New Book | John Locke’s Impact on Literature and Pictorial Art
From Krysman Press:
Joachim Möller and Bernd Krysmanski, eds., Creative Reception: John Locke’s Impact on Literature and Pictorial Art (Dinslaken: Krysman Press, 2024), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-3000555626, €30.
The authors of this volume—all of them recognized representatives of a wide range of academic disciplines—agree that Locke’s work must have had a considerable influence both on English and German literature and the visual arts of Great Britain, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the perspective of interdisciplinarity and intertextuality, the essays presented here deal with Locke as a source of ideas for Archibald Alison, John Constable, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Johann Timotheus Hermes, William Hogarth, Immanuel Kant, Martin Knutzen, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, George Lillo, Edward Moore, Johann Gottwerth Müller, Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Richardson, John Ruskin, Joseph Spence, Laurence Sterne, J. M. W. Turner, and Thomas Whately, among others.
Exhibition | The Art of French Wallpaper Design
Installation view of the exhibition The Art of French Wallpaper Design at the RISD Museum, November 2024.
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The exhibition is accompanied by an online publication:
The Art of French Wallpaper Design
RISD Museum, Providence, 16 November 2024 — 11 May 2025
The Art of French Wallpaper Design explores the vibrant, surprising designs that adorned walls in the 1700s and 1800s. Featuring more than 100 rare samples of salvaged wallpapers, borders, fragments, and design drawings, this exhibition reveals the creative process and showcases the extraordinary technical skills involved in producing these works, presenting an invaluable resource for artists and enthusiasts alike. This exhibition celebrates the vision and generosity of collectors Charles and Frances Wilson Huard, whose remarkable collection, assembled in the 1920s and ’30s, is now in the care of the RISD Museum. Accompanied by a comprehensive digital publication, The Art of French Wallpaper Design invites you to explore the remarkable innovation and craftsmanship of these historic pieces.
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Lyra Smith, ed., with contributions by Emily Banas, Brianna Turner, and Andrew Raftery, The Art of French Wallpaper Design (Providence: Rhode Island School of Design Museum, 2024), available online»
The vibrant designs of French papier peint (literally meaning painted paper) that adorned walls in the 1700s and 1800s were collected and donated to the museum by French artist Charles Huard and his wife, American writer Frances Wilson Huard. The Huard Collection is a rare resource due to the fragile and ephemeral nature of wallpapers. This free online publication explains the preservation methods used to take care of the wallpapers along with components made in the process, such as design drawings and woodblocks. The attentive care taken to preserve the materials made during each phase of the design process make the Huard Collection an ideal teaching collection.
Essays
• Introduction to French Wallpaper — Emily Banas
• About the Huard Collection — Emily Banas
• Conservation and the Huard Collection: Preserving the Processes of Making — Brianna Turner
• Printing Matters: Wallpaper in the Context of Printmaking — Andrew Raftery
The Collection
The RISD Museum contains one of the most significant collections of French 18th- and 19th-century wallpapers in the United States with approximately 500 wallpaper panels, borders, fragments, and design drawings. Here, you can browse the wallpapers by their collections, colors, motifs, or time periods.
The Making of Wallpaper
This video provides a guided, in-depth look at seven different wallpapers in the Huard Collection. Watch, listen, and learn about the hidden stories these wallpapers can tell us about their design, making, and use.
New Book | Quatremère de Quincy: Art and Politics
From Oxford UP:
David Gilks, Quatremère de Quincy: Art and Politics during the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0198745563, £90.
Antoine-Chrysosthôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) was the most distinguished writer on art and architecture at the end of the enlightenment. However, as David Gilks shows, he was never simply an esoteric antiquarian and theoretician; he was also a zealous functionary and skilled publicist whose writings on the arts often served political purposes.
