiquities in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.
Today, Baroque Neapolitan paintings form a significant part of private and public English art collections; yet there is no publication exploring the significance of these collections as a whole. Therefore, the lecture aims to fill this gap by identifying and locating Neapolitan art in public and private English collections, now disclosed in an up-to-date database. The database will include images, references, notes on subject, author, and context, as well as acquisition and provenance details, providing the first comprehensive view of Neapolitan paintings in England. Alessia will focus on specific private British collections held in country houses such as Compton Verney, with the new redisplay of its unique Neapolitan collection, and Holkham Hall, which owns several Neapolitan paintings, both of which reflect the changes in art collecting in England. The lecture will bring together different fields of study, from the history of art to the art market, and shed new light on the material conditions that made art collecting possible.
Alessia Attanasio is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, focusing on Baroque Neapolitan art that was collected in England during the Grand Tour (1680s–1820s), with particular interests in country houses, history of collecting, and museum studies. Alessia’s interest in museums is supported by eight years of experience working in museums as an assistant curator and museum educator, including Capodimonte Museum in Naples, and the Royal Collection Trust in London. Most recently, Alessia has been undertaking research into Baroque artworks in the Neapolitan Collection of Compton Verney, contributing to the curation of its permanent redisplay, Sensing Naples.
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