Enfilade

Upcoming at the Mellon Centre:

Louis Nelson | Global Houses of the Efik, with Shaheen Alikhan as respondent
Online and in-person, Paul Mellon Centre, London, 5 June 2024, 5pm

Carl Wadström, Design for a House in a Tropical Climate, from An Essay on Colonization (London, 1794).

Much of the scholarship on the globalised house of the early modern period privileges colonisers creating a false impression that globalisation was unidirectional. A more responsible examination explores the ways colonised communities also engaged in acts of collection, reinscription, and identity construction. Unlike many African communities, the Efik in Old Calabar (now modern Nigeria) never gave Europeans land rights to build the trading forts that slowly became the huge slave castles now dotting the West African coast. Forbidding European development allowed Africans far greater control over the landscapes of exchange along the waterline, where British ships’ captains would purchase enslaved Africans from Efik traders. Visitors’ descriptions include lavish accounts of the ways wealthy Efik traders donned British costume, swords, cocked hats, and umbrellas. But even more surprising for many were the traders’ houses. These took the common form of a raised two-storey house with a gallery on all sides. Over generations, some of these trading families stockpiled extraordinary collections of English material goods including gilt pier glasses, sofas, marble sideboards, engravings, clocks, and handsome dining tables. Years of negotiations while dining onboard with ships’ captains also meant that these traders could easily navigate both African and British dining practices. It was common practice for Efik traders to order not just objects but whole houses. This paper explores this practice and offers preliminary frames for interpretation.

Louis P. Nelson, Professor of Architectural History at the University of Virginia, is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean, and West Africa, and is a leading advocate for the reconstruction of place-based public history. Louis is an accomplished scholar, with two book-length monographs published by University of North Carolina Press and Yale University Press, three edited collections of essays, two terms as senior co-editor of Buildings and Landscapes—the leading English language venue for scholarship on vernacular architecture—and numerous other articles. His work focuses on the early American South, the Greater Caribbean, and the Atlantic rim. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (Yale, 2016) won three major book awards and was very positively reviewed in twelve different venues ranging from the popular Times Literary Supplement to the scholarly William and Mary Quarterly, The Art Bulletin, and Architectural History, many calling it a tour de force.

Shaheen Alikhan’s dissertation work, continuing from her MA thesis in architectural history on the construction of eighteenth-century slaving vessels, focuses on the reshaping and creation of waterfront spaces to facilitate the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. These liminal spaces, essential but unique within the larger landscape of chattel slavery, represented concentrated areas in which enslaved and legally free Africans and members of the African diaspora took opportunities to learn, communicate, earn wages, and build relationships and they have been largely overlooked. As an architectural historian, Shaheen has contributed to anthologies pertaining to the Caribbean world and reparative justice, and worked as a digital documentation specialist. She is currently in discussion with a publisher about her book Building a Floating Prison: Slave Ships throughout the Long Eighteenth Century.

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An ADAF online presentation (as noted at Events in the Field, the ever-useful calendar maintained by The Decorative Arts Trust) . . .

Peter Kenny | Forging a New Vernacular: French Ébéniste in Federal New York
Online, American Decorative Arts Forum, 21 May 2024, 9pm (ET)

Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779–1819) arrived in New York in the spring of 1803 a thoroughly-trained Parisian ébéniste who, according to his inaugural newspaper advertisement, had “worked at his trade with the most celebrated Cabinet Makers of Europe.”

Charles-Honoré Lannuier, Pier Table, 1815–19, mahogany, mahogany veneer, pine, tulip poplar, maple, marble, gilded brass, die-stamped brass, plate glass, 35 inches wide (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018.30a, b).

Well-versed in the elegant forms of the late Louis XVI period, which still held sway during the earliest period of his training in Paris, Lannuier’s design vocabulary at the time of his arrival also included the harder edged yet brilliant neoclassical style of post-Revolutionary France known as Directoire (1795–99), and the Consulat (1799–1804), a heavier more monumental style featuring the more archaeologically correct forms of le goût antique. This was Lannuier’s Parisian stylistic legacy. How he transformed this legacy, ultimately becoming one of the two principal leaders of the New York school of cabinetmaking alongside his greatest rival, Duncan Phyfe, is an inspiring and a uniquely American story.

