Enfilade

This month’s session from the GRHS series on women’s self-portraits, with information on other GRHS seminar series available here:

Ersy Contogouris | Les autoportraits d’Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun au Salon de 1787
Autoportraits au féminin (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) –Séminaire du Groupe de Recherche en Histoire des Sociabilités
Université du Québec, Montréal, Thursday, 13 October 2022, 2.00pm

Cette conférence étudiera l’autoportrait qu’Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun expose au Salon de 1787. Vigée-LeBrun avait été admise à l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture en 1783 aux côtés d’Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, portant ainsi à quatre le nombre de femmes membres de l’Académie pour la première fois depuis sa fondation en 1648, et à quinze le nombre total de femmes y ayant été admises. Cette présence féminine à l’Académie n’étant pas appréciée de tous, les années 1780 et les Salons bisannuels de 1783, 1785 et 1787 furent marqué·es par de nombreux débats portant sur la place des femmes dans le plus important espace artistique français. L’autoportrait de Vigée-LeBrun, dans lequel elle se représente avec sa fille Julie, sera mis en dialogue avec les autres œuvres présentées par Vigée-LeBrun à ce Salon afin de réfléchir à ce groupe de tableaux comme une sorte d’autoreprésentation de l’artiste en 1787.

Harewood House, West Yorkshire, designed by John Carr and Robert Adam, and built between 1759 and 1771.

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

From The Attingham Trust:

Sir David Cannadine, How Do We Study the Country House Now?
In-person (and recorded), Sotheby’s, London, Tuesday, 8 November 2022

The Attingham Trust has been championing the study of historic houses and their collections for seven decades, aiming to broaden the understanding of the artistic, social and cultural legacies they offer. In this lecture, David Cannadine will look afresh at these buildings and tease out some of the many complex and sometimes challenging narratives to which they bear witness, illustrating how the study of the country house has evolved and how much still remains for us to learn.

5.45pm  Drinks on arrival
6.30pm  Lecture

Tickets for both in-person attendance and to receive the recording (available for a limited time) can be purchased here. For queries about this event, please contact rebecca.parker@attinghamtrust.org.

Professor Sir David Cannadine is Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University and a visiting professor of history at Oxford University. He has written extensively on the economic, social, political, and cultural history of modern Britain and its empire, on collecting and philanthropy, and on the history of history. In 2018 he co-edited, with Jeremy Musson, The Country House: Past, Present, and Future, exploring how the idea of the country house has changed over the last forty years. Previously Chair of the Trustees at the National Portrait Gallery, President of the British Academy, and on the board of the Royal Oak Foundation, he is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society for Literature, the Society of Antiquaries, the Historical Association, and the British Academy. He is a patron of The Attingham Trust.

From Yale University:

Thomas Laqueur | What Are Dogs Doing in Eighteenth-Century British Art?
The Twenty-Fifth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Thursday, 13 October 2022, 5.30pm

Professor Thomas Laqueur will address the ways dogs mediate human sociability and specifically how they function formally in art to bind together the various elements—human and material—of an image. He will discuss images of dogs in the studies of scholars, like the portrait of Walpole and his dog in the library at Strawberry Hill, and move on to a discussion of the various contexts in which it might be understood: from the paintings of Carpaccio and Rubens to the eighteenth century and beyond; dogs in eighteenth-century British art from Hogarth’s Self-Portrait to the many family scenes of the period; and then more generally dogs in art as they constitute part of a symbolic system—world making and critical in our social cognition. A short coda on interpreting Balak, the most famous dog in Hebrew literature, in the Isreali Nobel Prize winning novelist Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s greatest novel, Only Yesterday, will get us back to Walpole in his study and the question the lecture poses: what are all those dogs doing in eighteenth-century British art?

Thomas W. Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus at UC Berkeley. He has written on the history of sexuality, of death and commemoration, of religion, and of human rights and humanitarianism. His most recent book is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Laqueur is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, The Three Penny Review, and other journals. He is currently writing a series of essays each organized around what dogs are doing in canonical works of art by artists including Giotto, Piero di Cosimo, Titian, Durer, Veronese, Valasquez, and Goya, as well around other images and artifacts—paw prints on Babylonian cuneiform tiles and Neolithic rock painting.

The Lewis Walpole Library Lecture is presented in New Haven by a visiting scholar on a topic relevant to eighteenth-century studies. The first Lewis Walpole Library lecture, “The Scourge of the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Carlyle,” was delivered in 1992 by Noel Annan. For a complete list of past Lewis Walpole Library Lectures click here.

Selected sessions from this fall’s Research Lunch Series at PMC:

Hans Hönes | Art History in Britain: A Scottish Innovation
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 7 October 2022, 1pm

It is widely assumed that art history made a somewhat belated entry into British academia. The foundation of the Courtauld Institute (1932) and the arrival of the exiled Warburg Institute (1933) have played a pioneering role in the establishment of degree-level teaching of the subject. While such statements are not wrong, they are certainly not the whole story. This paper discusses a range of initiatives to introduce academic art history teaching between ca. 1860 and 1930, focusing in particular on developments at Scottish Universities—Edinburgh, Aberdeen, St Andrews, and Glasgow. At Edinburgh and Aberdeen, the history of art was offered at degree-level as part of the Master of Arts (‘Ordinary’) degree; in the 1920s, Aberdeen even offered a Diploma in ‘Fine Art’. At St Andrews, art historical lectures formed part of the curriculum of disciplines such as classics. I will argue that art history in Britain first gained an institutional footing north of the border, and that this was facilitated by the specificities of Scottish Higher Education. By analysing developments in Scottish higher education I hope to redress a geographical imbalance that permeates much art historiographical writing—the result of a certain southern bias. Book tickets»