Quatremère de Quincy: Art and Politics during the French Revolution demonstrates how Quatremère’s early writings on art and antiquity formed the foundation for a politics grounded in faith, authority, and hierarchy that favoured gradual social and political evolution over destruction and experimentation. Gilks then traces how Quatremère set aside his antiquarian research and became a royalist politician and publicist during the revolutionary decade. Quatremère feared that the Revolution would destroy the cosmopolitan republic of letters that had flourished when states across Europe supported the papacy’s rediscovery of the past, restoration of taste and, revival of learning. Yet Gilks reveals that Quatremère was also a resourceful and an opportunistic political actor who deployed his opponents’ language for strategic reasons. Gilks therefore reinterprets Quatremère’s interventions by situating them in their polemical contexts and treating them as contributions to debates and quarrels, by locating his sources and reconstructing his social and political networks. The resulting study revises our understanding of Quatremère’s famous reflections on the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the Panthéon, art plunder, and museums, but it also discovers and sheds light on previously ignored writings. Although the study focuses on the period between 1789 and 1799, it examines the second half of Quatremère’s life to substantiate his commitment to crown and altar and show how he fought against the Revolution’s legacy of godless materialism and calculation that was inimical to the arts.
This is a thoroughly researched and richly detailed contextual study of the most eventful period in Quatremère’s life, offering an original and unfamiliar history of the French Revolution. Gilks integrates the study of political power with the history of ideas and art history and provides a window into institutional and legal reforms and debates about cultural patronage and education.
David Gilks was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then won a Henry Fellowship to Harvard. After returning to Cambridge for his doctoral thesis, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University London. He is currently Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of East Anglia. His research has been published in The Historical Journal, French Historical Studies, and Urban History. He is the first English-language translator of Quatremère de Quincy’s Letters on the Plan to Abduct Monuments of Art from Italy.
c o n t e n t s
Abbreviations
Note on Names and and Language
Biographical and Political Chronology
Introduction: An Unconventional History of the Revolution
1 The Making of a Missionary of Antiquity, 1755–85
2 The Friend of the Arts, 1785–89
3 Art in a Regenerated Nation, 1789–91
4 The Nation’s Temple, 1791
5 Devoted to the King, 1791–92
6 Republicanising the Pantheon, 1792–94
7 Standing for the Counter-Revolution, 1794–96
8 Justice to the Papacy, 1796
9 The Mask of Constitutionalism, 1796–99
Conclusion
Maps
Bibliography
Index
New Book | British Portrait Miniatures from the Thomson Collection
From Ad Ilissvm, an imprint of Paul Hoberton Publishing and also distributed by The University of Chicago Press (the Thomson Collection is now part of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto):
Susan Sloman, British Portrait Miniatures from the Thomson Collection (London: Ad Ilissvm, 2024), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1915401120, £80 / $100.
Portrait miniatures were highly prized in Europe for nearly four hundred years; and, unusually, artists based in Britain were the acknowledged masters of this specialised field. Many of the best painters are represented in this remarkable but relatively little-known collection. As is illustrated and described in this book, miniatures were frequently made as tokens of love or memorials of loved ones; part-likeness, part-reliquary and part-jewel, they might be wearable in a locket, on a bracelet, or even on a finger ring, but their portability also made them desirable as gifts.
Styles, techniques, and modes of presentation naturally evolved between 1560 (the date of the first miniature in the catalogue) and around 1900. Some changes happened rapidly; in England, for example, the foundation of exhibiting societies in 1760s created a demand for larger miniatures that could hang on the wall alongside full-sized portraits. The Thomson collection includes fine examples of the work of Nicholas Hilliard (from the Elizabethan period) and John Smart (from the eighteenth century) as well as notable portraits by less familiar names such as Jacob Van Doordt and James Scouler. It is apparent from the scope and character of his acquisitions that Ken Thomson never planned an encyclopaedic collection. Reacting to miniatures that spoke most eloquently to him when held in the hand, or examined under a glass, he developed over time a fondness for particular artists and had no qualms about omitting others altogether.
