Workshop | Touched / Retouched: Paper across Time, 1400–1800
From the Call for Applications at the Bibliotheca Hertziana:
Touched / Retouched: Paper across Time, 1400–1800
Rome, 11–16 November 2024
Applications due by 20 March 2024
The Lise Meitner Group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History and the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome invite applications for an intensive one-week, hands-on workshop for early career specialists in the field of prints and drawings. This is made possible with support from Getty through The Paper Project initiative.
The goal of the workshop is to provide object-based training to the next generation of curators in the graphic arts, with a focus on premodern practices of retouching. We take an expansive approach to the term ‘retouching’ to encompass any discernible alterations carried out on drawings, prints, or their support after completion. Once identified, such alterations carry important repercussions: they change the way an object is cataloged, interpreted, and presented to the public; they influence choices about acquisition or deaccessioning; they shape decisions about conservation, affecting storage and treatment needs. Among drawing specialists, detecting and dating traces of retouching is considered to be largely a matter of tacit knowledge. The reconstruction of the chronological sequence of interventions via close looking or the help of diagnostic technologies is carried out on a daily basis in collections worldwide, yet this practice is often virtually inaccessible to outsiders.
This workshop is designed to provide a source of technical and material knowledge that will prove essential for drawing and print curators entering the field. By focusing on retouching and its interpretation, we intend to advance a materially layered understanding of paper objects that builds on recent scholarly literature while exploring a fundamental point of intersection between academic, curatorial, and conservation practices. The Hertziana leads (Francesca Borgo, Camilla Colzani, Alice Ottazzi) and ICG co-leads (Giorgio Marini and Gabriella Pace) will be joined by keynote speakers Carmen Bambach and Antony Griffiths and senior discussants Jonathan Bober, Hugo Chapman, and Catherine Goguel, among others.
During the first, virtual phase of the program, participants will present their own preliminary research on a selected drawing from the BHMPI’s collections. This will lay the groundwork for the second, central segment: a week-long, in-person workshop in Rome, with senior experts from prominent European and North American graphic arts collections joining the cohort of instructors. Hands-on examination of works on paper both pre- and post-treatment, viewing exercises, and practical paper-marking experiences will take place at the BHMPI’s and ICG’s study rooms, at the Diagnostic Lab and Paper Conservation Department, at local archives, and in Fabriano, the largest paper production center of premodern Europe. Dedicated presentations on the most common forms of manipulation will cover collector’s marks, highlighting and overdrawing, pricking and pouncing, framing and binding, hand-coloring, conservation decisions, and archiving and filing. The week will be followed by a remote capstone session and presentation of individual projects.
During the week in Rome, accommodation and travel expenses will be covered for all participants. Shared meals and a per diem will also be provided.
This project is aimed at early career curators and academics with demonstrable interest and experience in the field of graphic art. Eligible candidates for application should hold a doctoral degree (earned within the past 10 years), be enrolled in a doctoral program, or possess a solid curatorial experience in graphic arts collections. A background in conservation is not a prerequisite. An active museum affiliation is preferable but not required. The working language is English. Knowledge of Italian is advantageous but not essential.
Applications to participate in the workshop must be submitted via the online application portal before 20 March 2024, 11.59pm CEST.
More information is available here»
Lecture | Iris Moon on Stubbs and Wedgwood
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).
