Enfilade

A series of five conversations hosted by The Wallace Collection:

Swing Time: Serendipitous Conversations about the Rococo
Zoom Webinar and YouTube, The Wallace Collection, London, 8 November — 6 December 2021

Fragonard’s Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette, known in English as The Swing, is a revered painting in the Wallace Collection and one of the most representative works of art of the entire French 18th century. To celebrate the gentle cleaning and restoration of this rococo icon, we have invited five art practitioners and five scholars to participate in a series of virtual conversations inspired by its key themes: Pink, Identity, Fashion, Play, and The Libertine. Join Dr Yuriko Jackall, Head of Curatorial and Curator of French Paintings at the Wallace Collection, to discover the influence of rococo art, and The Swing in particular, on artistic production today. The series will be recorded and made available on the Wallace Collection YouTube channel. Register for any of the five free talks here.

P I N K  |  Yuriko Jackall in conversation with Flora Yukhnovich and Valerie Steele
Monday, 8 November 2021, 19.00 GMT

Why is the colour pink so often associated with the frivolous, the dainty, and the overtly feminine? A plethora of images—of pink babies, pink flowers, pink fashion accessories—has cemented the gendering of pink in our collective imagination. Such is the case of Fragonard’s Swing, which displays at its centre a young woman in a billowing pink dress. Yuriko Jackall, artist Flora Yukhnovich, and curator Valerie Steele explore the widespread perception of the colour pink as particularly representative of femininity and the Rococo. See full event details here.

I D E N T I T Y  |  Yuriko Jackall in conversation with Catherine Yass and Rosalind McKever
Monday, 22 November 2021, 19.00 GMT

The name and motivations of the person who commissioned The Swing remain obscure. So do the identities of the three people depicted. Only the painter, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, is known to us. In cases like these, art historians rely upon visual clues to understand what is being represented. Yuriko Jackall is joined by artist Catherine Yass and curator Rosalind McKever in a conversation about how visual codes—dress, gesture, and representation of place—shape the way in which we read and perceive identity. See full event details here.

F A S H I O N  |  Yuriko Jackall in conversation with Sami Nouri and Jessica Degain
Monday, 29 November 2021, 19.00 GMT

During the last decades of the ancien régime (1760–1789), Paris became the epicentre of the fashion world. Vogues for hairstyle, dress shape, fabric patterns, or silk colour came and went, with the vertiginous rapidity associated to today’s ever-evolving fashion industry. Like his teacher, François Boucher, Fragonard excelled in putting his protagonists in the latest fashions. The fabrics, trimmings, and garments flowing from the brushes of these painters have, in turn, inspired fashion designers for the last 250 years. Join Yuriko Jackall, haute-couture fashion designer Sami Nouri, and curator Jessica Degain as they explore how 18th-century fashions continue to resonate today. See full event details here.

P L A Y  |  Yuriko Jackall in conversation with Monster Chetwynd and Alice Strang
Monday, 6 December 2021, 19.00 GMT

In sharp opposition to the architectural and rectilinear motifs of Classicism, the rococo aesthetic is populated by sinuous forms inspired by nature. Rocks, shells, leafy branches and sprigs of flowers introduce novelty and a sense of surprise into the furniture, wall panels and textiles of the eighteenth century. In turn, the unexpected playfulness of these rococo interiors encouraged a certain theatricality and whimsy in the demeanour of those who inhabited them. Yuriko Jackall, artist Monster Chetwynd, and curator Alice Strang discuss the resonance of rococo playfulness in contemporary practice, with special attention to layering, unusual juxtapositions, and the role of performance art as a means for exploring the eccentricities of everyday life. See full event details here.

T H E  L I B E R T I N E  |  Yuriko Jackall in conversation with Simon Bejer and Chantal Thomas
Monday, 6 December 2021, 19.00 GMT

After enduring years of tight control under Louis XIV, the 18th-century privileged classes enjoyed unprecedented freedom during the Regency and the reign of Louis XV. In Paris, their lives unfolded at the opera, the theatre, and the masked ball. In their country estates and suburban maisons de plaisance, they tasted the escapist delights of the French pleasure garden. The intimacy of these environments invited a relaxation of etiquette and, occasionally, the transgression of moral codes. In the final conversation of our series, Yuriko Jackall, artist and theatre designer Simon Bejer, and writer Chantal Thomas, discuss how changes in moral codes in 18th-century France impacted the arts and literature. See full event details here.

From the BGC:

Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Object Biography: The Life of a Concept
Online, Seminar in Museum Conversations, Bard Graduate Center, New York, 2 November 2021

Jan Luyken, Design for frontispiece, Het Leerzaam Huisraad, 1709, 14 × 90 cm (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-T-1989-183).

The object biography has gained popularity in art history, material culture studies, archaeology, history, conservation and restoration, and museum studies. As a concept, the biography creates attention for the individual trajectories of objects and how these change over time; it enables the connection of different approaches, usually dealt with by sub-disciplines (i.e. research into making, provenance, exhibition history, conservation, reception); it offers entry points even if no information is available and encourages interdisciplinarity as objects straddle many fields. Finally, the object biography stimulates new forms of writing because it lends the object a voice and foregrounds narrative.

But the concept’s anthropocentric foundations also raise questions. To have a ‘biography’ implies biological and mental development, which objects typically do not have. Are young objects less settled and do objects grow wiser the older they get? Metaphors of birth, maturing, and death might cover up exclusively thing-specific characteristics. Likewise, the proposed ‘life’ implies agency, but do objects really speak for themselves? Who actually tells their story, and would objects be better if we used concepts such as itineraries or necrographies to capture their histories?

This talk presents a brief history and theory of the concept of the object-biography, from its literary and didactic origins in the eighteenth-century to its recent critics, asking what the concept can help us see, which we otherwise would not. This free talk takes place, via Zoom, on Tuesday, November 2, at 5.00pm. Registration information is available here.

Ann-Sophie Lehmann is chair of art history & material culture at the University of Groningen. She recently published Lessons in Art: Art, Education, and Modes of Instruction, edited with E. Jorink and B. Ramakers (Leiden 2019). For an overview of her publications and activities is available here.

From the PMC:

The Museum and Gallery Today: Paul Mellon Lectures 2021
Six Online Lectures, 20 October — 11 February 2022

Established in 1994, this lecture series was named in honour of Paul Mellon (Yale College, class of 1929), the philanthropist, collector of British art, and founder of both the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) in New Haven and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC) in London. Co-organised by the two institutions, these biennial lectures have traditionally been given by a specialist in British art, first at the National Gallery, London, and again at the YCBA in New Haven.

This year’s series, entitled The Museum and Gallery Today, is exclusively online and features individual talks from some of the world’s most distinguished museum and gallery directors. The lectures are presented as free live webinars. Registration is required (for each lecture, individually).

20 October 2021
Gabriele Finaldi (Director of the National Gallery)

3 November 2021
Kaywin Feldman (Director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC)

10 November 2021
Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem)

11 November 2021
Iwona Blazwick (Director of the Whitechapel Gallery)

24 November 2021
Maria Balshaw (Director of Tate)

11 February 2022
Eve Tam (Former Director of the Hong Kong Museum of Art)

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)

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

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)

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

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)

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

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.