Hans C. Hönes is a Lecturer in Art History at Aberdeen University. In 2021–22, he held the Paul Mellon Centre’s Research Collections Fellowship, with a project on British art historiography in the post-war period. He has worked extensively on the history of art history and art theory since the eighteenth century, and has written and edited books on Heinrich Wölfflin (2011), eighteenth-century antiquarianism (2014), Aby Warburg (2015), and art history and migration (2019), as well as publishing articles in journals such as Oxford Art Journal, Architectural History, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. He has just completed his third monograph, a new biography of Aby Warburg (forthcoming with Reaktion Books).

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

Jake Subryan Richards | Anglo-Dutch Empire and Visual Culture in the Atlantic World
Paul Mellon Centre, 28 October 2022, 1pm

Theodorus Netscher, Pineapple Grown in Sir Matthew Decker’s Garden, 1720, oil on canvas, 85 x 95 cm (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum).

This talk explores the hidden connections between the British and Dutch Empires as revealed by several paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through formal and contextual analysis, the talk will investigate how artists have established and challenged visual norms related to Atlantic slavery and freedom. Book tickets»

Jake Subryan Richards is a member of the British Art Network’s Emerging Curators Group and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics. Between 2020 and 2024, he is the external curator of a project to investigate how the collections of the University of Cambridge Museums are connected to Atlantic enslavement and empire. Richards’ interests span Dutch and British fine art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the art of the African diaspora over the past five hundred years. Richards has published research in Past and Present and Comparative Studies in Society and History. His article on anti-slave-trade law won the 2019 Alexander Prize, and his PhD thesis was co-winner of the 2021 Prince Consort and Thirlwall Prize and Seeley Medal. He is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

Dean Hawkes | Architecture and the Climate of England
Paul Mellon Centre, 25 November 2022, 1pm

The first chapter of Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art (1956) is entitled ‘The Geography of Art’. In this Pevsner examined the influence of climate on national character and, by extension, on the art of a nation, concluding that there is, “a whole string of facts from art and literature tentatively derived from climate.” This is a question that I have explored in relation to the history of architecture, in my research in the last decade or so. In this work I have tried to show how the nature of this climate, defined by meteorologists as ‘temperate maritime’, may be represented and interpreted through the study of historic buildings and that the relationship of architecture and climate is as much a question of history and culture as it is of science and technology.

The background to the talk will be established by a brief outline of the architecture-climate relationship in England from the early modern period to the present. This will be followed by a presentation of material from recent in-depth research carried out at the sixteenth-century Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, where a full annual cycle (2018–19) of environmental data was collected in five of the major apartments. This research, undertaken in collaboration with Dr Ranald Lawrence of the University of Liverpool, combines the methods of building science and architectural history, providing a basis from which to construct a new description of the environment in the house as it was experienced in the first years of its inhabitation at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the midst of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’. Book tickets»

Dean Hawkes has been a teacher, researcher and practitioner of architecture for over half a century. For thirty years he taught and researched in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge and, between 1995 and 2002, was Professor of Architectural Design at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University. Following his retirement he returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of Darwin College, where he continues to research and teach. He has held visiting professorships at schools of architecture in Glasgow, Hong Kong, Huddersfield, Leicester, and Singapore. His research is concerned with the relationship of architecture and the environment, with particular emphasis on the evolution of this connection in the history of architecture. This theme has been explored in a sequence of books: The Environmental Tradition (1996), The Selective Environment (2002), The Environmental Imagination (1st ed. 2008, 2nd ed. 2018), and Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture (2012), and in numerous papers. In 2010 he received the RIBA Annie Spink Award for excellence in architectural education.

From BGC:

Charles Kang | From Wax to Paper: Antoine Benoist’s Portraits of Louis XIV
A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 28 September 2022, 6.00pm

Antoine Benoist (1632–1717), Portrait of Louis XIV, ca. 1705, colored wax with a natural wig. 52 × 42 cm (Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon).

Painter and sculptor Antoine Benoist is best known for a profile relief portrait of Louis XIV in polychrome wax. The striking verisimilitude of this work and his other wax creations readily evoke the popular wax statues at Madame Tussauds. In this lecture, Charles Kang explores the outer limits of royal portraiture at the time of Louis XIV, beyond oil paintings, marble busts, bronze statues, and medals. Kang also looks at two other works that Benoist produced towards the end of his career: a group of grisaille miniature portraits in elaborate gilt bronze frames and a manuscript biography of Louis XIV decorated with similar miniatures in gouache. Through these works, Benoist attempted to reposition himself as a chronicler of royal likeness rather than as a wax portraitist.

Charles Kang is Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Drawings at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Responsible for the museum’s collection of Dutch and European drawings, he is currently working on several projects, including one on the rise of private drawing societies in the Netherlands and another on the relationship between artistic drawing and early ethnography. He trained in eighteenth-century French art and visual culture and holds a PhD from Columbia University and an MA from Williams College in the history of art.