Enfilade

From Sciences Po (as noted at Le Blog de L’ApAhAu). . .

Anne Lafont — Sororités, ou l’alternative au motto de 1789: liberté, égalité, fraternité
Sciences Po, salle de conférences, 56 rue Jacob, Paris, 2 November 2011

Henriette-Lorimier, "Self-Portrait," 1801

Il est au moins deux registres où la question de la sororité peut faire sens dans un séminaire consacré à la passion égalitaire de la société post-révolutionnaire et de ses implications dans la vie culturelle. La sororité des arts, de la peinture et de la poésie, fut le leitmotiv de la théorie artistique à l’époque moderne. De même, le sort public des femmes engagées dans la création fut autant considéré, pendant la Révolution française, par les femmes artistes que par les femmes de lettres, à l’instar de Germaine de Staël, qui n’est pas étrangère, d’ailleurs, à la constitution de la pensée tocquevillienne. Par ailleurs, la sororité désigne le processus de communautarisation des artistes femmes en 1800, face au tout masculin initié par la société révolutionnaire des clubs et des assemblées, comme l’ont bien montré les nombreux travaux sur le genre depuis le livre pionnier de Geneviève Fraisse, Muse de la Raison Démocratie et exclusion des femmes en France (1989). Néanmoins, nombreuses furent celles qui saisirent l’opportunité de l’abolition de la censure à l’exposition publique annuelle du Louvre : le Salon, en 1791, pour investir l’espace public de la création et risquer la professionnalisation à une époque de redéfinition radicale du marché de l’art, de la commande privée et de la commande publique. En un mot, ces femmes artistes s’employèrent à suivre des stratégies de subsistance à un moment d’instabilité, où les rivalités entre artistes, en général, s’étaient accrues. Quelles furent alors les solutions imaginatives de ces sœurs de plumes et de pinceaux? En quoi leurs expériences inaugurales forment un paradigme propice à comprendre l’avènement de l’artiste moderne?

At the Dallas Museum of Art:

The Eighth Annual Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture
Louis Léopold Boilly: Between Genre and Portraiture
Dallas Museum of Art, 3 November  2011

Louis-Léopold Boilly, "A Family Admiring a Portrait of a Lady in an Interior," ca. 1790, oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 21 in. (44.45 x 53.34 cm), The Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation

Focusing on Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Woman Showing her Portrait, this lecture explores the richly imaginative interchange between genre painting and portraiture in the eighteenth century. Join distinguished scholar Dr. Susan L. Siegfried, Denise Riley Professor of the History of Art and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, as she describes how the easy exchanges between the real and the fantasy elements of these two categories of subject matter evidently facilitated the imaginative participation of patrons and viewers in ascribing meanings to them.

Thursday, November 3
7:30 p.m., C3 Theater
Included in general admission to the Museum

From The Lewis Walpole Library:

The Eighteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture by Amanda Vickery
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 21 October 2011

“Family Life Makes Tories of Us All”: Love and Power at Home in Georgian England

To see the state in miniature one need only go home. Husbands were to govern wives, masters and mistresses to rule servants, and parents to discipline children. The years after 1688 saw the acceptance of new ideas about political authority and social manners, but the household hierarchy endured regardless. Notoriously Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau did not include every adult individual in their democracy of consent, but rather every male head of household, who was seen to represent the interests of his patriarchal entourage. The British considered themselves enemies to tyranny, disparaging and caricaturing ‘oriental despotism’ in foreign families as confirmation of barbarity, but local servitude passed almost unnoticed by political ideas. I have yet to encounter a single gentleman musing on whether it might be possible to reconsider his domestic rule in the light of the new political ideas. ‘Family life’, it was observed in 1779, ‘makes Tories of us all… see if any Whig wishes to see the beautiful Utopian expansion of power within
his own walls’.

The new political ideas which advocated government by consent did nothing to revolutionize the structures of domestic authority, but the content and meaning of domestic life was transformed over the eighteenth century. New ideals of politeness revolutionized domestic manners and interactions amongst the modestly propertied, while the vogue for sensibility in novels and paintings inflated expectations about affection and happiness at home. What then was the balance of love and power in eighteenth-century marriage and family life? And how did dependents live with the contradictions? ‘Do you not admire these lovers of liberty!’ snapped Elizabeth Montagu in 1765 ‘I am not sure that Cato did not kick his wife.’

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Amanda Vickery is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, 2009) and The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale, 1998) which won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman/History Today prize. She is the editor of Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 1991) and Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America (Yale, 2006). She writes and presents documentaries for BBC2 and BBC radio 4. In 2011, she judged the Samuel Johnson prize.

