Enfilade

From the lecture series Collecting Art in Imperial Russia, organized by Princeton’s REEES program:

Guillaume Nicoud (Mendrisio, Archivio del Moderno), The Hermitage, or a ‘Museum’ in 1770 according to Catherine the Great
Online, Thursday, 18 February 2021, 12.00–1.30pm (ET)

Why did Catherine the Great build the entire complex of the Hermitage ? This question could constitute the main thread in our presentation. Behind the origins of the Hermitage was the initial idea of creating a hanging garden and additional apartments outside the Winter Palace, although linked to it by a bridge. It quickly faded in the face of Catherine II’s social and cultural intense practices. One should consider that everything she created there aimed at influencing in one way or another the Russian aristocracy as well as at showing to the rest of Europe that she could be, in addition to being an empress, a woman of letters and taste.

Then can we define the Hermitage as a whole? Certainly, its name suggests that it was a place to retreat, at least from the court, and thus a space where to behave under her own rules. In fact, the answer is probably contained in letters written in the 1780s by Catherine herself to Friedrich Melchior Grimm, her commissioner based in Paris, where she calls her Hermitage her own ‘museum’. What does a museum mean for Catherine? And for the Hermitage in terms of architectural typology? Can we in this case consider the paintings gallery of the Hermitage as a ‘museum’? After tracing the history of the construction of the building complex, in order to highlight its architectural characteristics, the presentation will try to summarize how this place and the collections it holds were described during Catherine’s reign, including her very own point of view. Her use of the term ‘museum’ must be related to the definition of the term in Diderot’s and Alembert’s Encyclopedia, that is to say the ‘museum of a woman of letters’. What if the Hermitage, even if it was not a ‘museum’ in the way we conceive it today until the middle of the 19th century, has nevertheless been ‘Catherine’s museum’?

Registration is available here»

Guillaume Nicoud is a postdoc researcher in art history and architecture at the Swiss National Science Foundation in the Archivio del Moderno, University of the Italian Switzerland, involved in the program “Milan and Ticino (1796–1848), Shaping the Spatiality of a European Capital” (FNS Sinergia n°177286 ; and from 2016 to 2019 in the program “The Architecture of ‘Moskovskij stil’Ampir’,” n°IZLRZ1_164062). He specializes in the history of European cultural relations and interactions around 1800. His doctoral thesis, defended at the EPHE, EPSL, Paris in 2016, is entitled “A Gallery Stemming from the Enlightenment: The Imperial Gallery of the Hermitage and France from Catherine the Great to Alexander the Great, 1762–1825” (to be published). He is also a member of the SAPRAT team (EPHE/PSL, EA 4116), co-directs with Dr. Markus Castor the research program “Collecting in the 18th Century: On the Archeology of a Perfect Collection” at the German Center for Art History (Paris) and participates meanwhile in the publication of the First Catalogue of the Hermitage Paintings Gallery (Vol. I, St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, 2018). His publications include the exhibition catalog Jérôme Napoleon, King of Westphalia (Château de Fontainebleau, 2008, in coll. with Chr. Beyeler); Jérôme Napoléon et l’art et la culture dans le Royaume de Westphalie (Dfk Paris, 2 vol, in press, in coll. with J. Ebeling and Th. Smidt); and L’empire de Catherine la Grande: nouvelles approches (symposium proceedings, SPM, Paris, publication scheduled for spring 2021, in coll. with J. Kusber, K.S. Jobst, Fr.-D. Liechtenhan and A. Pufelska).

With this year’s CAA conference now underway, a quick reminder of two HECAA-sponsored sessions, one today and one tomorrow!

