Lecture | Satish Padiyar on Fragonard, Temporality, and Suprises
Maurice Blot, after Jean Honoré Fragonard, Le Verrou (The Bolt, or The Lock), etching, second state, sheet: 41.8 × 49 cm, image: 36.8 × 45 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1974.652). Fragonard’s painting is in The Louvre.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Satish Padiyar, Surprises: Fragonard and Temporality
The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 21 April 2016
Arguably, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was a painter at odds with late-eighteenth-century bourgeois notions of progressive time and the Enlightenment concept of historical and material progress. In this talk, Satish Padiyar asks how Fragonard marks time and what is the time and the timing of his quasi-expressionist marks.
In an oeuvre eminently about love, it is the particular moment of ‘surprise’ that Fragonard obsessively returns to: a moment of temporal suspense in which the human subject is taken by storm and which resurrects a quasi-infantile sense of un-control and openness to the unexpected. Through the “spontaneous gesture” (Winnicott), Fragonard seeks to throw the subject outside the received norms of time and social courtesies. The surprise attack characterizes both his technical audacity and his psychology of love, corporeal attraction and violence. Thursday, 21 April 2016, 6:00pm, Institute of Fine Arts, Lecture Hall, New York University, 1 East 78th Street.
Satish Padiyar is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts and Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century European Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art.
RSVP here»
The lecture is scheduled to be live-streamed.
David Pullins on Painting, Decoration, and Porcelain at The Frick
Upcoming talks at The Frick:
David Pullins, Shared Practices: Painting and Decoration in Eighteenth-Century France
The Frick Collection, New York, 20 April 2016
Motifs after François Boucher and other leading painters populate the surface of Sèvres porcelain, including pieces in The Frick Collection. David Pullins considers what it was about academic painters’ training and working methods that encouraged the adaptation of their motifs from canvas to porcelain, textiles, and other media. Wednesday, 20 April, 6pm, in the Music Room. Free, though seating is on a first-come, first-served basis; a live webcast will also be available.
David Pullins, The French Dialogue with Chinese Porcelain
The Frick Collection, New York, 21 April 2016
Focusing on examples from The Frick’s permanent collection, learn how France became familiar with Chinese culture through its porcelain, which traveled around the globe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will also ask how a foreign material was repackaged into a symbol of French cultural identity, one that was considered a necessary part of Gilded Age collections. Thursday, 21 April, 5:30pm. Advance registration is required; courses are free with a $25 student membership or a full membership for recent graduates.
Lecture | 17th- and 18th-Century Dutch Design in the Global Marketplace
Thursday at The Nelson-Atkins:
Catherine Futter, Reflecting on 17th- and 18th-Century Dutch Design in the Global Marketplace
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 31 March 2016
In this series, connected with the exhibition Reflecting Class in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, four Nelson-Atkins curators reflect on themes presented in the exhibition, including the importance and legacy of 17th-century Dutch painting and depictions of the social classes in art. Works from across art-historical periods and the museum’s collections will be discussed.
With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the reach of the Dutch East India Company, Dutch designs spread to distant lands as far away as the American colonies and China. Join Catherine Futter, Director, Curatorial Affairs, for this talk that explores Dutch influence in ceramics, furniture, silver and other decorative arts.
Thursday, March 31
6-7 pm | Atkins Auditorium
Tickets required
Exhibition | James Gillray’s Hogarthian Progresses
From The Lewis Walpole Library:
James Gillray’s Hogarthian Progresses
The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 6 April — 16 September 2016
Curated by Cynthia Roman
James Gillray, The life of William-Cobbett, written by himself. : Now you lying varlets you shall see how a plain tale will put you down! / Js. Gillray inv. & fec. Published in London, 29 September 1809 (Lewis Walpole Library).
Sequential narration in satiric prints is most famously associated with the ‘modern moral subjects’ of William Hogarth (1697–1764): Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1735), Marriage A-la-Mode (1745), and Industry and Idleness (1747) among others. Less well-known is the broad spectrum of legacy ‘progresses’ produced by subsequent generations drawing both on Hogarth’s narrative strategies and his iconic motifs. James Gillray (1756–1815), celebrated for his innovative single-plate satires, was also among the most accomplished printmakers to adopt Hogarthian sequential narration even as he transformed it according to his unique vision. This exhibition presents a number of Gillray’s Hogarthian progresses alongside some selected prints by Hogarth himself.