For the lecture’s calendar listing at the YCBA click here

The Association of Art Historians (the British equivalent of CAA), has launched a series of free events intended for a general audience and held in a pub. The next talk, at The Monarch, is to be given by Hannah Williams on September 26th. -CH.

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Hannah Williams, The Violent Suicide of François Lemoyne: An 18th-Century Art History Mystery
The Monarch Pub, London, 26 September 2011

18th-Century French Sword (Photo Source: V&A Collections)

As part of the AAH’s commitment to bringing the best in cutting-edge art-historical research to a wider community, we are pleased to be able to announce a hopefully-regular Art History in the Pub series of talks, lectures and events. Our talks present a selection of the wide variety of topics, periods, methods and approaches common in art historical study, and are aimed at a generalist audience.

Paris, 4 June 1737: the celebrated artist François Lemoyne commits suicide. It started as an ordinary day. Lemoyne had been to his studio to give a lesson to his students and taken a meal with his cousin. But then events took a macabre turn. Lemoyne retired to his bedroom, carefully locked the door, took up his sword, and proceeded to inflict upon his body multiple fatal stab wounds, before dropping to the floor and dying in a pool of blood.

Lemoyne’s death shocked and horrified his family and colleagues, and it has since presented something of a mystery for art historians. Why should this incredibly successful artist – first painter to Louis XV – have wanted to kill himself only months after completing what is now considered his magnum opus: the ceiling of the Apotheosis of Hercules at the Château de Versailles? Was it over money? Professional jealousy? A madness induced by lack of recognition? Could it have been murder? Or if it really was suicide, then how did Lemoyne complete his gruesome task?

With most of the clues now lost deep in the past, some art-historical sleuthing is necessary in order to retrieve the traces. In this paper, I attempt to solve these perplexing mysteries through a forensic and art-historical analysis of the object responsible: Lemoyne’s sword. Using police reports, autopsies, and witness statements, I piece together the final hours of Lemoyne’s life and offer a material reconstruction of the now lost fatal weapon, exploring what Lemoyne’s sword looked like, what he did with it, and what it meant to him. Drawn from a larger study investigating what artists’ personal possessions reveal about their everyday lives, this case explores the limits and possibilities of object-biography, and presents an exercise in recovering the material history of an object when that object no longer materially exists.

Can art history solve the crime? Come along and find out!

Hannah Williams is a Junior Research Fellow in Art History at St John’s College, Oxford. A specialist in 17th- and 18th-century French art, Hannah completed her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010 and previously held a doctoral fellowship at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. She is currently writing a book on artists’ portraits and self-portraits entitled Face-to-Face with the Académie Royale: An Ethnography in Portraiture, which combines art-historical and anthropological approaches to investigate the culture of an early modern community of artists. Hannah is also researching a post-doctoral project – Painters and Parish Life – which traces the local social networks of artists in 18th-century Paris through a study of parish churches and religious art. With Katie Scott, she is writing a book on Artists’ Things, which offers an alternative guide to the material culture of 18th-century French artists through close studies of their personal possessions.

More information about the Art History in the Pub series is available here»

Even if you’re not up for the whole week-long workshop, Monday’s public seminar on eighteenth-century shoes sounds like lots of fun. I stumbled upon the event through the 18th-Century Blog: Fashion and Culture from the 1700s, which in turn links to A Fashionable Frolick. As for getting straight to the source, we have Nicole at The Mantua Maker to thank. The following description comes from her website:

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Workshop on Making Eighteenth-Century Shoes
New York, 20-27 August 2011

Led by Brett Walker, an apprentice shoemaker at Colonial Williamsburg

. . . There will be an eight-hour stitching workshop on the Saturday prior to the full class (20 August) that will be open to the publick. This part is a prerequisite, of course, to the full shoemaking workshop, and the fee is included in the total class fees for students of the entire class. However, this day will also be open to the general public as well for a stand-alone $60-per-person fee. We will cover measuring and making up of threads, attaching bristles, shoemaker’s stitch, round-closing, split-and-lift stitches, “subcutaneous” whip-stitches, stabbing stitches, & perhaps some miscellaney like how to make black wax, &c.

Sunday the 21st will be a short recess, and then the shoemaking class will begin in earnest at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning, 22 August. The first hour-and-an-half or two hours will be a brief seminar on men’s and women’s shoe fashions, ca. 1700-1800, in which we’ll be attempting to “raise the bar” of the attendee’s awareness of stylistic and construction details in the various decades of the 18th-Century. This will most likely be open to the public for a $35 stand-alone fee, but that has not been confirmed.

