Enfilade

Fold-out engraving in Charles Crawford, Observations on Negro-Slavery (Philadelphia: Eleazer Oswald, 1790)
(Philadelphia: Penn Libraries, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts)

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From Penn Libraries:

Michael Suarez, Printing Abolition: How the Fight to Ban the British Slave Trade Was Won, 1783–1807
The A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography
Online and In-person, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 25, 26, and 28 October 2021

In this series of highly illustrated lectures (originally scheduled for March 2020), Michael Suarez offers a fresh perspective on British abolition, richly informed by political prints and personal correspondence, newspapers and pamphlets, account books and committee minutes, parliamentary reports and private diaries. Suarez’s revisionist history not only traces the production and distribution of abolitionist print, but also reveals the hidden networks that variously sustained the first humanitarian mass media campaign. Abolition forces brilliantly exploited the power of print to contend with the complex legacies of the American and French Revolutions, the slave revolt in present-day Haiti, and the Napoleonic Wars. Seeking to understand how both abolitionists and their foes exploited systems of influence through printed words and images in many forms, Suarez delineates the strategies that abolitionists devised to overcome accusations of religious fanaticism, economic malfeasance, and political sedition. Exploring the first author’s book tour in the UK, a consumer boycott fostered by the radical press, and the fashionable publisher who clandestinely worked as press agent for the pro-slavery interest, these lectures will demonstrate the power of bibliography and book history to rewrite established narratives and to recover lives and labors typically left out of conventional accounts.

These three lectures will be held in person and also livestreamed via Zoom webinar (advance registration required to receive Zoom link). In addition, the lectures will be recorded and available for viewing and as podcasts approximately several weeks after being presented.

Michael F. Suarez, S.J. has served as Director of Rare Book School, Professor of English, University Professor, and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia since 2009. Professor Suarez serves as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. His recent books include The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume V, 1695–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), co-edited with Michael Turner, and The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford University Press, 2010), a million-word reference work co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen. The Book: A Global History, also co-edited with H. R. Woudhuysen, first appeared in 2013. In 2014, Oxford University Press published his edition of The Dublin Notebook, co-edited with Lesley Higgins, in the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. He delivered the 2015 Lyell Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Oxford.

Feeding the Machine: A Triple System of Networks
Monday, 25 October 2021, 5.30pm (EST)

Register for this lecture (attending in person or attending virtually, via Zoom webinar).

Commodity Culture and the Political Economies of Print
Tuesday, 26 October 2021, 5.30pm (EST)

Register for this lecture (attending in person or attending virtually, via Zoom webinar).

Beyond Westminster: Toward More Global Forms of Knowing
Thursday, 28 October 2021, 5.30pm (EST)

Register for this lecture (attending in person or attending virtually, via Zoom webinar).

Hubert Robert, View of the Gardens at the Villa Mattei, 1761, red chalk on paper
(Dallas Museum of Art, fractional gift of Charlene and Tom Marsh, 2006.17)

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From the DMA:

Jessica Fripp, The French Academy in Rome: Adventures in Bromance
Annual Rosenberg Lecture
Online and In-Person, Dallas Museum of Art, 11 November 2021, 7.00pm

Presented by the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation

Winning the Royal Academy’s prix de Rome was a major accomplishment for aspiring painters and sculptors in 18th-century France. The prize came with a three-year funded stay in Rome, and provided an opportunity for artists to finish their education by viewing firsthand antique, Renaissance, and Baroque works of art in the Eternal City. But, much like students who study abroad today, their time in Rome involved just as much play as work.

In this lecture, Jessica L. Fripp, Associate Professor of Art History and Undergraduate and Graduate Coordinator at Texas Christian University, will talk about works of art that provide a view into the less studious side of artists’ time in Rome: caricatures. What can these ‘silly’ drawings tell us about life in Rome as a young artist and the role of friendship and play in academic artistic training?

This talk will be livestreamed on the DMA’s YouTube channel, with limited in-person seating available. Dr. Fripp’s recent book Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France will be available for purchase at the DMA Store, and a book signing will follow the event on-site.

To register (for either in-person or virtual attendance), click here»

From The Wallace Collection:

Mark Hall, The Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society, 1784–1914: Collecting Scotland, Collecting the World
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online, Monday, 25 October 2021, 5.30pm

Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Scotland, is currently managed on behalf of Perth & Kinross Council by the cultural trust, Culture Perth & Kinross. The Museum’s history as a local authority service dates back just over a century, to the first decade of the twentieth century. It is part of a history of collecting spanning four centuries, beginning in the late eighteenth century. Its formative iteration, both in terms of a collection and a physical museum, was the Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society, founded in 1784.