P R O G R A M S
Study Day
James Gillray’s Experimental Printmaking
Organized by Esther Chadwick, History of Art, Yale University and Cynthia Roman, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 10 June 2016
Graduate Student Seminar
Collecting the Graphic Work of William Hogarth
Sheila O’Connell, Former Curator of Prints, British Museum, 14 June 2016
Graduate Student Seminar
Connoisseurship: Graphic Satire from William Hogarth to James Gillray
Andrew Edmunds, Collector and Dealer, 15 June 2016
Master Class for Graduate Students
A Contest of Two Genres: Graphic Satire and British History Painting in the Long Eighteenth Century
Mark Salber Phillips, Professor of History at Carleton University, Ottawa, and Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, 22–26 August 2016
Master Class for Graduate Students
The Comic Image 1800–1850: Narrative and Caricature
Brian Maidment, Professor of the History of Print, Liverpool John Moores University
Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, 14—16 September 2016
Lectures | Benjamin West at Spencer House
I noted this small exhibition a week ago but failed to include the programming details. The first lecture takes place on Monday. –CH
Benjamin West at Spencer House
Spencer House, London, 31 January 2016 — 29 January 2017
In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the restoration of the State Rooms at Spencer House, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s early neo-classical interiors will showcase work of Benjamin West, a central figure in the development of neo-classical painting. Central to the exhibition is West’s Milkmaids in St. James’s Park, Westminster Abbey Beyond (ca. 1801, oil on panel, Paul Mellon Fund), which is on special loan to the Rothschild Foundation from the Yale Center for British Art. . . .
To complement the exhibition, a series of three lectures about Benjamin West will take place at Spencer House, followed by drinks:
• Loyd Grossman, How to Paint History: Benjamin West and the Death of General Wolfe, 14 March at 6.30pm
• Desmond Shawe-Taylor (The Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures), Benjamin West and George III, 18 July at 6.30pm
• Lars Kokkonen (Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art), Evaporations: Milkmaids in St. James’s Park No More, 14 November at 6.30pm
Booking information is available here»
Lecture | Giorgio Riello, Towards a Global Cultural History?
Giorgio Riello, Towards a Global Cultural History? Gifts,
Commodities and Diplomacy in the First Global Age
Deutsches Haus, Columbia University Department of History, New York, 23 March 2016
Columbia University Department of History is pleased to present the Dr. S. T. Lee Annual Lecture in History: Towards a Global Cultural History? Gifts, Commodities and Diplomacy in the First Global Age, presented by Professor Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick, Department of History), Wednesday, March 23rd, Deutsches Haus (420 West 116th Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive), 6:00–7:30pm. Reception to follow.
Giorgio Riello was trained as an economic historian, with a focus on material culture and the history of technology. After his work on the transformation of Italian and European industry in the eighteenth century, he began publishing on global history, becoming founding director of the Centre for Global History and Culture at Warwick University, one of the world’s leading programs focusing on the global history of material culture. His multiply award-winning publications have ranged from the global history of cotton to south Asian textile production, to the global industry of shoe production.
Lecture | Philip Morgan on Slavery at Mount Vernon
Junius Brutus Stearns, George Washington as a Farmer at Mount Vernon, 1851 (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; photo by Katherine Wetzel). Information on the painting from Colonial Williamsburg.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the Homewood Museum at Johns Hopkins:
Philip Morgan, Entangled Lives: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 18 February 2016
The fifth-largest slave owner in Virginia by the late 1780s, George Washington constantly struggled with the tangled web of slavery despite his personal desires to eliminate it from his life. In this lecture illuminating the lived experience of slavery, historian Philip Morgan will share the ways in which master and slaves, whites and blacks, interacted at Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation with special focus on the workplace, families and resistance.
A reception with the speaker will precede the lecture at 5pm. The lecture, at 6pm, is presented in celebration of African-American History Month by Homewood Museum, the former country house and slave-holding farm of the Carroll family in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Admission is free; however, reservations are requested. Walk-in registration is based on seating availability. The reception and lecture will be held in the Mason Hall Auditorium: 3101 Wyman Park Drive, Baltimore, MD 21211.
Philip Morgan is the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and one of the leading specialists on the history of the Atlantic world.
Additional information on Morgan’s work on slavery at Mount Vernon is available from George Washington University.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Homewood Museum, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, July 2008.