Call for Papers | Eating or Not Eating Animals: Sociability and Ethics
A glutonous man thinking about the food and drink he will consume at Christmas! From The Comic Almanack for 1839: An Ephemeris in Jest and Earnest, Containing ‘All Things Fitting for Such a Work’ by Rigdum Funnidos, Gent, with illustrations by George Cruikshank (London: Charles Tilt, 1838).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the Call for Papers (the PDF of which includes the French), via GIS Sociabilités:
Eating or Not Eating Animals: Sociability and Ethics around the Table
Manger ou ne pas manger la chair: Sociabilité et éthique autour de la table
Université Rennes 2, 6 June 2024
Organized by Florence Magnot-Ogilvy and Sophie Mesplède
Proposals due by 15 March 2024
Since the non-human turn of the early 21st century, numerous critical works have examined the animal question in the 18th century, a time when humanity’s place in the world, the relationship between human beings and non-human animals, the latter’s sensibility, and debates on the sensory soul were at the heart of the reflections of philosophers, physicians, naturalists, and educationalists.[1]
Few studies, however, have explored the question of meat- and non-meat-eating patterns specifically from the point of view of sociability.[2] Yet the issue formed one of the dividing lines in sociability, between men and women, young and old, people from different backgrounds, but also, in a new way, between humans and non-humans, in a century in which pets were playing an increasingly important role in human sociability.[3] As more and more human beings developed unique emotional relationships with cats, dogs, monkeys, and birds—to name but a few companion species—the question arose as to whether or not the bodies of animals credited with sensibility should be consumed. Some naturalists and writers, such as the Englishman Lord Monboddo and the hunter-philosopher Charles Georges Leroy, author of Lettres sur les animaux, recognized the ability of these animals to aggregate into communities that they felt were close to human societies. The tradition of the metempsychosis narrative, revived by the vogue for Orientalism, was then articulated in an unprecedented way with reflections on point of view, sensibility, and individuality.
In the 18th century, the abstinence from meat practiced for religious reasons[4] along with that driven by medical concerns (in George Cheyne’s writings, for example, where the question of diet was also linked to an imagination of power) was joined by that born of ethical considerations regarding the duties of humans towards other animals. The latter would profoundly question the dividing line between humanity and animality in European cultures won over by the imperatives of sensibility. The philosophical writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Condillac, and Rousseau on the nature of this boundary and the consequences to be drawn from it in terms of food were to be read throughout Europe. Meanwhile, their fictions were supported by a food imaginary weighed down by moral and political values, from Zadig’s supper to the gendered eating habits of Clarens as set out by Saint-Preux in one of the letters of La Nouvelle Héloïse. Across the Channel, it was often men of faith who spoke out against the cruelty inflicted on other species, and called for reflection on the modalities of their killing as much as on its finality. If the barbaric treatment of certain animals jeopardized the moral fiber of human beings, as William Hogarth’s series of engravings entitled The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) helped to bring to light for a large English audience, what about the consumption of their flesh? “Vegetarianism,” term that did not appear until the middle of the 19th century, seemed to an increasing number of men and women to be a virtuous option that, although not always practiced, provided a subject for reflection and discussion in the context of enlightened sociability.
This study day, devoted to the debates surrounding the consumption of animals during the Enlightenment and the reconfiguration of positions that took place at the time, invites us to examine the question of a meat-eating habits insofar as these intersected with the emergence of new forms of sociability in Europe. It will look at how discussions about the ontological status of non-human animals helped redefine European sociability, where flesh-eating was a regular practice encouraged by the commercial adventures of the long 18th century.
Current debates around vegetarianism, veganism, anthropocentrism, and the gendered nature of food invite us to go back to the origins of modernity and to re-interrogate the Enlightenment on the place and role of non-human animals in what constitutes society. With this in mind, we will look at the many representations, both textual and pictorial, evoking the consumption of animal bodies in various social and literary contexts:
• In the visual arts — iconographic representations of animals killed or fattened for human consumption (hunting pictures, portraits of livestock, still-life paintings), animal carcasses, culinary preparations that visibly include them, market stalls and kitchen tables, the presence of animals in banqueting scenes, scenes of animals being fed, visual associations between femininity and animal flesh, caricatures and satirical representations, illustrations for fables, educational texts or scientific publications, etc.
• In literature — the representation of discussions about food and drink (table discussions, the material conditions of debates on the issue, the modalities of conversations, arguments and debates), hygiene-related considerations about children’s diets, the influence of flesh consumption on human morals, the link between what people ate and who they were, whether and how this type of discourse was influenced by the different literary genres, etc.
• In the periodical press, essays, political writings, and pamphlets — how and when the issue was used to support a particular argument.
• In scientific writings (naturalist, veterinary, and medical writings) — the extent to which they took the ongoing changes in morals and attitudes towards animals into account
Papers may be presented in French or English. Proposals (with a provisional title, a 250-word summary, and a brief biography of the author) should be sent before 15 March 2024 to:
Florence Magnot-Ogilvy, florence.magnot-ogilvy@univ-rennes2.fr
Sophie Mesplède, sophie.mesplede@univ-rennes2.fr
This event is supported by the GIS Sociabilités.
i n d i c a t i v e b i b l i o g r a p h y
Arena, Francesca, Yasmina Foehr-Janssens, Irini Papaikonomou et Francesca Prescendi (eds.), Allaitement entre humains et animaux : représentations et pratiques de l’Antiquité à aujourd’hui, Anthropozoologica 52/1, 2017.