The Museum is looking back at this history as part of its project to create a new museum in Perth. In the context of that project, this contribution will summarise the collecting significance and history of the Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society from its Enlightenment origins and including its colonial legacy. In the presentation a range of collecting case studies will be discussed to further emphasis the local and international network of collectors and donors the Society relied on and to demonstrate the rich range of the collections. The case studies will include the Cambus Bronze Age sword, collecting John Knox, and the collectors Colin Robertson (1783–1842), David Ramsay (1794–1860), and the Riach Brothers—active respectively in America, Oceania, and the Middle-East.

Dr Mark Hall is Collections Officer for Culture Perth & Kinross, Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Scotland.

Please note that this seminar will take place on Zoom and YouTube, and will not be held at the Wallace Collection. Admission is free, and registration is required. More information and details of future seminars can now be found here.

This afternoon, from Monticello:

Linda Binsted, Brick Palladian Architecture: Jefferson’s Transformation of Stone to Clay
Online, 21 September 2021, 4.00pm (Eastern Time)

Join the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello for a virtual Fellow’s Forum with architect and architectural historian, Linda Binsted. Click here to join us on Zoom on Tuesday, 21 September at 4.00pm.

Thomas Jefferson’s international travels took him to the cities and countryside of England and France but not to Italy, the birthplace of Palladian design. His travels never took him to Rome and its classical buildings, nor did he see any works by Palladio firsthand. Yet, through architectural treatises, the prevalent pattern books of the 18th century, visits to architecturally significant structures in America, England, and France, and the intellectual thoughts of the day, he came to produce some of the most influential Palladian designs in the still young United States.

Palladio’s villas are visions of smooth planar beauty, crisp whiteness in the Italian piedmont sun. Jefferson’s Palladian work in the Virginia piedmont—Monticello, Poplar Forest and the University of Virginia—are clothed in molded red brick and striped with sand mortar. Other builders and architects of the era studied the same sources as Jefferson and used the same materials to produce worthy Palladian-inspired plans and volumes; however, their detailing of the façade merely replicated the prevalent Georgian and Federalist manner. This presentation examines the pathway Jefferson travelled and the methods he employed to purify the brick edifice to better attain the planar volumes depicted in Palladio’s folios.

Linda Binsted is a practicing architect working in Washington, DC. Her architectural designs have garnered design awards and appeared in local and national publications. She has conducted seminars focused on the intersection of the design, technology, and history of building materials including brick and concrete as well as mid-century urban renewal at American Institute of Architects (AIA) conferences including AIA Washington Chapter’s Design DC and Virginia AIA ArchEx. She is also a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Master’s program in architectural history. As an architectural historian, she has presented her preliminary findings on Jefferson’s brickwork design at the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) regional conference in 2017 and the New Discoveries of Thomas Jefferson’s Architecture and Design symposium sponsored by the University of Virginia in 2018.

Russia in Europe / Europe in Russia: Cross-Cultural Connections in a Recentered Art World
Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Catherine Phillips, Emily Roy, Margaret Samu, and Zalina Tetermazova
Online, 23 September 2021, noon (Eastern Time)

HECAA is pleased to announce the next installment in our Zoom event series. Please join us on Thursday, 23 September 2021 for Russia in Europe / Europe in Russia: Cross-Cultural Connections in a Recentered Art World. The roundtable will take place at the following times: 9.00 Los Angeles, 12.00 New York, 17.00 London, and 19.00 Moscow.

Registration is available here»

Follower of Rembrandt (1606–1669), The Centurion Cornelius (The Unmerciful Servant), ca. 1660, oil on canvas
(London: The Wallace Collection)

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From the seminar flyer:

Andrea Morgan, Collecting and Displaying Rembrandt’s Pictures in 18th- and 19th-Century England: Charles Jennens of Gopsall Hall and the ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online, Monday, 27 September 2021, 5.30pm

The history of collecting paintings attributed to Rembrandt in eighteenth- century England is especially rich. The English developed such a passion for the Dutch artist by the second half of the century that it led the Reverend Matthew Pilkington to worry in 1770 that “the genuine works of this master are rarely to be met with, and whenever they are to be purchased they afford incredible prices.” This talk will focus on two private collections of paintings attributed to Rembrandt that were formed beginning in the eighteenth century.

Charles Jennens is best remembered as the librettist to the composer George Frederic Handel, but he also owned a massive art collection. Among Jennens’s collection by the 1760s and hanging at his now lost estate, Gopsall Hall, formerly in Leicestershire, were six paintings attributed to Rembrandt and one contemporary copy. The copy was a painting by Pieter Tillemans after Rembrandt’s celebrated picture of Belshazzar’s Feast that was in the eighteenth century owned by the Earl of Derby at Knowsley Hall. While Jennens’s ‘Rembrandt’ pictures have since lost their attribution to the master, I propose some reasons why Jennens in particular might have had a special interest in Rembrandt’s painted oeuvre.