109th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Online, 10–13 February 2021

The ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century?
Live Q & A online, Friday, 12 February 2021, 2.00–2:30pm (ET)
Chairs: Sarah Betzer (University of Virginia) and Dipti Khera (New York University)
• Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Architectural ‘Worlding’: Fischer von Erlach and the Eighteenth-Century Fabrication of an History of Architecture
• Andrei Pop (University of Chicago), Enlightenment as Thought Made Public: A Philosophy and a Portrait
• Meredith Gamer (Columbia University), Britain, Empire, and Execution in the Long Eighteenth Century
• Maggie Cao (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Maritime Media and the Long Eighteenth Century
• Bart Pushaw (University of Copenhagen), Poq’s Temporal Sovereignty and the Inuit Printing of Colonial History

Eco Deco: Art and the Environment in the Long Eighteenth Century
Live Q & A online, Saturday, 13 February 2021, 2.00–2.30pm (ET)
Chairs: Wendy A. Bellion (University of Delaware) and Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Freya Gowrley, Fragmented Histories, Imperial Objects: The Specimen Table across Time and Space
• Shweta Raghu, Ebony Clothes / Ebony Bodies: Negotiating Ornament in Coromandel Coast Furniture
• Sarah Simpson Grandin (Harvard University), Trees, Orphans, and the Forgotten Figures of Savonnerie Carpet Manufacturing, 1662–1688
• Philippe Halbert (Yale University), ‘A Toilette in their Fashion’: Indigenizing the Dressing Table in France and New France

Gavin Hamilton, Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus, 1760–63
(National Galleries of Scotland)

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From the Paul Mellon Centre:

Duncan Macmillan, French Art and Scotch Ideas: The Scottish Enlightenment and The Dawn of Modernity in French Art
Zoom, Wednesday, 10 February 2021, 2.00–3.30pm (GMT)

This online event is part of a collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre and the Fleming Collection that will focus on aspects of Scottish art, both current and neglected. As a charity, the Fleming Collection promotes Scottish art and creativity through exhibitions, loans, and education, inspired by its own collection, deemed the finest outside institutions. Recently, the Fleming Collection gifted its specialist library to PMC as a contribution to building an unrivalled resource for British art studies open to all.

The Scottish philosophy of moral sense established the supremacy of the imagination which became one of the a priori of art. So too did its corollary, the idea that the imagination flourished more freely in the primitive condition of humanity, either in the remote past or among unsophisticated people in the present. In Rome, Gavin Hamilton pioneered these ideas in the visual arts and an international community of younger artists, including Canova and David, followed his lead. James Macpherson’s Ossian drew on the same ideas.

Later in the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, Thomas Reid’s philosophy of common sense enjoyed international currency. It also had particular appeal to artists as Reid argued that only they are aware of the raw sensations from which intuitively our perceptions are formed and that they must record these signs, not what they signify. This radical idea echoed through the nineteenth century. Reid also presented the same argument for expression and again gave artists privileged vision. His principal interpreter, Dugald Stewart, was a close friend of Henry Raeburn who was clearly influenced by Reid’s ideas. David Wilkie also followed Reid to make expression the basis of his art. His contemporary, the surgeon Charles Bell, made it the centre of his medical studies and his eventual identification of the function of the nervous system. Bell influenced Géricault.

Wilkie also responded to Reid’s ideas on perception, however, and also to how his arguments replaced imagined objectivity with actual subjectivity: art is personal and particular, not general. From this Archibald Alison developed an aesthetic theory of association. Drawing on these ideas, in Chelsea Pensioners reading the Waterloo Dispatch Wilkie quite consciously knocked history painting off its perch atop the hierarchy of painting. Wilkie also followed Burns and certainly influenced Constable. Along with Walter Scott, he was greatly admired in France where concurrently Reid’s philosophy became a fashionable topic amongst the artists in Delacroix’s circle. In Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, Balzac parodied its consequences for painting. Delacroix, Bonington and others were also deeply influenced by Wilkie and followed his example to explore a more personal and subjective kind of painting. Courbet also followed Wilkie, particularly in the idea reiterated by Reid that art is expressive, but to recover the simplicity of response, for both Wilkie and Courbet epitomised by folk music, artists must unlearn what they have learnt. Reid’s Works became a school text book for the Impressionist generation and his ideas on perception still find echoes in their work and that of Cézanne.

