Enfilade

Rosalba Carriera, Portrait of the Elector Frederick Christian of Saxony), 1740, pastel on paper, 63.5 × 51.5 cm
(Dresden: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister)

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From The French Porcelain Society:

Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, The Grandest of Tours: Fragile Diplomacy Meets the Grand Cure
Online Lecture, 13 June 2020

The French Porcelain Society continues its series of weekly online lectures with Maureen Cassidy-Geiger on the incredible two-year Grand Tour of the Elector Friedrich Christian of Saxony in the mid-eighteenth century. We hope you can join us on Saturday, 13 June 2020, 19:00pm (British Summer Time). Members will receive an email invitation with instructions on how to join the online lecture. If you want to join, please contact us for more details on FPSenquiries@gmail.com.

Elector Friedrich Christian of Saxony (1722–1763), who succeeded King August III in 1763 for just 74 days, was afflicted from birth with profound physical disabilities which prevented him from standing or walking without assistance and made simple tasks like eating and dressing difficult. The marriage of his sister Maria Amalia to the King of Naples in 1738 inspired their parents to send the fifteen-year-old heir to the throne on an impromptu journey to Italy for life-saving medical treatments. This exceptional two-year adventure was amply documented, allowing us to precisely reconstruct the prince’s route and daily experiences as he travelled from Dresden to Naples, Rome, Florence, Milan and Venice along pilgrimage routes and post roads, returning via his mother’s court capital, Vienna. Like the able-bodied Grand Tourists he met along the way, he also travelled incognito (‘Comte de Lusace’) with an entourage, enjoyed celebrity status, and collected art, relics, books and souvenirs for shipment home, many of them gifts from his hosts along the way. A selection was featured together with archival documentation in The Grand Cure / Die Grande Kur 1738–1740 (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2018). In return, wagonloads of porcelain from the Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Meissen were shipped abroad to serve as thank yous from King August III and to celebrate the Naming Day of dowager Empress Wilhelmine Amalie, the prince’s grandmother. Many of these porcelain gifts have survived and were showcased in the exhibition and catalogue Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63 (YUP/BGC, New York, 2007–08). Some were customized with coats of arms or apt painterly compositions, a few items were repurposed from Japanese Palace stock, and others were simply on hand and included in the shipments; the Meissen porcelain table service that accompanied the prince across Italy was understandably damaged and depleted from use at the lunches and dinners he routinely hosted so a replacement was sent via courier to meet him in Vienna, together with a selection of the king’s silver plate.

Maureen Cassidy-Geiger has twice driven the prince’s itinerary and has researched his sojourns in Naples, Rome, Venice and Vienna on various residential fellowships. Transcriptions of the travel diaries, composed mostly in French, and related research and documentation are posted on the website comtedelusace.wordpress.com.

From PMC:

Georgian Provocations: Six Iconic Works of Art from Eighteenth-Century Britain
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 28 May — 9 July 2020

Georgian Provocations is a one-off summer public lecture course, delivered online, and designed to provide an accessible and stimulating introduction to the art of the period. In this series of six 30-minute lectures, Hallett and Postle focus on six seminal paintings from the Georgian era and investigate their contents, contexts, and impact. Together, they reveal many of the ideas and issues that coursed through British visual culture between the 1730s and the 1790s, and demonstrate the riches that continue to be gained from looking intensively at an individual work of art. Lectures will be released weekly from 28 May to 2 July at 3pm (GMT).

An associated conversation on July 9 will be streamed live via Zoom Webinar at 6pm (GMT), providing a Q&A session with series presenters Mark Hallett and Martin Postle, who will talk about the pictures they focused upon in their lectures and their respective approaches to discussing the works in question.

28 May 2020
Mark Hallett, Walking the Streets: William Hogarth’s The Four Times of Day by William Hogarth (1736–38)

4 June 2020
Martin Postle, Variations on a Theme: Richard Wilson’s The White Monk (ca. 1755–65)

11 June 2020
Martin Postle, All Done from Nature: George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (1762)

18 June 2020
Martin Postle, The Artist as Intellectual: Joshua Reynolds’s Self-Portrait as President of the Royal Academy (1780)

25 June 2020
Mark Hallett, Displaying the Hero: John Singleton Copley’s The Death of Major Peirson (1784)

2 July 2020
Mark Hallett, Making an Impact: Thomas Lawrence’s Arthur Atherley (1792)

9 July 2020
Georgian Provocations: A Conversation, streamed live via Zoom Webinar at 6pm (GMT); register via Eventbrite here.