After a thirty-year career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Peter M. Kenny retired in 2014 as the Ruth Bigelow Wriston Curator of American Decorative Arts and Administrator of the American Wing. From 2015 to 2020 he served as co-president of Classical American Homes Preservation Trust, where he was responsible for the overall management and curatorial vision of its seven historic houses in New York City, the Hudson River Valley, North and South Carolina, and the U. S. Virgin Islands. A nationally recognized expert on early American furniture, he has lectured extensively on the subject at American museums and universities. The catalogs to his major exhibitions on the renowned cabinetmakers Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1779–1819) and Duncan Phyfe (1770–1854) garnered the Robert C. Smith Award of the Decorative Arts Society, and the Henry Allan Moe Prize from the New York State Historical Association. He was the 2015 recipient of the Eric M. Wunsch Award for Excellence in the American Arts and the 2018 Antiques Dealers’ Association of America Award of Merit. Mr. Kenny serves on the boards of The Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, which publishes the journals, American Furniture and Ceramics in America, Boscobel Restoration, Inc. in Garrison, New York, and Hyde Hall in Cooperstown, NY. He also serves as a Scholarly Advisor for Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz, NY. Mr. Kenny is a graduate of Montclair State University and received his MA from the Cooperstown Graduate Program (State University of New York College at Oneonta) in History Museum Studies.

The American Decorative Arts Forum (ADAF) encourages the study, understanding, enjoyment and preservation of American art and design from their earliest beginnings to the present. Founded in 1983 to promote the study and appreciation of decorative arts, the ADAF has broadened its scope to include many areas of American fine arts and design, including fashion and architecture. The Forum sponsors up to twelve lectures annually by nationally recognized experts which are held in-person at the Gunn Theater, Legion of Honor, San Francisco and/or via Zoom. Members also have access to special events, including curator-led tours of exhibitions, visits to private collections, and travel opportunities. Members also receive a newsletter and emails containing updates and schedules of lectures and events.

Canaletto, Piazza San Marco, ca. 1723, oil on canvas, 68 × 112 cm
(New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, 1988.162)

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From the Bibliotheca Hertziana:

Basile Baudez | Fabricating the City: Canaletto and 18th Century-Venice
Online and in-person, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, 4 June 2024, 11am

Textiles are everywhere in the modern city. Flags flutter atop buildings. Awnings stretch over sidewalks. Laundry dangles between houses. Yet the crucial role these fabrics play in urban life has not been properly understood. This research seminar looks to eighteenth-century Venice to uncover the ways in which textiles shaped politics, society, and law in the early-modern metropolis.

One of the most famous cities in Europe and a gateway to the East, visited by merchants and tourists from around the world, Venice was adorned with textiles of all types: Turkish carpets, military standards, baldachins, and clothing, among them. Focusing on the celebrated vedute of Canaletto, this seminar will discuss how textiles mediated tensions between public authorities and private citizens in the control of common spaces such as streets and squares just as distinct public and private spheres were emerging in Europe and the question of who controlled them became increasingly contentious. Eighteenth-century Venice emerges here as a vivid case study for the progressive transformation of streets and squares from sites of living to sites of regulated circulation and temporary occupation, a marker of modern cities as we know them. By exploring the rich and varied textiles that adorned one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, this research seminar will not only shed light on a key moment in Venice’s political and artistic history, it will provide valuable historical grounding for future discussions about the role of physical fabrics in the social and political fabric of our cities.

This research looks at eighteenth-century Venice to establish a model applicable to any urban context. Under the pressure of the contemporary explosion of the tourist market in the eighteenth century, Venice became the most reproduced and recognizable cityscape in the world, far more so than urban centers like Paris and London. Images of the city and its inhabitants are found in painting, print, drawing, porcelain, and furniture while being endlessly described in travel books, guides, letters, novels, and plays. An entire school of city view painters celebrated its contemporary life in contrast to the ruins of Rome, its main rival. Having lost its economic and political standing on the world stage, the Venetian Republic positioned itself as a unique space of political stability, freedom, and pleasure while celebrating its cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Venice kept its unique status as the main trade partner of the Ottoman Empire, and its tourists sought to get a glance at its exotic visitors and their luxurious fabrics. Recent historiography on Venice has challenged the traditional view of the eighteenth century as a time of decadence and backwardness; in fact, it enjoyed an era of financial prosperity (derived largely from the textile industry), intellectual, musical, and artistic renaissance that posits the city, with its unique republican government, as a perfect case study to tell a story about modernity.

