Enfilade

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.

This year’s Lewis Walpole Library Lecture takes place on Friday:

The Ladies Library: Or, Benjamin Franklin’s Sister’s Books
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 8 November 2013

The Twentieth Annual Lewis Walpole Library Lecture, 5:30pm

Professor Jill Lepore, National Book Award finalist and author of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, will discuss her work reconstituting the lost library of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane (1712–1794). Most of what Jane read, she borrowed, but she was an avid and discriminating reader, writing to her brother, “I Read as much as I Dare.”

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize; The Mansion of Happiness, a finalist for the Carnegie Medal; The Whites of Their Eyes, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and The Story of America. Her 2008 novel, Blindspot, written jointly with historian Jane Kamensky, was also a Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. In October 2013, Book of Ages, Lepore’s landmark biography of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister, was
published and nominated for the National Book Award.

The lecture is free and open to the public.

From the Sydney Intellectual History Network (SIHN) at the University of Sydney:

Laura Auricchio | Hero and Villain: Lafayette’s Legacies
University of Sydney, 12 November 2013

Tuesday, 12 November 2013, 6:00 pm, New Law School Foyer

Americans have long hailed the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) as an extraordinarily admirable figure—a wealthy French nobleman who, at the age of 19, volunteered to fight in the War of Independence and prodded his king to support the rebel cause. But in France, Lafayette is seen by partisans on both the left and the right as an opportunist, a misguided dreamer, even a traitor. In her talk, Auricchio will consider how Lafayette, a man who lived by a principle that he called “moderation,” could have garnered such disparate reputations. While part of the answer lies in the very different roles that he played and decisions that he made in the French and American revolutions, this talk focuses on the importance of visual, material, and print cultures in shaping and sustaining Lafayette’s divided legacies.

Laura Auricchio is Associate Professor of Art History and Dean of the School of Undergraduate Studies at The New School in New York. She has published widely on French and American visual culture in the Age of Revolution and on topics in twentieth-century American art. Her next book, The Marquis, a visually informed biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution, will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2014.

This event is co-sponsored by Sydney Ideas and the Sydney Intellectual History Network (SIHN@Sydney). For further information about SIHN@Sydney, please contact Jennifer Milam, Professor of Art History and Eighteenth-Century Studies (jennifer.milam@sydney.edu.au).

Information on the full 2013–14 seminar series on the History of Libraries is available from the Institute of English Studies:

John Goldfinch: The Survival of the Old Royal Library Collections, 1660–1760
British Library, London, 3 December 2013

A series of research seminars on the history of libraries, freely open for anyone to attend, has been organized by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. They are jointly sponsored by the Institute of English Studies, the Institute of Historical Research, and the Library & Information History Group of CILIP. The December 3rd session is to be held in the Board Room of the British Library, Euston Rd., St. Pancras. Everyone attending is asked to meet at 5.20 at the British Library’s reception desk on the ground floor. As the Library needs to know numbers in advance, if you are intending to attend, please send a message to Jon Millington, john.millington@sas.sc.uk.

Please forgive the short notice, but news of the event is a useful marker of the launch of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s College London in partnership with the British Museum (stay-tuned for the Centre’s website). –CH

Enlightenment Bodies – from Apollo to Automata
King’s College London, The Strand, London, 15 October 2013

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The Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s in partnership with the British Museum, presents Enlightenment Bodies – from Apollo to Automata, on Tuesday, 15 October 2013, 19.30–20.30 at the Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, Strand Campus, King’s College London.

Both the aesthetics and the workings of the human body were key themes of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. This is, therefore, an ideal topic with which to launch King’s College’s new interdisciplinary research centre, which will bring together our expertise in this area across a wide range of departments, and will build on our close relationship with the Enlightenment Gallery curatorial team at the British Museum. Join us for an exploration of the importance of the human body to Enlightenment life and thought with a panel of experts:

Athena Leoussi, University of Reading, Co-director of European Studies, University of Reading and author of
Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-Century England and France (1998);
Anna Maerker, Senior Lecturer in History of Medicine, King’s College London, author of Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815 (2011);
Simon Schaffer, Professor of History of Science, University of Cambridge and TV presenter of Mechanical Marvels and Clockwork Dreams, a recent programme for BBC 4.

The panel discussion will be followed by a drinks reception. The event is free, though booking is required.

From the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU:

Anne Lafont | Proposals for an Atlantic Portraiture: Paris, Philadelphia, Saint-Domingue, ca. 1800
Institute of Fine Arts–NYU, New York, 8 October 2013

Anne Lafont will consider visual cultures of alterity in the era of Atlantic Revolutions (eighteenth and nineteenth century). First, she will identify an unrecognized body of works and discuss the opportunity of studying it as a whole. Next she will address the pictorial and academic category of portraiture when discussing images of Haitian heroes. Finally, she will consider how three stylistic communities – Paris, Philadelphia, Saint-Domingue – are working together across continents

Anne Lafont is an Associate Professor of Modern Art History at the University of Paris-Est Marne la Vallée and Chief Editor of Perspective, la revue de l’INHA (French National Institute of Art History). A former fellow at the Villa Medici, she devoted her thesis to the painter Anne-Louis Girodet and has since worked on artistic theory and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual arts, with a special attention to the revolutionary period, race and aesthetics, and gender issues.

Tuesday, October 8, 12:30pm
Institute of Fine Arts-NYU, Loeb Room, 1 East 78th Street, New York
Reservations are required; please click here.

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Rendez-vous

In Fall 2013, the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU inaugurates Rendez-vous, a seminar on French art (18th to 20th centuries) held monthly throughout the 2013–2014 academic year. 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 (2013–2015). 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.

Upcoming Lectures

8 November 2013 | Chonja Lee, University of Zurich
L’Âme de Lotus: Floral Animations in French Art around 1900

9 December 2013 | Merel van Tilburg, Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris
Embroidery and Tapestry as History Painting in Belgium and France around 1900: Colonialist Exhibition Pieces by Hélène de Rudder and Georges Rochegrosse

17 February 2014 |Carole Blumenfeld, Palais Fesch-Musée des Beaux-arts d’Ajaccio
Marguerite Gérard: The Most Successful Genre Painter of her Time