ODSECS presents live seminars with Q&A opportunities (advance registration required for participation). Recordings remain available after the fact. I would particularly note Freya Gowrley’s talk in July on “Anna Seward and the Poetics of Exchange,” with registration details here. –CH

Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies
Launched April 2020, ongoing

The Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies brings together researchers in eighteenth-century literature and culture from across the globe for conversation, debate, and sociability. It aims to make the best new research available to the widest possible audience, and to facilitate a diverse and inclusive research culture.

ODSECS seminars take place live and are also recorded to ensure maximum accessibility. In each seminar, a twenty-minute paper delivered by an expert speaker is followed by a 20- to 30-minute question and answer session. All participants are welcome to contribute to the Q&A using a microphone or the typed chat function.

ODSECS is convened by Dr Rebecca Bullard, Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. Please send enquiries about ODSECS to r.bullard@reading.ac.uk.

Seminar 1: Sophie Coulombeau (University of York), Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers
April 2020

In April 2020, a group of researchers came together to experiment with the format for ODSECS. Dr Sophie Coulombeau gave a wonderful paper about the research project, ‘Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers’. On this occasion, only the talk was recorded, not the question and answer session that followed it.

Seminar 2: Eugenia Zuroski (McMaster University), Haywood’s Fascinum
Monday, 18 May 2020, 4.00pm (UK time)

Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai is a curiously elaborate joke: an intricate oriental romance as vehicle for a relatively straightforward satire of Robert Walpole and his political ascendance. As Ros Ballaster has observed, the tale contains “anarchic and perverse comic energies” that tend to overwhelm, even counteract, the story’s political orientations. In this paper, I consider how, in its more anarchic and perverse moments, Eovaai theorizes “unseriousness” as an epistemological and political approach to the world—an unexpected utopian promise in the prospect of being “carried away” by literature’s most fascinating and least plausible objects. Tracing Haywood’s engagement with the Roman fascinum, I show the unexpected conceptual heights a well-deployed penis joke might take us.

Seminar 3: Nicholas Seager (Keele University), ‘The Celebrated Daniel De Foe’: The Reception and Publication History of Defoe’s Non-Fiction
Wednesday 17 June 2020, 4.00pm (UK time)

This paper examines unexplored aspects of Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) posthumous publication history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It challenges prevalent understandings of his reception, as critics have assumed that “Defoe seems to have been little read or remembered in the years after his death,” and that until the twentieth century he was remembered as a “slapdash journalistic hack.” As well as trying to qualify or dispel such views, the paper argues that Defoe’s extensive publication history in numerous non-fiction genres—history, travel-book, conduct writing, journalism, polemical pamphlets, religious treatises, and more—reveals some ways in which generic change occurred across the period. Defoe’s non-fiction was subjected to acts of re-publication that amount to adaptation and appropriation, processes more commonly applied to Defoe’s fiction. Finally, the paper shows how the re-publication of Defoe’s non-fiction repeatedly engaged with British political, social, and economic history, from the Forty-Five to the French Revolution and beyond.

Seminar 4: Freya Gowrley (University of Derby), Anna Seward and the Poetics of Exchange: Portraiture, Poetry, and Gift Culture
Wednesday, 15 July 2020, 4.00pm (UK time)

This paper unpacks the complex networks of emotional, artistic, and poetic exchange that surrounded a highly emotional portrait-object: a printed version of George Romney’s painting Serena given to Lady Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831)—the so-called ‘Ladies of Llangollen’—by the poet Anna Seward (1742–1809). Seward identified the image as a ‘perfect similitude’ of her deceased step-sister Honora Sneyd, so much so that the print played an active role in Seward’s commemoration of their lost friendship. Like Butler and Ponsonby’s own infamous ‘romantic friendship’, Seward and Sneyd enjoyed an intensely close and deeply affectionate relationship that flouted social norms, with both Sneyd’s marriage to Richard Edgeworth in 1751, and her eventual death in 1780, devastating the poet.