One of the largest but heretofore neglected English collections of paintings attributed to Rembrandt was formerly held at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, having been amassed by various members of the aristocratic Temple-Grenville family. The first picture was recorded at Stowe as early as 1724, but by 1838 there were a total of ten paintings attributed to the Dutch artist at the estate, along with three said to be by artists in Rembrandt’s circle. I trace the history of this collection and conclude with a discussion of the aptly called ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe.

Please note that this seminar will take place on Zoom and YouTube, and will not be held at the Wallace Collection. Admission is free, and registration is required. More information and details of future seminars can now be found here.

Online this Sunday from the French Porcelain Society:

Alessandro Biancalana, European Porcelain at Villa Cagnola
FPS Living Room Lecture, 5 September 2021, 18.00 (BST)

The French Porcelain Society is delighted to continue its online lectures with a very special private tour of Villa Cagnola, north of Milan. Alessandro Biancalana will discuss some highlights from the vast collection of European porcelain in the villa, including Doccia, Meissen, and Capodimonte. He will be joined during the Q&A session by director Don Eros Monti and curator Andrea Bardelli. We hope you can join us. For free links, please email FPSmailing@gmail.com.

“I would define Villa Cagnola not as a house museum in the strictest sense of the term, but rather as a Wunderkammer. Among its numerous treasures, including naturalia, porcelain plays a leading role: it is a composite collection, which has the eighteenth century as leitmotif, bringing together pieces from different manufactories all of them of high quality. Walking along Villa Cagnola’s rooms and looking at the showcases full of objects fascinates the visitor who travels between decorative systems and shapes that are different from each other: the most important European centres of production are represented with Meissen, Doccia, and the most relevant Venetian factories. I hope our journey is stimulating and a source of curiosity.” –Alessandro Biancalana

From the registration page: 

Ana Mónica da Silva Rolo and Noé Conejo Delgado, A Dactyliothec from Pietro Bracci in the Portuguese Royal Family’s Collections
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online, Monday, 26 July 2021, 17.30

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Europe, the versatile education of erudite elites was indispensable to and synonymous with social distinction. In this cultural frame, travels through Europe, in the style of the Grand Tour, became especially appreciated among European aristocratic youth. At the same time, interest in Classical antiquity and collecting antiques was enhanced, giving rise to a flourishing activity of replica production and trade, especially in Italy.

The dactyliothec by the Italian artist Pietro Bracci (1700–1773) in the collections of the Museum-Library of the House of Bragança (Vila Viçosa, Portugal) illustrates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century taste, shared by the last generations of the Portuguese Royal House. The set presented is composed of 2,350 plaster moulds of gems and cameos, organized in three thematic series. The first and largest series is dedicated to emblematic pieces of ancient art and the Italian Renaissance. The second series is composed of a selection of reproductions of the best carvings originally made by eighteenth-century craftsmen, like Giovanni or Luigi Pichler and Natal Marchant. The third and last series brings together a total of 180 cameos dedicated to Emperors of Europe. Dated between the end of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this dactyliothec reflects the importance that such casts assumed as souvenirs of Classical art and history for collectors and travellers, as well as their use as an educational resource in the academic training of young aristocrats.

You can register to view this talk via Zoom here, or plan to watch via The Wallace Collection’s YouTube channel.

Ana Mónica da Silva Rolo and Noé Conejo Delgado are both based at the Archaeology Centre UNIARQ of Lisbon University.

From the Attingham Summer Lecture Series:

David Adshead, Pompeii and All That: Reimagining Ancient Worlds
Online, Wednesday, 14 July 2021, 6.00pm (BST)

Wilhelm Zahn, Die schönsten Ornamente und merkwürdigsten Gemälde aus Pompeji, Herculanum und Stabiae (Berlin, 1828).

David Adshead, Co-Director of the Attingham Summer School and Director of the London House Course, will look at the cultural impact of the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii. News of the excavation of these ancient Neopolitan cities sent an electric shock of excitement across Europe and beyond and served as a stimulus to the nascent Neoclassical movement. Grand Tourists, artists, and architects flocked to see the statuary, wall paintings, and other artefacts that emerged unscathed from their volcanic overburden. Illustrated publications followed. These cities also caught the attention of philhellenes at a time before travel to Greece and, modern day, Turkey was common, for they had been Greek colonies before they were Roman. The discovery at Pompeii of a temple dedicated to the goddess Isis, decades before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, also triggered a fascination in all things Egyptian. Aspects of collecting, design, and decoration were all directly or indirectly influenced as a result.

Registration is available here»