St Mark’s Square, the center of Venetian political, religious, and social life, was the most tightly controlled space in the Republic and probably in the whole of Europe. It is the heart of this study and is often compared to the stage of a theater, to which seeing and being seen are integral. On the Venetian stage, the Republic’s Senate took painstaking care to regulate the usage of and access to its every part, from the porticoes under the Procuratie to the interstitial space between the two Piazzetta granite columns: beggars and prostitutes were forbidden, itinerant vendors had to be authorized, garments were carefully controlled. But the Square was also the main locus of distraction, encounters, gossip, the location of the most popular cafés like Florian and luxury shops. On St Mark’s Square the Senate organized the main religious and civic festivities from the annual, tented Corpus Domini procession to the vast ephemeral luxury market erected the week of the Ascension—and, of course, the most famous Carnival of the continent, where clothes and masks helped to disguise each participant. By focusing on images, testimonies, and laws governing St Mark’s Square, this research covers the entirety of urban life in its spatial and temporal complexity through the textile medium.

This event with be available through the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Vimeo Channel. The link will be soon published here.

Basile Baudez is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the Art & Archaeology department at Princeton University after having taught at the Sorbonne in Paris. His first book, Architecture et Tradition Académique au Siècle des Lumières (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) questions the role of architects in early modern European academies. He co-edited several volumes on the history of architecture such as A Civic Utopia: Architecture and the City in France, 1765–1837 (Drawing Matters, 2016), Chalgrin et son Temps: Architectes et architecture entre l’Ancien Régime et l’Empire (Blake and Co, 2016), and most recently Textile in Architecture from the Middle Ages to Modernism (Routledge, 2023). He curated several shows devoted to architectural drawings, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at the Courtauld Institute in London. His latest monograph, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021) was the 2022 winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. He is currently completing a book project entitled Textiles in the City: Fabricating Eighteenth-Century-Venice on the role of textiles in urban settings.

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Today, from YCBA:

Brian Cowan | Extra-Illustration and the British Historical Imagination, ca. 1660–1850
Online, 30 April 2024, 12.30pm (Eastern Time)

Extra-illustration was a practice that developed in the later eighteenth century as a means by which collectors added imagery (most often prints, but sometimes manuscripts, objects, or original artworks) to existing books. In this talk, Brian Cowan will examine the practice of extra-illustration as a means of understanding the varieties of British historical imagination in the long eighteenth century. His project explores the relationships between political history, secret history, and biography as these genres developed over the course of the long eighteenth century in Britain.

The session is part of YCBA’s Art in Context series. Presented by faculty, staff, Student Guides, and Visiting Scholars, these talks focus on a particular work of art—often in the museum’s collections or special exhibitions—through an in-depth look at its style, subject matter, technique, or time period.

Registration is available here»

Brian Cowan is an associate professor of history at McGill University. He has published widely on early modern British and European history and is a founding member and inaugural president of the board for the international research group devoted to the history of sociability in the long eighteenth century. This group recently launched DIGIT.EN.S, an online encyclopedia of the history of sociability. Cowan’s publications include The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012), and as a member of the twenty-two-person ‘multigraph collective’ Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (2018). His edited collection on The Cultural History of Fame in the Age of Enlightenment is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic, and he is currently editing (with Valerie Capdeville) The Oxford Handbook of the History of the European Enlightenment for Oxford University Press.

Image: Edward Hyde Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England begun in the year 1641: with the precedent passages, and actions, that contributed thereunto, and the happy end, and conclusion thereof by the king’s blessed restoration and return upon the 29th of May, in the year 1660 (Oxford, 1702–04).

From the School of Advanced Study, University of London:

Emmanuelle Chapron | The Loan Registers of the 18th-Century Royal Library of Paris: A History of Readers, Books, and Institutions
Online, via Zoom, 4 June 2024, 5.30pm

The study of the loan registers of the Royal Library of Paris helps us to understand the use of the library and manuscripts in the 18th century, leading to a history of institutional trust and the library as archive.

In association with the History of Libraries seminar series. All are welcome; those wishing to attend should book a free ticket here.

Emmanuelle Chapron is Professor of Modern History at Aix-Marseille Université and Ecole pratique des hautes études, Paris. She is a specialist of the history of the book and libraries as well as history of scholarship in early modern times, in France and Italy. Among her publications are Ad utilità pubblica : politique des bibliothèques et pratiques du livre à Florence au XVIIIe siècle (Geneva, 2008) and Livres d’école et littérature de jeunesse en France au XVIIIe siècle (Liverpool, 2021). She is the curator of the digital edition of the letters and papers of Jean Jean-François Séguier (1704–1783). She is currently working in archives in libraries from the 17th century onwards.