Discussing both Seward’s copy of the print, as well as Butler and Ponsonby’s facsimile, this paper places the image within two contexts: firstly, in relation to Seward’s volume of poetry, Llangollen Vale with Other Poems (1796), a sentimentalising series of verses dedicated to Seward’s intimate relationships with Butler, Ponsonby, and Sneyd; and secondly, within an intricate display of gifted portraits at Plas Newydd, Butler and Ponsonby’s home at Llangollen in Wales. Using methodologies from the history of the emotions, material culture and literary studies, and art history it will demonstrate the image’s deep embedment within Seward’s emotional and creative consciousness: on the one hand, allowing Seward to actively ruminate and comment upon her close connections with Sneyd, Butler, and Ponsonby; and on the other, functioning within a dynamic web of literary, material, and loving gestures enacted between Seward and her friends. In so doing, the paper will highlight the vibrant intermedial lives of this eighteenth-century print, and the urgency of an interdisciplinary approach to the art of this period.

At SLAM (and conveniently enough, coinciding with ASECS) . . .

Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Angelica Kauffman: An Enterprising Artist in 18th-Century Britain
Saint Louis Art Museum, 20 March 2020

Angelica Kauffman, Woman in Turkish Dress, 1767, oil on canvas, 25 × 20 inches (Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Dr. E. Robert and Carol Sue Schultz 704.2018).

Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), an Austrian-Swiss artist, began her career in Italy, where her clients included British tourists who encouraged the young painter to pursue her profession in England. Over the fifteen years she worked in London, Kauffman achieved fame and fortune and returned to Italy as an international celebrity. Celebrating a portrait recently acquired by the Museum, this lecture will discuss Kauffman’s life and work in England as a fashionable painter and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, a rare distinction for a woman, and how she used her talents to advantage.

Friday, 20 March 2020, 7pm, Farrell Auditorium at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The lecture is offered free of charge, thanks to the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment. Tickets are, however, required. Advance tickets are recommended and may be reserved in person at the Museum’s Information Centers or through MetroTix, 314.534.1111 (all tickets reserved through MetroTix incur a service charge).

Wendy Wassyng Roworth is Professor Emerita of Art History, University of Rhode Island.

From Eventbrite:

Kate Smith, Loss and Dispossession in the Long Eighteenth Century
University of Edinburgh, 17 March 2020

Dr Kate Smith (University of Birmingham) delivers the inaugural lecture for the Material Culture in the 17th and 18th Centuries Research Group. Histories of material culture have often focused on questions of presence: how objects in the past were made, purchased, used and repaired. In contrast, Kate Smith’s paper will explore what happened when objects were absent. More particularly, it will examine how eighteenth-century Britons developed systems to deal with loss and what such systems required of them. It will show that, when faced with loss, individuals were called upon to recall their possessions and describe them in full. To make their possessions recognisable to others, and thus increase the possibilities of reclamation, eighteenth-century Britons had to draw out the salient features of missing things. In doing so, they reveal much about what they imagined their possessions to be. The paper considers questions of description, attention, memory and the self to show the complex knowledge, practices and systems constructed and utilised in response to loss. Register here.

Tuesday, 17 March 2020, 17.30–19.00
Playfair Library Hall
South Bridge, Edinburgh

George Stubbs, George IV, when Prince of Wales, detail, 1791, oil on canvas, 103 × 128 cm
(Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 400142)

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In connection with the exhibition George IV: Art & Spectacle now on view at Buckingham Palace:

Steven Parissien, George IV and the Horse
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, 26 February 2020

One of George IV’s greatest passions was horseracing. In this lunchtime lecture, Steven Parissien, Chief Executive of Palace House, Newmarket, examines the ways in which George utilised the image of the thoroughbred horse to define and bolster his royal image. 13:00–14:00

This month at UT Austin’s Ransom Center:

Jane Raisch, Original Copies: The Facsimile before Photography
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, 27 February 2020

Called “the nightmare of book collectors” by John Carter and Nicolas Barker, facsimiles do not hold a particularly revered position in bibliography and book history. The opposite of the venerated ‘original’, facsimiles are seen as a compromise at best and downright deception at worst. And, yet, people have long been driven to make reliable copies of old documents. Raisch’s lecture will delve into the pre-history of today’s digital reproductions, looking in particular at the creative technical strategies that 16th- through 18th-century scholars and printers devised to reproduce the visual qualities of inscriptions and manuscripts. It will ask how and why early print copied material objects that came before—and, in the process, it will rethink and expand our understanding of what facsimile can mean today. Lecture in the Prothro Theater. Reception to follow. Thursday, 27 February, 4.30–7.00pm.