Using this collection housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a case study, the catalogue discusses the function of miniatures, their material presence, the circumstances in which they were made, and aspects of their later history. The homes and studios of the most successful painters, as sumptuous as those occupied by oil painters, often passed from one generation to another: here, one key property in Covent Garden is described and illustrated. In this book, for the first time, a number of specialist artists’ suppliers are identified, showing where ivory could be obtained and enamel plates prepared and fired. The links between enamelling for clock and watch faces and enamelling for miniatures are demonstrated. The illicit practice within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century art trade of duplicating old miniatures, a topic generally avoided in the literature, is addressed here. Miniatures are difficult to display in museums, but recently-developed photographic methods of identifying pigments are also proving to be a way of introducing a new audience to this multi-layered subject. Eighteen years after Ken Thomson’s death, there could not be a more opportune moment to highlight his collection.
Susan Sloman has written extensively on British art, her most recent book being Gainsborough in London (2021). She has a longstanding interest in studio practice and artists’ premises and a record of unearthing fresh documentation on the lives of artists.
New Book | Blenheim: 300 Years of Life in a Palace
From Rizzoli:
Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, with photography by Hugo Rittson-Thomas, Blenheim: 300 Years of Life in a Palace (New York: Rizzoli, 2024), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-0847833504, $75.
The most important, most visited, and most renowned of all of Britain’s stately homes, Blenheim has been home to the Churchill family for more than 300 years.
Regarded as perhaps the greatest of the stately homes and the finest example of baroque architecture in Great Britain, Blenheim is a treasure of English heritage. In this stunning volume, Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, the twelfth generation of the family, takes us on a privileged tour of the palace.
Designed by John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor (a protégé of Christopher Wren) in the early 1700s; with stonework, furniture, and tapestries crafted by the best talents of the age; and art and statuary by such notable artists as John Singer Sargent and Joshua Reynolds, Blenheim is filled with artistic commissions that provide a window into the history of England. In addition to the gilded staterooms and acres of landscaped gardens, Spencer-Churchill shows us the family’s private apartments, with their secret corridors and history of illustrious guests, as well as the ‘downstairs’ staff area with its iconic bell system. With beautiful photography of the magnificent interiors and priceless collections, and Spencer-Churchill’s fascinating text, this volume illuminates Blenheim as it’s never been seen before.
Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill is an interior designer, founder of Woodstock Designs, and author of multiple Rizzoli books on design and historic styles, including The Life of the House, Blenheim and the Churchill Family, and Classic English Interiors. She lectures widely on design and design history in the US and the UK.
Hugo Rittson-Thomas is a portrait photographer of many high-profile subjects, including the British royal family. His work has been published in Romantics and Classics, Secret Gardens of the Cotswolds, and Great Gardens of London.
The Decorative Arts Trust Announces Recipients of Publishing Grants
From the press release (13 June 2024) . . .
The Decorative Arts Trust congratulates the inaugural recipients of their new Publishing Grants. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens received Publishing Grants for Collections, Exhibitions, and Conferences, and Dr. Joseph Larnerd from Drexel University received a Publishing Grant for Dissertations and First-Time Authors.
In November 2024, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York City’s Washington Heights will publish A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain to accompany their landmark exhibition of the same name. Guest Curator Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack and Deputy Director and Head of Collections Margaret Connors McQuade will lead this examination of the estrado, defined in the early 18th-century treatise Diccionario de Autoridades as the “set of furniture used to cover and decorate the place or room where the ladies sit to receive visitors.” The estrado was a remarkable space where a diverse group of women engaged in elaborate social practices and displayed their collections of valuable objects from the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Decorative arts, paintings, rare books, and engravings from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library’s collection will be presented in an entirely new light, with many to be exhibited for the first time.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California plans to release a comprehensive publication about an influential Los Angeles-based ceramics artist in fall 2026. Although additional details cannot be announced at this time, the book will complement an exhibition led by Lauren Cross, PhD, the Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is publishing Art, Industry, and Reform in Philadelphia, 1876–1926, accompanying the museum’s spring 2026 exhibition of the same name. David Barquist, The H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., Curator of American Decorative Arts, and Colin Fanning, Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts, lead the exhibition and publication, which will focus on Philadelphia artisans and architects who drew on a range of inspirations—from the British Arts and Crafts movement to masterworks at the World’s Fairs—to address challenges of urban industrialization. Their investigation will be among PMA’s offerings during the nation’s 250th commemoration, which is also the museum’s 150th anniversary year.
