Figaro Unbound: Culture, Power, and Revolution at Play
Readers in the Los Angeles area as well as those planning to attend ASECS may find this series from LA Opera of interest. The associated programming is extensive. –CH
Figaro Unbound: Culture, Power, and Revolution at Play
Various venues in the Los Angeles area, January — April 2015
After Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, ca. 1755 (Institution: Comédie-Française)
From February 7 through April 12, 2015, LA Opera will produce three operas inspired by the works of the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–1799). Beaumarchais was a man of many talents: a playwright, watchmaker, inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary (both French and American). His trilogy of Figaro plays—The Barber of Seville (1775), The Marriage of Figaro (1784) and The Guilty Mother (1792)—captured staggering changes in social attitudes of the late 18th century. These plays and their characters have been subsequently adapted into operas (some more successful than others) by Paisiello, Salieri, Massenet and Milhaud to name a few.
LA Opera’s programming of the “Figaro Trilogy”—John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro—within the 2014/15 season will immerse audiences in the world of a character who created a sensation in the years leading up to the French Revolution. The lasting legacy of the free-thinking barber will be explored in Figaro Unbound, a three-month celebration of the revolutionary spirit.
With a variety of programming for all ages, Figaro Unbound will investigate the ongoing relevance of Figaro and the Beaumarchais trilogy. There will be performances of alternate musical adaptations of Figaro’s story and opportunities to examine his lasting influence on American political and cultural life. Figaro Unbound partners include ArcLight Cinemas, the Hammer Museum, Opera UCLA, A Noise Within, LA Theatre Works, FIDM Museum, the Huntington Library, LACMA, the Norton Simon Museum, the Getty Museum, and the Opera League of Los Angeles, among others.
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Funiture, Pegs and ’Tails
For anyone who’s ever dreamed of being able to look over the shoulder of someone who understands eighteenth-century furniture at the level of materials, design, construction, and afterlife, I’m glad to recommend Pegs and ‘Tails, the blog of Jack Plane, a retired antiques dealer and self-taught woodworker, formerly from the UK who now lives in Australia.
His reproduction pieces are fascinating, and he’s especially helpful for things at auction (the good and the bad). His blog includes a fine bibliography, and there’s a book is in the works. –CH
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The first chest of drawers is typical of small four-drawer William and Mary chests made around 1695. The carcase is made of pine and veneered with walnut, and the drawer fronts are additionally crossbanded with yew. Jack Plane.
. . . I now believe a monograph on late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chests of drawers would be a better introduction to those with an interest in case pieces and all manner of furniture from this period. The book’s contents may vary as I work my way through it, but the projected chapters are as follows:
• The Development of the Chest of Drawers
• A William and Mary Walnut Veneered Chest, circa 1695
• A Queen Anne Walnut Veneered Chest, circa 1705
• A George I Virginia Walnut Chest, circa 1720
• A George II Mahogany Chest, circa 1740
• A George III Mahogany Chest, circa 1765
• Reproduction finishing
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The blog began 14 September 2009 with this inspired posting:
It’s on a somewhat gloomy note that I begin this blog…
Q. Traditionally speaking, what are the principal differences between carpenters, joyners and cabinetmakers?
A. Nails, pegs and dovetails!
Sadly, carpenters predominantly employ air-powered ‘phittunks’ these days, joyners have largely disappeared from the vernacular and cabinetmakers assemble built-in bathroom, bedroom and kitchen units from man-made board.
Looking up ‘cabinetmakers’ in the ‘phone directory and Google reveals numerous entries for kitchen fitters and very few makers of fine furniture. It seems makers of fine furniture are now known as ‘woodworkers’—a very unhappy reflection and a far cry from the eighteenth-century heyday when cabinetmakers ranked second only to upholsterers in the furniture trades hierarchy.
This is my blog concerning pegs and dovetails.
Jack Plane.