Located on the Johns Hopkins University campus, Homewood Museum offers visitors the chance to explore diverse interests in tremendous depth and provides an intimate look at life in early-19th-century Baltimore. The museum’s collections consist of fine and decorative arts objects representative of the furnishings during the Carroll family’s occupancy (1802–1833). Some works have direct affiliation with the Carroll family. The majority of the collection is American, with a strong concentration in high-quality Baltimore furniture of the period. English ceramics, silver, and furniture, as well as items of Chinese and French manufacture, are reflective of the imports available in early-19th century Baltimore.
Exhibition | Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits, 1700–1860
From left to right: John Trumball, Portrait of Alexander Hamilton, ca. 1804–08 (Museum of the City of New York, 72.31.3); Nicholas Biddle Kittell, Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Henry Augustus Carter, ca. 1845 (Museum of the City of New York, 62.234.12); and George Peter Alexander Healy, Portrait of Caroline Slidell Perry Belmont (Mrs. August Belmont, Sr.), ca. 1855 (Museum of the City of New York, 51.317).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Press release for the exhibition now on view at MCNY:
Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits, 1700–1860
Museum of the City of New York, 5 February — 18 November 2016
Curated by Bruce Weber
The Museum of the City of New York presents Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits, 1700–1860, an ensemble of iconic New Yorkers presented by intricate and elegant portraits, which were commissioned as status symbols and painted by the very best artists a young nation had to offer. The exhibition opened to the public on Friday, February 5, 2016.
Visitors can see familiar figures, such as the renowned John Trumbull portrait of Alexander Hamilton that inspired the image on our ten-dollar bill, and can also come face-to-face with New Yorkers like Richard Varick, of Varick Street in Greenwich Village, and the Brooks family, of Brooks Brothers fame, whose names are part of the city’s fabric but whose stories remain untold to a broad audience. This unique exhibition draws from the City Museum’s permanent collection to reveal the evolution of a dynamic city through its leading merchants, politicians and patrons, as well as the development of portraiture itself, one of New York’s oldest visual art forms.
“New York City’s distinctive character and unique personality have always come from its citizens,” said Whitney Donhauser, Ronay Menschel Director of the Museum of the City of New York. “This exhibition explores over 150 years of city life through the lives of many of history’s most celebrated New Yorkers, offering visitors an intensely engaging and deeply personal interaction with the past.”
Picturing Prestige relies on the people who shaped New York City in its formative years to tell the story of how the city grew from its colonial foundations through the Revolutionary War and blossomed into a mercantile powerhouse in the mid-19th century. The namesakes of Varick and McDougal Streets in Greenwich Village are brought to life by centuries-old paintings of Richard Varick and Alexander McDougall. Brooks Brothers is a household name in present-day America, and Picturing Prestige will display the early Brooks family in the light they wished to be shown in their own time.
The exhibition is also a study in the art of portraiture and New York City’s place as an artistic hub, showcasing over 40 oil paintings to go along with a dozen miniatures—small portraits kept as keepsakes, which were the original version of family wallet photos. The show is organized in three sections that demonstrate not only the growth and transformation of the city itself, but also the changing nature of portraiture as an art form, the city’s emergence as an artistic center, and the ways in which the city’s elite viewed itself over time:
• Colonial Foundations, 1700–1775
• Young Nationhood, 1777–1815
• The City Rises, 1815–1860
The scope of the exhibition, curated by Bruce Weber, City Museum Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, is made possible by the wealth of the City Museum’s permanent collection, offering portraits of iconic New Yorkers as painted by the leading artists of their respective generations. The artists themselves reveal nearly as much history as their subjects do, from the Duyckinck family demonstrating that the best painters in America in the 17th century were not from America, to John Singleton Copley personifying the rise of fine art in this country over one hundred years later.
“The portraits in this exhibition are works of art in and of themselves, but they are also windows into the lives and times of legendary New Yorkers,” added Weber. “In thinking about who commissioned these paintings and the artists who brought their subjects to life, we can tell the story of a city emerging from the throes of revolution to lead a young nation towards its rightful place at the vanguard of the artistic world. Today, New York City’s role as a cultural center is undisputed. Picturing Prestige helps explain how we got there.”