Berchtold, Jacques, “Julie et l’âme des poissons du Léman dans La Nouvelle Héloïse de Rousseau”, De l’animal-machine à l’âme des machines : querelles biomécaniques de l’âme XVIe–XXIe siècles, Paris, éditions de la Sorbonne, 2010.
Berchtold Jacques et Jean-Luc Guichet (ed.), « L’animal des Lumières », Dix-huitième siècle 42, 2010.
Blackwell, Mark, The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Bucknell University Press, 2007).
Burgat, Florence, L’humanité carnivore (Seuil, 2017).
Gregory, James, “Vegetable Fictions in the Kingdom of Roast Beef: Representing the Vegetarian in Victorian Literature”, in Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan (dir.), Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900 (Lexington Books, 2007): 17–34.
Guerrini, Anita, “A Diet for a Sensitive Soul: Vegetarianism in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Eighteenth-Century Life 23.2, May 1999: 34–42.
Guichet, Jean-Luc, Rousseau, l’animal et l’homme. L’animalité dans l’horizon anthropologique des Lumières (Cerf, 2006).
Guichet, Jean-Luc (ed.), De l’animal-machine à l’âme des machines : querelles biomécaniques de l’âme XVIe–XXIe siècles, Paris, éditions de la Sorbonne, 2010.
Larue, Renan, Le Végétarisme des Lumières. L’abstinence de viande dans la France du XVIIIème siècle (Garnier, 2019).
Magnot-Ogilvy, Florence, « Instabilité énonciative et hiérarchie des valeurs dans l’Histoire véritable : l’effet-personnage et la projection sensorielle chez Montesquieu », Montesquieu et la fiction : autour des Lettres persanes, Aurélia Gaillard (dir.), Lumières, 2022: 145–159.
Morton, Timothy, “Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley, and the Making of Romantic Vegetarianism”, Romanticism 12.1, 2006: 52–61.
Page-Jones, Kimberley, “From Buffon to Coleridge: Sociability and Humanity in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Comparative Anatomy”, Literature & History 32(2), 2023: 110–128.
Puskar-Pasewicz, Margaret, Cultural Encyclopedia of Vegetarianism (Greenwood, 2010).
Richardot, Anne (dir.), Bestiaire des Lumières, Revue des sciences humaines 296, 2009.
Serna, Pierre, L’Animal en République (Anarchasis, 2016).
Serna, Pierre, Comme des bêtes (Fayard, 2017).
Spencer, Colin, The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (UPNE, 1996).
Strivay, Lucienne, « Manger juste. Les droits de l’animal dans les encyclopédies de 1750 à 1800. De l’éthique au politique », in Bodson, Liliane, Le Statut éthique de l’animal : conceptions anciennes et nouvelles (Université de Liège, 1995): 61–99.
Stockhorst, Stefanie, Jürgen Overhoff and Penelope J. Corfield, Human-Animal Interactions in the Eighteenth Century: From Pests and Predators to Pets, Poems, and Philosophy (Brill, 2021).
Wolloch, Nathaniel, Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (Humanity Books, 2006).
Scientific Committee
• Jacques Berchtold (Sorbonne Université/ Fondation Bodmer)
• Valérie Capdeville (Rennes 2)
• Émilie Dardenne (Rennes 2/ IUF)
• Jean-Luc Guichet (Université de Picardie)
• David Mc Callam (University of Sheffield)
• Florence Magnot-Ogilvy (Rennes 2)
• Sophie Mesplède (Rennes 2)
• Kimberley Page-Jones (UBO)
• Sophie Vasset (Université Paul Valéry)
• Phil Withington (University of Sheffield)
n o t e s
1. See in particular L’animal des Lumières, Jacques Berchtold and Jean-Luc Guichet (eds.), DHS n°42, 2010; Bestiaire des Lumières, Anne Richardot (ed.), Revue des sciences humaines 296, 2009; Figures animales, Annie Duprat (ed.), Sociétés et représentations 27, 2009; Jean-Luc Guichet, Rousseau, l’animal et l’homme, l’animalité dans l’horizon anthropologique des Lumières (Cerf, 2006) ; as well as the works of Pierre Serna, L’Animal en République (Anarchasis, 2016) and Comme des bêtes (Fayard, 2017).