Pure Judgment
After five years, I hope you’ll indulge me as I ask a small favor that has nothing to do with HECAA or the eighteenth century. A former student and now friend of mine has recently launched a blog, and I would be grateful if you have a look. Pure Judgment—related to the eighteenth century only in owing its title to Kant—reports on juried awards in a variety of cultural fields, with an emphasis on the arts. The site’s editor, Anna Hanchett, was good enough to put up with me in a handful of classes, including January term trips to Venice and London. She’s currently working as an assistant to a particularly fine bookbinder (and in this capacity does handle an enviable share of eighteenth-century material culture). –CH
Here’s the link and more information:
In contrast to the thousands of blogs built around highlighting an individual’s tastes, preferences, and recommendations, Pure Judgment reports on juried standards of excellence. Covering a wide range of cultural production—including literature, the visual arts, music, fashion, film and food—the site aims to inform readers of people whose work has been recognized by experts within a given field as outstanding. Among the award-winners recently highlighted are David Titlow (Taylor Wessing Prize), Uxua Casa Hotel (Smith Hotel Award), Richard Flanagan (Man Booker Prize), Paper Airplanes (CinefestOz Film Award), and Iris Van Herpen (Andam Prize).
While other sites report on particular areas of cultural production, Pure Judgment is exceptional for its expansive scope . . . because you shouldn’t have to know about a particular award to care about the category or the winner. Pure Judgment aims to broaden the horizon for all of us.
Ruling on the Warburg Institute
Press release (6 November 2014) from Bates Wells Braithwaite and the Warburg Institute:
To the benefit and relief of scholars worldwide, the High Court has rejected the University of London’s claims that all additions to the Warburg Institute since 1944 belong to the University, and instead agreed that they form part of the Institute. Furthermore, the judge, Mrs Justice Proudman, held that the University is obliged to provide funding for the activities of the Warburg Institute.
Leticia Jennings of Bates Wells Braithwaite, who advised the Advisory Council of the Warburg Institute, commented: “This decision ensures that the wealth of important material housed within the Institute will remain available, as before, in its entirety, and that the University will not be free to in any way restrict the access of the many scholars who use and rely on the Institute’s outstanding resources.”
The Institute grew out of the private library of the art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929), who collected books in art history, literature, intellectual history, religion and the history of science and magic. As a Jewish institution based in Germany, the Institute was forced to close, and its very existence was threatened by the Nazi-organised book-burnings of April 1933. To escape destruction, the entire library of 60,000 books, as well as photographs, papers and furniture, were shipped to the safe-haven of London in December 1933. Many of the Institute’s staff also transferred to London.
After years of negotiation involving members of the Warburg Family, the University of London, distinguished scholars and philanthropists, the University of London became trustee of the Warburg Institute, to hold it on charitable trust pursuant to the terms of a 1944 Trust Deed*. The Institute has since grown into a world class teaching and research institute, much respected and sought after by academics worldwide.
The Trust Deed obliges the University to maintain and preserve the Warburg library in perpetuity, to house it, and to keep it adequately equipped and staffed as an independent unit. Leticia Jennings stated: “The contemporaneous evidence leading up to the signing of the Trust Deed shows that the transfer to the University of London was on the condition that the University accepted these obligations. This judgment has confirmed that the University must maintain the Institute as ‘an independent unit’, and that the University is not entitled to use the name and prestige associated with the Warburg Institute to obtain funds, but to then apply those funds to the University’s general purposes.”
In recent years the University had charged a proportion of its total estate expenditure to the Warburg Institute, meaning that the once solvent Institute was left with a significant deficit as it was used, in effect, to subsidise the University’s corporate property. The judge held that the University’s conduct in this regard is not permissible and “flies in the face” of the terms of Trust Deed.
Two More Waddesdon Manor Treasures Now Online
Le Ballet Royal de La Nuit and Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables choisies, two treasures of Waddesdon Manor’s library collected by Ferdinand de Rothschild (1848–1898) are now accessible via the online collection catalogue.
Jean de La Fontaine, Fables choisies, (Paris, 1755–59); Waddesdon, The Rothschild Collection (The National Trust) Bequest of James de Rothschild, 1957; acc. 3681.1-4. Photo by Mike Fear © The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor.
Le Ballet Royal de La Nuit at Waddesdon was probably produced as a gift for Louis Hesselin (1602–1662) as a reward for the successful staging of the ballet, first performed at the French court on 23 February 1653. It contains material from three distinct sources: the booklet of the ballet printed by Robert Ballard in 1653, a poem called Le Docteur Muët, and 129 original designs depicting costumes and scenes from the ballet now attributed to Henry Gissey (c. 1621–1673). Reproductions of the bindings; inscriptions by a previous owner, Baron Jérome Pichon (1812–1896); as well as the designs are available online, accompanied by commentaries based on the publication: Michael Burden and Jennifer Thorp (eds), Ballet de la Nuit: Rothschild B1/16/6 (Hillsdale; Pendragon Press; 2009).
