Enfilade

From The Newberry:

Nina Dubin | Love, Trust, Risk: Painting ‘The Papered Century’
The Newberry Library, Chicago, 19 April 2014

The eighteenth-century vogue for pictures of women perusing love letters not only marked the age’s affection for epistolarity, it also emblematized the “papered century,” named for the period’s unprecedented proliferation of monetary notes and credit instruments. Dwelling upon the fragility of paper promises, epistolary pictures vivify the precariousness of trust and the romanticization of risk on the eve of modernity.

Saturday, April 19, 2:00–4:00pm

The Newberry Library Eighteenth-Century seminar is designed to foster research and inquiry across the scholarly disciplines in eighteenth-century studies. It aims to provide a methodologically diverse forum for work that engages our ongoing discussions and debates along this historical and critical terrain. Attendance at all events is free and open to the public but in order to receive the pre-circulated paper, participants must register online in advance via this link. A reception follows each presentation. It is also the custom of the seminar to gather at a restaurant in the Newberry neighborhood to continue our conversation. If you would like to join us for dinner after any session, please email Lisa Freeman at lfreeman@uic.edu.

Timothy Campbell, University of Chicago
Lisa A. Freeman, University of Illinois at Chicago
John Shanahan, DePaul University
Helen Thompson, Northwestern University

From the UK’s Institute of Conservation (ICON). . .

Rica Jones on Ramsay’s Technique in Context and Perspective
Grand Robing Room, Freemason’s Hall, London, 16 April 2014

Allan Ramsay took London’s art world by storm when he set up his painting practice in Covent Garden in the late 1730s, and his work remained fashionable for the next two decades. One aspect of his portraiture was much commented on—he painted the faces in shades of red before applying the more naturalistic flesh tones. This paper was first written for the catalogue of the exhibition Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment at The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow (October 2013 to January 2014). The author will illustrate this feature of Ramsay’s work, examine its significance to Ramsay, and place it in the context of the times.

Rica Jones trained as an art historian before studying the conservation of paintings. Until 2012 she worked as a conservator at the Tate Gallery and published extensively on techniques of painting in Britain from the 16th through the 18th centuries. She continues to work in both fields in the private sector.

Wednesday, 16 April 2014 in the Grand Robing Room at Freemason’s Hall, 60 Great Queen Street London WC2B 5AZ. Close to both Covent Garden and Holborn Tube Stations. Doors open at 6pm. Talk 6.30–8pm. Tickets: ICON members: £10, non-members: £15. Students £5 (student card required to be shown on the door). Free wine and cheese including in price of ticket.

Please register by sending your name and stating if you are an ICON member. Your name must be on the security list no later than Monday, 14 April 2014. RSVP Clare Finn +44 20 7937 1895 or finnclare@aol.com.

Rendez-vous: An International Seminar on French Art, 18th–20th Centuries

Rendez-vous is a seminar on French art (18th–20th centuries) held monthly throughout the 2013–14 academic year at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. International scholars are invited to present their research in an informal and creative setting for approximately 30 minutes, followed by an open discussion with students and colleagues. Rendez-vous focuses on French art in the broadest sense: ‘French’ is interpreted in an extensive way, including global exchanges, political dimension and colonial history, and ‘Art’ includes painting, architecture and sculpture, but also material and visual culture. Rendez-vous offers an occasion to learn about current innovative research by international and engaging scholars. The seminar aims to open up an exchange of methodologies, thoughts and ideas in a participatory atmosphere.

Rendez-vous is organized by Noémie Etienne, IFA/Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2013–15). These lectures begin at 12:30pm in the Loeb room at the Institute of Fine Arts. They are open to the public, but RSVPs are required.