Dr. Joseph Larnerd received the inaugural Publishing Grant for Dissertations and First-Time Authors. Larnerd, an Assistant Professor of Design History at Drexel University in Philadelphia, will publish Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age with the University of Delaware Press in fall 2025. This publication offers an original history of cut glass refracted through the labors required to make and maintain the glistening wares. Larnerd will show how popular representations of the medium and these widely discussed labors undercut how working-class peoples imagined and enacted social class, privilege, and mobility.
The deadline to apply for Decorative Arts Trust Publishing Grants is March 31 annually. For more information, visit decorativeartstrust.org.
Funding News | Mellon Centre Publication and Digitisation Grants
The Mellon Centre recently announced changes to its publication grants and the introduction of digitization grants:
Paul Mellon Centre Funding: Publication and Digitisation Grants
Applications accepted 5 August — 30 September 2024
Ahead of the opening of the autumn 2024 round of funding opportunities we have made some alterations to simplify and improve our Publication Grants. Our Publication Grants continue to be one of our most heavily subscribed awards, and in 2023 received over ninety applications. Therefore we have decided to streamline the process; instead of having the single Publication Grant, for which authors and publishers could apply separately or together, from autumn 2024 there will be three distinct grant categories:
Author Grants (Large)
Awards of up to £6,000 which can only be applied for by authors, editors or individuals working on a long-form piece of written work (e.g. monograph, catalogue etc.). This award is designed to support costs incurred by the author relating to the publication, such as image purchasing and copyright, commissioning of new photography or graphics, marketing/publicity costs and supporting publisher subventions.
Author Grants (Small)
Awards of up to £1,000 which can only be applied for by individuals working on a short-form piece of written work (e.g. article, chapter etc.) for a scholarly journal or edited volume. This award is primarily designed to support costs incurred by the individual for images use associated with their piece of writing (e.g. copyright costs, image purchasing, commissioning of new photography or graphics).
Exhibition Publication Grants
Awards of up to £6,000 which can only be applied for by organisations, institutions or publishers working on a publication associated with an exhibition on British art or architectural history. The publication could be due to be published to coincide with the exhibition or as a direct result of an exhibition. This award is primarily designed to support the practical costs incurred by the organisation, institution or publisher when publishing the work (e.g. printing, binding, image rights, commissioning new photography or images, indexing, copy-editing, production costs, marketing and publicity etc.). If a publisher is interested in applying for a grant for a publication not relating to an exhibition we would encourage them to speak to the author or editor so they can apply for an Author Grant (Large).
Applications will open on 5 August and close 30 September. Please do contact the Grants & Fellowships Manager if you have any questions relating to these changes. Multiple applications across these schemes, for the same publication, will not be accepted. If an applicant is interested in digitising a publication then we would encourage them to look at our new Digitisation Grant which is due to be introduced in autumn 2024.
Supporting the field of British art history publishing has been an important strand of grantmaking for Paul Mellon Centre since its inception in 1970. These changes to the structure of the publications grants will not impact on the overall amount awarded to publication annually, and we will endeavour to support as many projects as possible.
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Digitisation Grants
The Mellon Centre is pleased to be able to introduce Digitisation Grants, a new funding opportunity that will be offered for the first time in our autumn 2024 round. Our Digital Project Grant was introduced in 2015 and since then has supported a variety of fascinating and innovative digital projects; however, since its inception we have noticed that many applicants are looking for funding to support more straightforward digitisation projects, and we hope this new grant will help.
The Digitisation Grant is an award of up to £5,000 and is specifically designed to help organisations make materials from their collections freely available for users online via digital methods. The grant may be used towards the practical costs of in-house digitisation (e.g. equipment and software), hiring an external digitisation service and personnel costs for cataloguing or research purposes.