Jane Raisch, PhD is Lecturer in the Department of English at The University of York in the United Kingdom.

This spring at the Mellon Centre:

Rebecca Tropp, Accommodating the Picturesque: The Country Houses of James Wyatt, John Nash, and Sir John Soane, 1793–1815
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 20 March 2020

James Wyatt, Ashridge House, commissioned by the 7th Earl of Bridgewater.

Whilst much has been written about the development of Picturesque theory at the end of the eighteenth century, regarding both the landscape itself and prescriptions for the siting of buildings within it, these discussions have generally been limited to two-dimensional snapshots, such as those represented in Humphry Repton’s Red Books. This paper, based upon ongoing research for my doctoral dissertation, seeks to push beyond the visual to investigate some of the physical implications and repercussions of the Picturesque ideal—the intersection between the visual two-dimensional picture-plane and the practical three-dimensional architectural response—on the design and construction of country houses at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the work of James Wyatt (1746–1813), John Nash (1752–1835), and Sir John Soane (1753–1837), and limiting my investigation to those country houses designed during the pivotal period from 1793 to 1815, I investigate two specific implications related to the lowering of the principal floor from piano nobile to ground level, as part of a general repositioning of the house within the landscape. First is the use of level changes within the ground floor—the inclusion of a few steps up or down in entrance halls or between rooms, as distinct from staircases between floors—considering some possible reasons for their incorporation and the purposes they served. Second, and sometimes connected to these level changes, is an increase in permeability between interior and exterior, through the use of full-length windows, loggias and attached conservatories—social/botanical spaces that were first incorporated into the design of the house during this period. Taken together, these developments furthered the evolving relationship between house and landscape and, as a result, the experience of moving through and between those spaces.

Research Lunches are a series of free lunchtime research talks. All are welcome, but please book a ticket in advance. 1:00–2:00pm, Seminar Room, Paul Mellon Centre.

Rebecca Tropp is a fourth-year PhD student in History of Art at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, working under the supervision of Dr Frank Salmon. She completed her MPhil in History of Art and Architecture at Cambridge in 2015, investigating recurring spatial arrangements and patterns of movement in the country houses of John Nash. Prior to commencing postgraduate studies in the UK, she received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York, where she majored in the History and Theory of Architecture.

This spring at the Mellon Centre:

Public Lecture Course, Ceramics in Britain, 1750 to Now
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, Thursdays, 5 March — 2 April 2020

Registration opens 3 February 2020

While the story of ceramics is a global one, Britain has played a leading role in the last three centuries, a period in which British invention has shaped developments and brought constant renewal to the industry. This course, delivered by experts in the subject, will explore five key influential developments in the history of British ceramics since the mid-eighteenth century, examining the multiple ways in which innovators, entrepreneurs and artists have reinvigorated the field. No prior art historical knowledge is necessary. There will be a brief drinks reception from 6:30 to 7:00pm. The lectures will begin promptly at 7:00pm.

Registration will open on 3 February at 10:00am on the Paul Mellon Centre website. Please note you will need to sign up for each week individually and in order to ensure consistency attendance, we overbook. If you find you can no longer attend after signing up, please let us know so your place can be offered to someone else. On the night, admission will be made on a first-come, first-served basis.

Thursday, 5 March
Patricia Ferguson (Project Curator, British Museum), Pots with Attitude: British Satire on Ceramics, 1750–1820

Thursday, 12 March
Catrin Jones (Chief Curator, Wedgwood Museum), Josiah Wedgwood: Experimentation and Innovation

Thursday, 19 March
Rebecca Wallis (Curator, National Trust, London and South East), ‘Blue China’: A Nineteenth-Century British Obsession

Thursday, 26 March
Simon Olding (Director of the Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham), ‘Beyond East and West’: The Founding of British Studio Ceramics

Thursday, 2 April
Neil Brownsword (Artist and Professor of Ceramics, Staffordshire University), Obsolescence and Renewal: Reimagining North Staffordshire’s Ceramic Heritage