2. With the notable exception of Le Végétarisme des Lumières. L’abstinence de viande dans la France du XVIIIème siècle by Renan Larue (Garnier, 2019), which sets out to explore the roots of vegan and vegetarian thought in the writings of the Enlightenment. Renan Larue founded a vegan studies programme at the University of California where he teaches, broadening the perspective to current debates on vegetarianism and eating patterns as political stances.
3. See the PhD thesis recently defended in 2023 by Tomohiro Kaibara under the supervision of Antoine Lilti: “Le Grand sacre des chats: l’invention d’un animal de compagnie en France (1670–1830).”
4. The case of Thomas Tryon springs to mind, as do the dietary prohibitions of all religions, which attracted the attention of philosophers such as Voltaire in France.
New Book | The Wealth of a Nation
Part of the Princeton Economic History of the Western World, from Princeton UP:
Geoffrey Hodgson, The Wealth of a Nation: Institutional Foundations of English Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0691247014, £35 / $40.
How the development of legal and financial institutions transformed Britain into the world’s first capitalist country
Modern capitalism emerged in England in the eighteenth century and ushered in the Industrial Revolution, though scholars have long debated why. Some attribute the causes to technological change while others point to the Protestant ethic, liberal ideas, and cultural change. The Wealth of a Nation reveals the crucial developments in legal and financial institutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that help to explain this dramatic transformation.
Offering new perspectives on the early history of capitalism, Geoffrey Hodgson describes how, for the emerging British economy, pressures from without were as important as evolution from within. He shows how intensive military conflicts overseas forced the state to undertake major financial, administrative, legal, and political reforms. The resulting institutional changes not only bolstered the British war machine—they fostered the Industrial Revolution. Hodgson traces how Britain’s war capitalism led to an expansion of its empire and a staggering increase in the slave trade, and how the institutional innovations that radically transformed the British economy were copied and adapted by countries around the world. A landmark work of scholarship, The Wealth of a Nation sheds light on how external factors such as war gave rise to institutional arrangements that facilitated finance, banking, and investment, and offers a conceptual framework for further research into the origins and consolidation of capitalism in England.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson is professor emeritus in management at Loughborough University London and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics. His many books include Liberal Solidarity, Conceptualizing Capitalism, and Darwin’s Conjecture.
New Book | Novels, Needleworks, and Empire
Part of the Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History, from Yale UP:
Chloe Wigston Smith, Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-0300270785, $65.
The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism
In the eighteenth century, women’s contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives. Their traces were recorded in material ways, through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes, and it was deeply connected to colonialism.
Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arm’s reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.
Chloe Wigston Smith is professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of York, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Entangled Forms
1 Making the Four Corners of the Globe, Oroonoko, and Euphemia
2 Small Marks in Thread: Samplers, Moll Flanders, and Material Expression
3 Global Domestic Objects: Embroidered Maps, Lydia, and The Female American
4 Pins, Needles, and Wampum in Mary Rowlandson and Hobomok
5 Companionship in Black Attendant Needlework, The History of Sir George Ellison, and The Woman of Colour
Coda: Material Entanglements, Then and Now
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Call for Papers | Textiles and Masculinities
From ArtHist.net and the Design History Society:
Textiles and Masculinities
Online, Design History Society, 15 June 2024
Proposals due by 11 April 2024
Banyan, British, ca. 1780, silk (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978.135.1).
The complex and evolving relationships between masculinities and textiles have been underrepresented in histories of design to date. This picture contrasts with the cultural and social importance textiles have in maintaining, contesting, and performing masculinities. This online symposium will share international research on historical and contemporary textiles in global contexts. We invite researchers at any level who investigate some aspect of masculinities and textiles to submit an abstract.