Materials to be digitised could include:
• photographic collections
• archival collections of letters, index cards, notes etc.
• bound volumes (e.g. diaries, magazines, newspapers, albums, sketchbooks, published books etc.)
• objects, paintings or assets
• publications
Please note that organisations can only apply for this award to digitise items in their own collections.
We hope this grant will help to make materials concerning British art and architectural history available to a wider audience and continue Paul Mellon Centre’s mission to champion new ways of understanding British art history and culture.
Decorative Arts Trust Prize for Excellence and Innovation
From The Decorative Arts Trust:
Decorative Arts Trust Prize for Excellence and Innovation, $100,000
Application due by 30 June 2024
To further the Decorative Arts Trust’s mission to foster appreciation and study of the arts, the Trust established this $100,000 Prize for Excellence and Innovation. The Prize funds outstanding projects that advance the public’s appreciation of decorative art, fine art, architecture, or landscape. The Prize is awarded to a non-profit organization in the United States or abroad for a scholarly endeavor, such as museum exhibitions, print and digital publications, and online databases. The Trust’s selection committee aims to recognize impactful and original projects that advance scholarship in the field while reaching a broad audience.
Visit the Trust’s website for details and application instructions.
Exhibition | High Strung: 500 Years of Keyboard Instruments
One of the world’s finest musical instrument collections (boasting the world’s oldest cello as well as significant archival resources) is housed on the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, in the southeast corner of the state, about 40 miles from Sioux City, Iowa. Founded in 1973 around Arne Larson’s collection of some 2500 instruments, the National Music Museum recently finished a major renovation and re-installation project. In January, Elizabeth Rembert provided a profile for NPR’s All Things Considered (2 January 2024), and later that month the museum announced the acquisition of five cellos (including 17th- and 18th-century instruments), 27 bows, archival materials, and a Hawaiian guitar previously owned by the late cellist Robert Cancelosi. In addition to the NMM’s regular exhibitions, this special exhibition is on view through the end of the year:
High Strung: Five Centuries of Stringed Keyboard Instruments
National Music Museum, Vermillion, South Dakota, March — December 2024
For over 600 years, stringed keyboard instruments have served as repositories for human imagination, science, technology, craft, artistry, and music. They are admired for their stature—and oftentimes stunning beauty—alongside their ability to play both melody and harmony. Keyboard innovation has continuously expanded throughout the world, throughout time. The special exhibition High Strung: Five Centuries of Stringed Keyboard Instruments explores the form, function, and development of keyboard instruments from early harpsichords to the modern piano. The special exhibition brings together nearly 20 keyboard instruments from the NMM’s collections—some of which have never before been exhibited.
Curatorial Workshop | Inside Drawings
From ArtHist.net and The Menil Collection:
Inside Drawings: A Workshop on the Materiality of Unique Works on Paper
The Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, 3–7 June 2024
Applications due by 22 March 2024
The Menil Drawing Institute at the Menil Collection in Houston is dedicated to the study and display of drawing, with a focus on scholarship and raising public appreciation of the medium—from early drawings to modern and contemporary works. Inside Drawings: A Workshop on the Materiality of Unique Works on Paper will address the physical components of drawing practices in a focused manner, intended to give curators of drawing collections a broader understanding of unique works on paper for the purpose of better defining, researching, and interpreting drawings.
Fully funded by the Getty Foundation through their Paper Project initiative, this weeklong workshop will utilize the collection and staff of the Menil, involving outside experts in the fields of paper conservation, papermaking history, materials study, conservation imaging and science, and curation of drawings. There will be hands-on opportunities to deepen understanding of materials, as well as visits to exhibitions, collections, and an artist’s studio. Sixteen selected participants will have all expenses paid. Ideal participants will be early to mid‐career curators, with up to fifteen years of experience, who work directly with a collection of drawings. The Menil Drawing Institute seeks to assemble an international cohort of colleagues to participate in this workshop and encourages international applicants.
More information is available here.
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