Charles Hamilton Smith (1776–1859, Belgian), Cheslakee’s Village in Johnstone’s Straits, undated, watercolor and graphite on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream wove paper; 41 × 33 cm; inscribed in pen and black ink, lower center: “Cheslakee’s Village in Johnstones Straits | Nootka Sound.” Signed in pen and black ink, lower right: “CHS” (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.1820(26)).

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Later this month, from YCBA:

Adam Chen, British Encounters with Indigenous Slavery at Nootka Sound
Online, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 23 February 2021, 12.30–1.00pm (ET)

At the end of the eighteenth century, British and Spanish mercantile expeditions descended upon an inlet known as Nootka Sound, on what is now the coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Their reactions to the native Nuu-chah-nulth people and to the well-established indigenous slave trade on the Pacific Northwest Coast reveal the dissonance and nuances of eighteenth-century European attitudes toward slavery. Adam Chen will share several images of works from Yale and other collections to illustrate his talk.

Art in Context, the Center’s gallery talk series, is now online. Presented by faculty, staff, visiting scholars, and student guides, these lectures are held on the last Tuesday of each month during the academic year. Each talk focuses on a particular work of art in the Center’s collections, or a special exhibition, and takes an in-depth look at its style, subject matter, technique, or time period. The last ten minutes are reserved for conversation and will allow for participants to ask questions.

Adam Chen (TD 2022) is a Yale undergraduate majoring in the history of art and a Bartels Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. He has previously worked in the European art departments of the Yale University Art Gallery and Seattle Art Museum. His historical interests include the eighteenth century and art of the British Empire. Chen is from the Pacific Northwest, and the topic of this talk is of personal significance. Chen is also an oil painter and carillon player.

This Wednesday, from YCBA:

Jason Farago, Lytton Lecture: A Global Criticism for a Global Art World
Online, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 10 February 2021, 12.00–1.00pm (ET)

In the last 30 years, museums, galleries, fairs, and publications have taken a worldwide approach to art—but how can an art critic make substantive judgements when his or her beat spans the entire globe? In this talk, Jason Farago, art critic for the New York Times, considers how museums should approach the art of foreign cultures, how viewers can appreciate things they don’t fully understand, and how criticism can offer a view of art as a continuous flow of people, images, and ideas.

Generous support for this program has been provided by the Norma Lytton Fund for Docent Education, established in memory of Norma Lytton by her family. Lytton was an active docent at the Center for more than twenty years and subsequently spent a decade engaged in research for the Center’s Department of Paintings and Sculpture.

Jason Farago (Yale BA 2005) has served as an art critic for The New York Times since 2017. Before that, he was the first US-based art critic for The Guardian, and he has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. Farago was also the editor and co-founder of the art and culture magazine Even, whose run is anthologized in Out of Practice: Ten Issues of Even, 2015–18 (Motto Books). He has published catalogue essays on the art of Sheila Hicks, Simon Hantaï, Kishio Suga, Julia Dault, Meleko Mogkosi, and others. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for art criticism.

Please register for the program here»

HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
Online, Saturday, 6 February 2021, 2:00–3:30pm (EST)

Our next HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase is on Saturday, February 6, 2–3:30pm (EST). Please join us via Zoom (link below) to hear our next seven emerging scholars present their research. Each participant will present for 3–5 minutes, and after the presentations, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dani Ezor (dezor@smu.edu).

Best regards,
HECAA Board

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Zoom: https://smu.zoom.us/j/98321231325