Also now online are entries for four volumes of Jean de La Fontaine’s (1621–1695) Fables choisies, published in Paris between 1755 and 1759 by Desaint and Saillant. This edition is considered to be the most magnificent illustrated book made before the advent of modern printing. The binding of the Waddesdon example, by Louis Douceur (d. 1769), is decorated with specially-cut tools also illustrating the fables. The dolphin which occurs on the spine panels of the Waddesdon volumes may indicate that these were bound especially for the Dauphin Louis (1729–1765), son of Louis XV. Details of the location and sizes of the illustrations in all four volumes, along with a transcription of the title and names of the designer and engraver of each print, are included in the online entries.
Both books can also be explored further in the newly published catalogue by the late Giles Barber, The James A. de Rothschild Bequest: Printed Books and Bookbindings (The Rothschild Foundation, 2013). The Waddesdon collection is one of the finest of its kind in the world, and the published catalogue along with the online entries allows for many of these treasures to be revealed to the public for the first time. For more information about the printed catalogue, please visit the website.
Richard Wilson Online Catalogue Now Available
The Richard Wilson Online catalogue raisonné has been compiled by Dr Paul Spencer-Longhurst (Senior Research Fellow) with the collaboration of Professor David Solkin (Curator of the exhibition, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, 1982–83) and Kate Lowry (formerly Chief Conservator at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff), with the assistance of Maisoon Rehani (Project Coordinator) and Peter Thomas (Technical Project Consultant).
Richard Wilson Online is the outcome of intensive ongoing research undertaken since 2009 to re-establish Richard Wilson’s (1713/14–1782) status and redefine his output in celebration of the tercentenary of his birth. The website is launched as a work-in-progress designed to provide an up-to-date and freely accessible record of Wilson’s autograph paintings and works on paper. It complements and extends the public interest in and academic focus on his achievements stimulated by the exhibition, Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting, on show at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA, and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, Cardiff in 2014.
Accessing Richard Wilson Online
Internet Archive Book Images Now Available via Flickr Commons
Image from page 274 of Comte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, greques et romaines (Paris : Desaint & Saillant, 1752). More information is available here»
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As noted here at Enfilade in December, the British Library made available over a million images from the pages of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books via Flickr Commons. The BBC now reports that Georgetown University Fellow in Residence Kalev Leetaru has uploaded 2.6 million pictures sourced from books digitized by the Internet Archive. Publication dates range from 1500 to 1922. All images are tagged and available for free download. A quick search for Caylus turned up the image shown above. Search options are limited, and it took me a few moments just to work out how to search only within the Internet Archive Book Images, as opposed to all of Flickr (proof only of my own clumsiness; once you start typing in the main search box in the upper right hand corner, you should see a photostream option appear just below). How useful this resource is will depend upon what sort of search you’re attempting, but the possibilities seem extraordinary. In addition to the news story excerpted below, the Flickr Blog provides further information. –CH
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Leo Kelion, “Millions of Historic Images Posted to Flickr,” BBC News (29 August 2014).
An American academic is creating a searchable database of 12 million historic copyright-free images.
Kalev Leetaru has already uploaded 2.6 million pictures to Flickr, which are searchable thanks to tags that have been automatically added. The photos and drawings are sourced from more than 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organisation. The images have been difficult to access until now. Mr Leetaru said digitisation projects had so far focused on words and ignored pictures.
“For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works,” he told the BBC. “They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that. . . .”
The full BBC story is available here»
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More about the Internet Archive, from the Wikipedia entry on the organization:
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.”[2][3] It provides permanent storage of and free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As of October 2012, its collection topped 10 petabytes.[4][5] In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet. . .
N O T E S
2. “Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions.” Internet Archive. Retrieved April 13, 2013.
3. “Internet Archive: Universal Access to all Knowledge.” Internet Archive. Retrieved April 13, 2013.
4. “10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes archived!” Internet Archive Blogs. October 26, 2012. “On Thursday, 25 October, hundreds of Internet Archive supporters, volunteers, and staff celebrated addition of the 10,000,000,000,000,000th byte to the Archive’s massive collections.”
5. Brown, A. (2006). Archiving Websites: A Practical Guide for Information Management Professionals. London: Facet Publishing. p. 9.
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Released as Linked Open Data
Posted by James Cuno at Iris: The Online Magazine of the Getty (21 August 2014) . . .