At ten o’clock, we will take a brief break, after which those folks who are taking the full six-day class will dive right in to making instruction, wrapping up by five o’clock on Saturday, 27 August. When the workshop is completed, the students should have at least one shoe finished and perhaps a second one started.

Domenico Remps, "Trompe-l'oeil with an Open Cabinet" (detail), ca. 1700 (Florence: Museo dell'Opificio delle Pietre Dure)

From CRASSH at the University of Cambridge:

Things: Material Cultures of the Long Eighteen Century
Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, ongoing series

The eighteenth century was the century of ‘stuff.’ Public production, collection, display and consumption of objects grew in influence, popularity, and scale. The form, function, and use of objects, ranging from scientific and musical instruments to weaponry and furnishings were influenced by distinct features of the time. Eighteenth-century knowledge was not divided into strict disciplines, in fact practice across what we now see as academic boundaries was essential to material creation. This seminar series will use an approach based on objects to encourage us to consider the unity of ideas of the long-eighteenth century, to emphasise the lived human experience of technology and art, and the global dimension of material culture. We will re-discover the interdisciplinary thinking through which eighteenth-century material culture was conceived, gaining new perspectives on the period through its artefacts. Subscribe to the group mailing list at https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/crassh-things

Conveners
Katy Barrett  Co-Secretary  (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
Sophie Waring  Co-Secretary (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
Adrian Leonard  Treasurer  (Affiliate Research Student, Winton Centre for Financial History)
Susannah Brooke  (Faculty of History)
Molly Dorkin  (Department of History of Art)
Simon Layton  (Faculty of History)
Eoin Phillips  (Department of History and Philosophy of Science)
Jonathan Yarker  (Department of History of Art)

Faculty Advisors
Dr Melisssa Calaresu (Faculty of History)
Dr Patricia Fara (Director of Studies, Dept of History and Philosophy of Science)
Dr Mark Goldie (Chairman and Reader in British Intellectual History, Fac of History)
Dr William O’Reilly (Associate Director, Centre for History and Economics)
Professor Simon Schaffer (Professor of History of Science, HPS)
Professor Liba Taub (Director and Curator of the Whipple Museum, HPS)
Professor Nick Thomas (Prof of Historical Anthropology, Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)
Dr Richard Dunn (Curator of the History of Navigation, National Maritime Museum)
Dr Catherine Eagleton (Curator of Modern Money, British Museum)
Dr Kim Sloan (Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Galleries and Curator of British Watercolours and Drawings before 1880, British Museum)

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The fall schedule:

Things: Material Cultures of the Long 18th Century
Programme for Michaelmas Term 2011

Each seminar will feature two talks each considering the same type of object from different perspectives.

A R T E F A C T S
Tuesday, 11 Oct 2011
Professor Simon Schaffer (HPS, Cambridge) and Professor Nick Thomas (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge)

B O T A N Y
Tuesday, 25 Oct 2011
Dr Kim Sloan (British Museum) and Dr Charlie Jarvis (Natural History Museum)

S C I E N T I F I C  I N S T R U M E N T S
Tuesday, 8 Nov 2011
Dr Richard Dunn (National Maritime Museum) and Dr Alexi Baker (HPS, Cambridge)

C O I N S
Tuesday, 22 Nov 2011
Dr Catherine Eagleton (British Museum) and Dr Martin Allen (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

As noted at Treasure Hunt (with lovely photos), Selvedge Magazine, in association with the National Trust, is hosting an evening on linen. From the website invitation:

We Love Linen
Fenton House, Hampstead (London), 28 June 2011

Linen cupboard at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire ©NTPL, Nadia Mackenzie / Exterior of Fenton House ©NTPL, Matthew Antrobus

Join Selvedge at Fenton House in Hampstead on Tuesday 28 June. The charming 17th-century merchant’s house which has remained virtually unaltered over the last 300 years of continuous occupation, will provide a period backdrop to our evening dedicated to the beauty of linen. And if the weather is fine there will be a short time to explore the beautifully kept gardens, enjoy a glass of wine and strawberries and cream before the talks begin.

Our first speaker is Amanda Vickery, author of  Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England and our “The Lure of White Linen” article, issue 39, page 22. Amanda will speak about the role of household linens in Georgian England. She will be followed by Elizabeth Baer, who will be sharing her lifelong passion for linen, and the forming of her collection. There will be time after the talks to view some of Elizabeth’s
antique linens and a selection will be available to purchase.
Ticket includes entrance to the house, glass of wine, and
strawberries and cream. Tickets, £35, concessions* £30.

Tickets are available here»