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Frédérique Baumgartner | Women Artists in Hubert Robert’s Views of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie
Institute of Fine Art, New York University, Friday, 14 March 2014

Hubert Robert (1733–1808), one of the most versatile artists of his generation, managed to combine the careers of a painter and museum curator during the French Revolution. Using his painter’s talent to express his curatorial vision, Robert painted numerous views of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, which opened to the public for the first time in 1793. This paper examines the place that Robert attributed to women artists in these views, in light of the rules and regulations that he and other Louvre curators were in the process of developing for this new public space. In doing so, it aims to assess how the Revolution’s gendered discourse pervaded the construction of the museum space and the degree to which Robert’s representation of women artists in the Grande Galerie challenged this discourse.

Frédérique Baumgartner is a lecturer and the director of MA in Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2011 and was a Postdoctoral Mellon Fellow at Columbia in 2011–13. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art, with a particular emphasis on the convergence of art and politics. Her current book project, stemming from her dissertation, examines the politicization of the art of Hubert Robert during the French Revolution in relation to notions of cultural experience.

Open to the public, RSVP required. For reservations click here

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Jessica Fripp | Caricature and Rebellion in Rome in the Eighteenth Century
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Tuesday, 8 April 2014

Winning the Prix de Rome was the capstone in an aspiring artist’s career in eighteenth-century France. But alongside the professional training a stay in the Eternal City offered, studying abroad also provided artists an opportunity to escape the hierarchy and competition of the Royal Academy and forge friendships with other young artists from all over Europe. This paper examines the effect of these new networks on artistic practice in Rome. It focuses on a group of caricatures produced by the French painter François-André Vincent, the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Stouf, and the Swedish sculptor Johan-Tobias Sergel. These caricatures were copied, etched, and exchanged between the artists represented in them, and served to define these artists as a group of friends. Fripp argues that caricature was a form of representation well-suited to memorializing the homosocial bonds formed in Rome, and an act of rebellion for these young artists as they transitioned from students to full-fledge artists.

Jessica Fripp is a Post Doctoral Fellow in Material and Visual Culture at Parsons the New School for Design. She received her MA from Williams College and a PhD from the University of Michigan with a dissertation entitled  “Portraits of Artists and the Social Commerce of Friendship in Eighteenth-Century France.” Her work examines the intersection between visual culture and sociability in the eighteenth century, focusing on the role art played in creating, defining, and sustaining personal relationships.

Open to the public, RSVP required. For reservations click here

This evening’s installment in the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies:

Richard Taws | Proofs of Life: The Dauphin and his Doubles in Nineteenth-Century France
Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Keynes Library, London, 29 January 2014

The next event of the spring term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Richard Taws (UCL) presenting on ‘Proofs of Life: The Dauphin and his Doubles in Nineteenth-Century France’ on Wednesday 29 January 2014 from 6.00 to 8.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

This paper will consider the authenticating agency attributed to images of the dauphin Louis-Charles, the son and heir of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, as they circulated globally in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Louis-Charles died at the age of ten in the Temple prison in 1795, yet rumours soon spread that he had been freed in a secret royalist escape plot and continued to live somewhere, most probably in the French colonies or North America. During the course of the nineteenth century the numerous images of Louis-Charles produced before, during and after the French Revolution were invoked regularly as the primary standard of proof against which to judge the many imposters who subsequently came forward from around the world, accompanied by lurid tales of adventure, to announce themselves the ‘lost’ dauphin. The appropriation of eighteenth-century images of Louis-Charles by these pretenders, as well as the paintings, prints and photographs they had made of themselves, were, in a rapidly transforming media ecology, closely connected to competing claims about the utility of different media in the production of the French past.

From The Institute of Conservation (ICON). . .

Alexandra Gent | Reynolds, Replication and Restoration:
Some Results from the Wallace Collection Reynolds Research Project
Grand Robing Room, Freemason’s Hall, 60 Great Queen Street, London 27 February 2014

Joshua Reynolds, The Strawberry Girl, 1772–73
(London: Wallace Collection)

The four-year Wallace Collection Reynolds Research Project is funded by The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Wallace Collection’s Benefactors and donors. The Project will investigate Reynolds’ techniques and materials by examining twelve of his paintings in the Collection. The project is a collaboration between the Wallace Collection and the Conservation and Scientific Departments at the National Gallery.