We’re delighted to announce that the Getty Research Institute has released the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)® as Linked Open Data. This represents an important step in the Getty’s ongoing work to make our knowledge resources freely available to all. Following the release of the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)® in February, TGN is now the second of the four Getty vocabularies to be made entirely free to download, share, and modify. Both data sets are available for download at vocab.getty.edu under an Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC BY 1.0).
What Is TGN?
The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is a resource of over 2,000,000 names of current and historical places, including cities, archaeological sites, nations, and physical features. It focuses mainly on places relevant to art, architecture, archaeology, art conservation, and related fields.
TGN is powerful for humanities research because of its linkages to the three other Getty vocabularies—the Union List of Artist Names, the Art & Architecture Thesaurus, and the Cultural Objects Name Authority. Together the vocabularies provide a suite of research resources covering a vast range of places, makers, objects, and artistic concepts. The work of three decades, the Getty vocabularies are living resources that continue to grow and improve.
Because they serve as standard references for cataloguing, the Getty vocabularies are also the conduits through which data published by museums, archives, libraries, and other cultural institutions can find and connect to each other. . . .
All four Getty vocabularies will be released as Linked Open Data by late 2015. To follow the progress of the project at the Getty Research Institute, see our Linked Open Data page.
The full announcement with lots of links is available here»
The Morgan Library’s Drawings Online
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Visit to a Lawyer, Pen and brown ink, with brown and brown-black wash, over black chalk, on laid paper, 1791 (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum). More information is available here»
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As noted by Lucy Vivante at her blog Vivante Drawings (7 July 2014), The Morgan recently launched its Drawings Online, with 2000 images now available and the entire collection of 12,000 scheduled to be available by the end of the year. In addition to the scholarly value, there must also be useful teaching possibilities. –CH
From The Morgan Library & Museum:
Georg Dionysius Ehret, Chenopodium bonus henricus, watercolor on vellum (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum).
For nearly a century, the Morgan Library & Museum has played a leading role in the field of master drawings. All the major European schools are represented in the collection, with particular strengths in Italian, French, British, Dutch, Flemish, and German masters. The collection also includes drawings by American artists as well as a growing number of modern and contemporary works on paper. The Morgan’s collection is thus unusual in that it represents, in increasing depth, continuity as well as innovation throughout the entire history of drawing.
Drawings Online aims to provide the public and specialists with a digital library of over 12,000 images, representing works of art spanning the fifteenth through twenty-first centuries. Included are approximately 2,000 images of versos of drawings that contain rarely seen sketches or inscriptions by the artist. Debuting on 15 June 2014 with nearly 2,000 images, Drawings Online will provide comprehensive imaging of the Morgan’s drawing collection by the end of the year.
Drawings Online is generously underwritten by the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, with additional funding from the David L. Klein, Jr. Foundation.
Arlene Leis on Sarah Sophia Banks’s Collection of Ephemera
Those of you working on ephemera may be interested in the John Johnson Collection’s Ephemera Resources Blog, associated with The John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian Library, which itself
is one of the most important collections of printed ephemera in the world and is a very rich source for social and printing historians. Assembled by John de Monins Johnson (1882–1956), papyrologist, and Printer to the University, it contains c.1.5 million items. Spanning from 1508 to 1939 (and beyond in some areas), the strengths of the Collection are in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The John Johnson Collection (formerly called the Constance Meade Memorial Collection of Ephemeral Printing) was transferred to the Bodleian Library from Oxford University Press in 1968.
Online since 2011, the blog then
aims to accumulate a useful and growing guide to the many websites either wholly or partially devoted to ephemera. The blog will list two types of resources: online resources and bibliographic references (books and articles, both hard copy and electronic).
British Museum. Prints and Drawings. C.1-193-219.
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Most recently, Arlene Leis contributes a guest posting:
Arlene Leis, “Sarah Sophia Banks: Collecting Ephemera in Late Georgian England,” John Johnson Collection’s Ephemera Resources Blog (3 June 2014).
The Prints and Drawings room at the British Museum holds a fascinating collection of ephemera amassed by Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818), sister of the celebrated botanist and President of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks. While Sir Joseph is a well-known collector of natural history whose collections helped shape the foundations of the Natural History Museum, Sarah Sophia, also an avid collector, has remained for the most part in her brother’s shadow. This, fortunately, is beginning to change. . . .
The full posting is available here»
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