Themes include but are not limited to:
• Fashion textiles and masculinities
• Maintaining, performing, or contesting masculinities through textiles
• Queer, non-binary, and fluid gender identities and textiles
• Masculinities, textiles, and interior design
• Decolonising textiles and masculinities
• Textiles for menswear in fashion for all
• Design, production, and consumption of textiles and masculinities
Due to the language limits of the organisers, the symposium will take place in English. We acknowledge that information/knowledge can be disseminated in different ways, and so we are open to different presentation styles and formats. To be considered for a 15-minute presentation, please submit a 300-word abstract and a 50- to 100-word biography to the DHS Senior Administrator Jenna Allsopp at designhistorysociety@gmail.com by 11 April 2024. Applicants will be notified of the outcome of the submission within two weeks of the closing deadline. Please contact Dr Fiona Anderson (Glasgow School of Art) at f.anderson@gsa.ac.uk with any questions.
Exhibition | The Doering Fashion Collection
Shoes, made in England or America, ca. 1800, leather, silk, and linen
(Mary Doering Fashion Collection)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the press release for the exhibition:
Elegance, Taste, and Style: The Mary D. Doering Fashion Collection
DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, opening 22 February 2024 (with three rotations)
More than 150 objects from one of the greatest private collections of early textiles, accessories, and historic dress assembled in the United States will go on view over the next several years at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. Elegance, Taste, and Style: The Mary D. Doering Fashion Collection will take visitors through 50 years of this collector’s passion and feature gowns, jackets, waistcoats, shoes, textile documents, and more dating between 1700 and 1840. Due to light sensitivity, the objects will be shown in three parts. The first installment displays approximately 40 objects and is the inaugural exhibition to be shown in the Mary Turner Gilliland and Clinton R. Gilliland Gallery, the Art Museums’ first dedicated gallery to historic costume. The dates for the second and third rotation of objects on view are still to be determined.
This green gown, made of wool, ca. 1815, is remarkable to have survived, because many woolen garments of the day were destroyed by moths and carpet beetles (Mary Doering Fashion Collection).
“Examples of historic dress are among the most human of artifacts from the past, providing windows into the lives and tastes of our forebearers,” said Ronald Hurst, the Foundation’s Carlisle H. Humelsine chief curator and senior vice president. “Mary Doering’s superb collection is particularly rich in such opportunities, and it is highly fitting that the Doering Collection constitutes the first exhibition in the new Gilliland Gallery for historic dress.”
When Mary D. Doering (b. 1952), a lifelong curator, educator, and researcher, was sixteen years old, she received a trunk filled with early 20th-century clothing as a bequest from her great aunt. This small gift was the impetus for what became a lifelong passion for historic dress. Throughout her career, Doering used her collection, which ultimately grew to thousands of pieces (there are approximately 800 pieces dating before 1840 alone), to educate hundreds of students and researchers about changing fashions, taste, design, and style. From the early collecting days when she went picking at local flea markets and antiques stores, to her first trip to the United Kingdom and her eventual meeting with the legendary antiques dealer Cora Ginsburg, who became Doering’s mentor, she thoughtfully and carefully selected every object in her collection. Over the nearly 50 years that she built the collection, Doering gained expertise to create a truly comprehensive assemblage ranging from underwear to the finishing accessories.
“It has been an absolute pleasure working with Mary’s collection, especially using objects so near and dear to her heart, to tell her lifelong story of collecting historic dress,” said Neal Hurst, Colonial Williamsburg’s curator of historic dress and textiles. “Every object that Mary acquired was carefully hand-selected based on her research and what she saw in other museums. Visitors to the new historic dress gallery will love seeing the range of clothing from the fine and fancy to the plain and every day.”
One highlight of the collection is a blue silk Englishman’s waistcoat, likely embroidered in the 1760s in China (Mary Doering Fashion Collection).
Among the highlights of Elegance, Taste, and Style is one of the first waistcoats Doering purchased of what was to become more than 100 examples dating between 1700 and 1840. This stunning blue silk waistcoat was probably embroidered in China in the 1760s for the Western market. Chinese embroidery is distinctive in that it uses twisted threads rather than single stranded floss. The object, the first of several Doering purchased at Christie’s in South Kensington, London, on 11 June 1974, was bought with money she saved to travel to Europe. Doering remembered the auctioneer saying, “Sold to the enthusiastic young woman on the aisle.”