The conservation of many of the works and their related frames featured in Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits, 1700–1860 was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as was digital photography and cataloguing of many of the paintings.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From MCNY:
Hamilton and Friends: Portraiture in Early New York
Museum of the City of New York, Thursday, 11 February 2016, 6:30 pm
Alexander Hamilton was a man of many faces: politician, economist, revolutionary—and rumored philanderer. After he was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, Hamilton’s widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, worked tirelessly to defend her husband’s reputation. Today we are familiar with likenesses of Alexander Hamilton—including one that is on the ten dollar bill. This panel will explore how portraiture served in the decades after the American Revolution as a critical tool in shaping and canonizing the public image of leaders and notables. Join us for a conversation about how the Hamiltons and other members of the colonial New York elite commissioned portraits to use both as status symbols and a means to craft their public image. This program delves into the themes of our exhibition Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits, 1700–1860.
• William H. Gerdts, Professor Emeritus of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center
• David Jaffee, Professor and Head of New Media Research, Bard Graduate Center
• Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Brett Palfreyman, Assistant Professor, History Department, Wagner College
• Bruce Weber (moderator), Museum’s Curator of Picturing Prestige: New York Portraits, 1700–1860
Study Day | Exploring Lee Priory: A Child of Strawberry Hill
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From Eventbrite:
Exploring Lee Priory: A Child of Strawberry Hill
Taddington Manor, Taddington, Near Cutsdean, Gloucestershire, 1 March 2016
Organized by Peter Lindfield
This study day, based at Architectural Heritage, Taddington Manor, Gloucestershire, explores the architecture of James Wyatt (1746–1813), the most famous architect of late Georgian Britain. The day will feature talks by experts on the architecture, interiors and furniture by James Wyatt, including the development of his architecturally-aware Gothic style at Lee Priory, Kent, before his most famous house, Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire.
The relationship between Lee Priory and the most famous Gothic Revival house in Georgian Britain, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, will also be addressed. The conservator who worked on Strawberry Hill and a second, previously unknown, room saved from Lee Priory before its demolition in 1953, will speak about Wyatt’s work.
The highlight of the day will be the close examination of the second surviving room from Lee Priory, the Library Ante-Chamber. This room is currently for sale and the study day offers perhaps the last chance to be able to get up close and examine, under the guidance of experts, one of the most exciting Wyatt-related discoveries of the recent past.
Registration (£25) includes lunch and refreshments at Taddington Manor. Please do not hesitate to get in contact with the organiser, Dr Peter N. Lindfield, at: peter.lindfield@stirling.ac.uk. At time of booking, please advise of dietary or access requirements. Tuesday, 1 March 2016 from 10:30 to 16:30.
Research Lunch | Geological Landscape in Britain
Drawings of minerals arranged in families according with the system of Professor Jameson, 1830–36
(Special Collections at Edinburgh University)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the Paul Mellon Centre:
Allison Ksiazkiewicz | Primitive Forms and Prospects: Geological
Landscape in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 5 February 2016
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British mineralogists and geologists appropriated different forms of inquiry such as art and architecture to help them wrestle with the natural and artificial aspects that informed their scientific sensibilities. The relationship between humanity and Nature, as debated in philosophical and artistic circles, paralleled discussions in earth studies and the developing new science of geology. While aesthetic categories such as the picturesque enabled artists to negotiate and articulate attitudes towards Nature that emphasized harmony and balance, these same techniques in scientific depiction cultivated and supported a sense of empirical vision of geological landscapes.
The mineral collections of Sir Charles Greville (1749–1809), Sir John St Aubyn (1758–1839) and Sir Abraham Hume (1749–1838), and A Geological Map of England and Wales by George Bellas Greenough (1778–1855) will be used to explore issues of art and aesthetics in the making of mineralogical and geological knowledge. Greville, St Aubyn and Hume were each influential figures in artistic and scientific communities and commissioned the mineralogist and French émigré Comte de Bournon (1751–1825) to catalogue their respective mineral cabinets. As a student of crystallography, Bournon classified specimens according to basic crystallized shapes that functioned as universal primitive forms. Geologists motivated by mineralogical interpretations of the earth understood geo-landscape through the interpretation of these basic elements. The production of a coloured geological map of England and Wales was one of the first projects undertaken by the Geological Society of London. Greenough, founder and first President of the Society, supported chemical and mineralogical interpretations of earth structure, and used colour to represent the relative positions of strata while maintaining a ‘naturalistic’ palette in the depiction of formations on his map.
All are welcome! However, places are limited, so if you would like to attend please contact our Events Manager, Ella Fleming on events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk. This is a free event, and lunch is provided.
Friday, 5 Februay 2016, 12:30–2:00pm
Lecture Room, Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA
Enfilade 
leave a comment