The Project’s recent investigations have helped develop a better understanding of two elements of Reynolds’s practice: replication of images and the restoration of paintings. This talk will draw on historical sources coupled with technical analysis of paintings to explore these activities in Reynolds’s busy studio.

Replication
It is a well-known that Reynolds’s studio practice incorporated the production of copies. Often made by students or copyists, there is, however, anecdotal evidence Reynolds himself sometimes worked simultaneously on more than one version of the same subject; The Strawberry Girl may be one such painting. Technical analysis of the Wallace Collection’s Strawberry Girl will be discussed in relation to Reynolds’s own technical notes and contemporary accounts of his practice, together with technical analysis of Tate’s Age of Innocence, which overlies another version of the Strawberry Girl.

Restoration
The Wallace Collection’s portrait of Baltasar Carlos in Black and Silver, was owned by Reynolds and is thought to have been restored by him. The portrait’s technical analysis will be presented showing how its technique relates to that of Velazquez, what can be revealed about Reynolds’s restoration of the painting and how this compares to the analysis of Reynolds’s materials.

Alexandra Gent joined the Wallace Collection in December 2010 as Paintings Conservator for the Reynolds Research Project. She trained as a paintings conservator at The University of Canberra, Australia, graduating with a Bachelor of Applied Science in the Conservation of Cultural Materials in 1999. Since coming to the UK in 2000 she has been employed by English Heritage, Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, as well as private studios in London and Oxfordshire. She is an accredited member of Icon and has a Masters in Culture, Policy and Management from City University London (2008).

Venue: In the Grand Robing Room at Freemason’s Hall, 60 Great Queen Street London WC2B 5AZ. Close to both Covent Garden and Holborn Tube Stations. Doors open at 6pm. Talk 6.30–8pm. Tickets: Icon members: £10, non-members: £15. Free wine and cheese including in price of ticket. Please register by sending your name and stating if you are an Icon member. Your name must be on the security list no later than Tuesday, 25th February 2014. RSVP Clare Finn +44 20 7937 1895 or finnclare@aol.com.

Later this month at The Wallace in connection with its History of Collecting Seminars:

Mia Jackson | Boulle the Connoisseur: ‘An Incurable Mania’
André-Charles Boulle as a Collector of Old Master Drawings
The Wallace Collection, London, 27 January 2014

André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732) was the most renowned ébéniste of his time, giving his name to the marquetry of turtleshell and brass that he brought to such perfection. He was also a voracious collector of works on paper and despite the success of his furniture, he died in debt. This is unsurprising given that the great collector, Pierre-Jean Mariette, his near-contemporary, said of him: ‘there was never a sale of prints and drawings at which he was not present and buying, often without having the means to pay’.

This seminar will focus on Boulle’s drawings—the types of  drawings Boulle collected, the rôle drawings may have played in the production of his furniture and the importance of his collection in relation to those of his contemporaries and clientèle. This will reveal a collection much more complex than the ‘source délicieuse’ beloved of furniture scholars, that included not only the works of his fellow ‘illustres’ in the Louvre, but also works by artists such as Raphael, van Dyck, the Carraccis and a much-regretted lost theoretical notebook by Rubens.

Admission is free and booking is not required.

Mia Jackson (Queen Mary, University of London)
Monday, 5:30, 27 January  2014
Lecture Theatre, The Wallace Collection

From the Paul Mellon Centre:

Tom Edwards (Abbot & Holder, Ltd) | Amongst the Grand Tourists:
Richard Cooper Jnr’s (1740–1822) Album of Italian Drawings
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 6 December 2013

Research lunches are intended to be informal events in which individual doctoral students and scholars talk for half-an-hour about their projects, and engage in animated discussion with their peers. A sandwich lunch, will be provided by the Centre. We hope that this series will help foster a sense of community amongst PhD students and junior colleagues from a wide range of institutions, and bring researchers together in a collegial and friendly atmosphere.

In order to help us plan for these events, it is  essential to check availability by emailing the Centre’s Events Co-ordinator, Ella Fleming (efleming@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk) at least two days in advance.