Enfilade

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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.

Wednesday’s Research Semainar, from the Mellon Centre:

Iris Moon | A Body for Stubbs
Online and in-person, Paul Mellon Centre, London, 6 March 20224, 5.00–7.00pm

This talk focuses on the relationship between the painter George Stubbs and the potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, and the work Reapers (1795). Alongside his commercial work making horse pictures for the landed gentry, Stubbs set out to create pictures of a more experimental nature executed on atypical surfaces, among them the oval ceramic tablets that Wedgwood created for him on demand. These were of an unusually large size, equally difficult to paint on, and fire in the kiln. Why was the horse painter drawn to the potter’s platters? Based on new material from Melancholy Wedgwood (MIT Press, 2024), this talk questions traditional readings of Wedgwood and the heritage paintings of Stubbs and, more broadly, notions of the eighteenth century as a foundational moment in Britain’s rise as a global commercial, financial, and industrial power. At the centre of this revisionist story is capitalism, empire, and exploitation. Found there too are babies, women, animals, and ceramics, among other lost figures not usually at the centre of eighteenth-century British art. Stubbs and Wedgwood take on new meanings when seen through the twisted prism of our own moment, amidst the ruins of late capitalist modernity.

Registration is available here»

Iris Moon is associate curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is responsible for European ceramics and glass. At the Met, she participated in the reinstallation of the British Galleries, and she is currently planning an exhibition on Chinoiserie, women, and the porcelain imaginary that will open in 2025. She is the author of Luxury after the Terror, and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France. A new book on Wedgwood, generously supported by a publication grant from the Paul Mellon Centre, will be published next year with MIT Press. In addition to curatorial work, she teaches at Cooper Union.

Image: George Stubbs, Reapers, 1795, enamel on Wedgwood biscuit earthenware (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.618).

From the Connecticut Ceramics Circle (with the full 2023–24 lecture schedule available here). . .

Ivan Day | Frozen Treats: The Development of the Ice Cream Cooler
Online, Connecticut Ceramics Circle, Monday, 12 February 2024, 2pm (Eastern)

Worcester Ice Cream Cooler (Ice Pail), ca. 1770, ‘Jabberwocky’ design, soft-paste porcelain (Houston: Rienzi Collection, 84.584.1.A-.C). Images of the bucket, liner, and cover pulled apart are available at Day’s Instagram account here.

Ice creams and water ices evolved in Italy in the second half of the seventeenth century. Initially they were a high-status luxury confined to court entertainments. Serving ices at table was not easy, as they had to be kept in a frozen state. Eventually, attractive three-part tin-glazed earthenware vessels called seaux à glace started to appear in France in the 1720s. Only a few of these faïence examples have survived, the earliest from Rouen dating from 1700–25. Another from Moustiers made in the Clérissey manufactory dates from circa 1725.

In order to keep the contents frozen, ice mixed with salt needed to be placed in the lower pail and the lid, with the ice cream contained in a bowl between. However, earthenware was not an ideal material for this purpose. It is likely that salt eventually found its way through any crazing in the glaze and was absorbed by the porous clay body, resulting in the glaze flaking off. Soft-paste and later hard-paste porcelain proved to be a much more durable material for making these beautiful vessels. The Sèvres manufactory based their porcelain seaux on the earlier faïence shapes, but developed a range of new forms closely allied to their own wine cooler designs. At first other European factories based their designs on the Sèvres model. In this illustrated Zoom lecture, Ivan Day will not only outline the development of these wonderful vessels, but demonstrate how they were used with an example from his collection.

Ivan Day is an independent historian of the social history and culture of food. He is celebrated for his reconstructions of historical table settings, which combine museum objects with accurate re-creations of period dishes. His work has been exhibited in many major museums in the UK, Europe, and North America, including the Getty Research Institute, Detroit Institute of Arts, Gardiner Museum, and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 2007, he worked on a re-creation of an imperial table featuring a Meissen Parnassus by Johann Joachim Kändler for the BGC exhibition Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63, curated by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger.

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As Day notes through his Instagram account,

“The lecture is a much revised version of one that I once delivered at a symposium at the Gardiner Museum in honour of the truly great porcelain scholar Meredith Chilton. Meredith is a close friend and colleague, but also a highly valued mentor. I have learnt so much from her. So my presentation is in honour of this wonderful woman.”