• Priscilla Sonnier (University College, Dublin), ‘Ierne’s Ladies of Quality’: Self-Fashioning Elite Female Social Identity in Ascendancy Ireland, 1730–90
• Jennifer Laffick (Southern Methodist University), Sentimentalizing Soldiers: Lamentation and Theatricality in Jean Broc’s Death of General Desaix
• Emily Peikin (University of Delaware), Rubens Peale with a Geranium: Botanical Science and Slavery in the Early Republic
• Damiët Schneeweisz (Rijksmuseum), Coloured Ivory: Portrait Miniatures in the Dutch Atlantic World
• María del Castillo García Romero (University of Seville), Feminae devotae: Artistic Portraits on Religious Female Culture in Baja Andalusia during the 18th Century
• Leo Stefani (Courtauld Institute of Art), Surface Learning: Tables, Royal Education, and Louis XV’s Pavilion at the Tuileries
• Joseph Litts (Princeton University), Afterlives and Francis Parsons’s 1762 Painting of Cherokee Diplomat Cunne Shote

From The Wallace Collection:

2021 Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online, The Wallace Collection, London, last Monday of the Month, 17.30

This seminar series was established in 2006 as part of the Wallace Collection’s commitment to the research and study of the history of collections and collecting, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Paris and London. The seminars—normally held on the last Monday of every month during the calendar year, excluding August and December—act as a forum for the presentation and discussion of new research into the history of collecting. Seminars are open to curators, academics, historians, archivists, and all those with an interest in the subject. Papers are generally 45–60 minutes long.

Please note that the seminars will take place on Zoom and will not be held at the Wallace Collection.

Monday, 22 February
Sara Ayres (Fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen), Descriptions of Collections and Their Display at the Stuart Court in 1669 in a Manuscript Account of Prince George of Denmark’s Grand Tour (1668–70)

Monday, 29 March
Janet M. Brooke (Independent Scholar, Montreal), The Gilded Age in Canada: Reconstructing the Life and Afterlife of the Sir William Van Horne Collection

Monday, 26 April
Ellinoor Bergvelt (Guest Researcher, University of Amsterdam / Research Fellow, Dulwich Picture Gallery), The Dutch King Willem II (1792–1849) as Collector and Source of Some Important Pictures in The Wallace Collection

Monday, 24 May
Krystle Attard Trevisan (PhD Candidate, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London), The ‘Primo Costo’ inventory of Count Saverio Marchese (1757–1833): Mapping the Print Market in Malta and Its European Connections

Monday, 28 June
Timothy Schroder (Trustee, The Wallace Collection), Inside the Dragon’s Lair: Henry VIII’s Kunstkammer at Whitehall Palace

Monday, 26 July
Ana Mónica da Silva Rolo (Archaeologist, Archaeology Centre UNIARQ, Lisbon University) and Noé Conejo Delgado (Archaeologist, Numismatist, Archaeology Centre UNIARQ, Lisbon University), A Dactyliothec from Pietro Bracci in the Portuguese Royal Family’s Collections: A Different Look at Art Collecting

Monday, 27 September
Andrea Morgan (PhD Candidate, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario), Collecting and Displaying Rembrandt’s Pictures in Eighteenth– and Nineteenth–Century England: Charles Jennens of Gopsall Hall and the ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe

Monday, 25 October
Mark Hall (Collections Officer for Culture Perth & Kinross, Perth Museum & Art Gallery), The Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society, 1784–1914: Collecting Scotland, Collecting the World

Monday, 29 November
Rachel Peat (Assistant Curator of Non-European Works of Art, Royal Collection Trust, London), ‘A Most Distinguished Collector and Patron’: Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Japanese Art, 1869–1900

Christie’s presents this free online panel (via Zoom) in conjunction with its Americana week:

Print Culture and Propaganda in the American Revolution: Selections from the Collection of Ambassador J. William Middendorf
Tuesday, 19 January 2021, noon (EST)

Moderated by Peter Klarnet, Senior Specialist, with a tribute by John Hays, Deputy Chairman

Panelists
• Philip Mead (Director of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Historian, Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia)
• Nancy Siegel (Professor of Art History and Museum Studies Coordinator, Towson University, Towson, Maryland)
• Allison Stagg
• Amy Torbert (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum)

Image: Lot 306 of sale 18947. Phillip Dawe, engraver, The Bostonian’s Paying the Excise Man or Tarring and Feathering (London: Robert Sayer & John Bennett, 1774; Collection of Ambassador J. William Middendorf II).