Another featured object in the exhibition is an ivory, silk satin round gown in nearly perfect condition. Believed to be a wedding gown worn in the West Country of England, the style was popular in the mid-18th century; it integrates the petticoat into the structure of the skirt rather than it being a separate garment. Doering purchased this round gown along with two other gowns from Cora Ginsburg in honor of her mother who died in January 1978. Doering used the small sum of money her mother left to her to fund the gowns.
Although the Doering Collection is strong in American and English objects and focused heavily on women’s dress from the 18th and early 19th centuries, it also includes important pieces from Europe, such as the 1780s Dutch jacket that is another star piece in the exhibition. Jackets of this era, such as this one, were very low cut, even under the bust, with a large handkerchief worn over the top. Dutch women often dressed with many different prints and patterns, which varied greatly depending on the region. This example is unusual in that it uses two different block-printed cotton fabrics with black or dark blue backgrounds in the lower skirts and under the sleeves. It is important to note the careful use of textiles here with two different but very similar textiles used in obvious places; textiles were more expensive than the labor to construct the jacket, so this indicates a level of frugality.
The Doering Collection features numerous accessories, including shoes, buttons, work bags, hats, caps, and buckles. One example among the shoe collection is another highlight of Elegance, Taste, and Style. Although James B. Patterson’s identity is lost to history, he saw value in this pair of ivory, silk satin slippers with a small Italian-style heel popular in the 1780s. He affixed a paper label to the bottom that reads: “Shoes worn in 1782” along with his name. This pair shows very little wear on the soles and heels perhaps indicating that they were worn as wedding slippers.
Designed by Jean-Baptist Huet between 1800 and 1805, this piece of French-printed cotton includes amphora, Apollo’s lyre, and the mythical harpee enclosed within medallions (Mary Doering Fashion Collection).
Mary Doering also collected many textile documents to use in her class on design, manufacturing techniques, and the change in taste over time, which she taught at The Smithsonian Institution’s Master’s Program in the History of Decorative Arts in 2001. One such rare example to be seen in the exhibition is an early 19th-century cylinder print that shows the new style and taste desired across England and Europe. With the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1730s and Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign at the turn of the century, ancient relics and symbols quickly became popular. Designed by Jean-Baptist Huet between 1800 and 1805, this print includes amphora, Apollo’s lyre and the mythical beast known as a Harpee, or half woman-half bird, enclosed within different medallions. The print, known as a furniture, was primarily used for bed hangings, window curtains, and slip covers. It is especially rare in that the designer, the printer, the date, and the place of production are all known.
Also included in the exhibition is a larger-than-life video panel that will be sure to delight visitors and highlight a practice we share with our 18th-century ancestors. It will show people of all races and classes, from Native Americans to soldiers, enslaved Africans to members of the top echelons of colonial society, tradesmen, and women, getting dressed.
In celebration of Elegance, Taste, and Style, a symposium on historic dress, Collections, Collectors, and Collaborations, will be held at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 14–16 November 2024. The symposium will not only celebrate the opening of the Mary Turner Gilliland and Clinton R. Gilliland Gallery at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg but also 90 years of historical dress and costumed interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg (since 1934), 70 years of the Margaret Hunter Shop, which was the first curated exhibition of clothing and accessories at Colonial Williamsburg (in 1954), and 40 years of mantua making in the Colonial Williamsburg’s department of historic trades (begun in 1984). Registration for the conference will launch later this spring.
Elegance, Taste, and Style: The Mary D. Doering Fashion Collection is generously funded by the Thomas L. and Nancy S. Baker Museum Exhibitions Support Fund. The exhibition’s video component, men’s accessories, and other essential aspects of the exhibition are funded by Charles and Ellan Spring.
New Book | François Le Moyne (1688–1737)
From Silvana Editoriale (and on sale until 10 March) . . .
Jean-Luc Bordeaux, François Le Moyne (1688–1737), Opera completa: New Findings and Legacy (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-8836652310, €95.
First Painter to the king in 1736 for only a few months before his tragic death, François Le Moyne had a career as short as it was prolific. A large number of works by this exceptional representative of French Rococo had been commissioned by the high clergy, the powerful Duke of Antin—official representative of King Louis XV—by members of the high aristocracy like the Prince of Conti or the Duke of Rohan or rich fermiers généraux like François Berger or Abraham Peyrenc de Moras, or even by the elite of great collectors or connoisseurs like Mariette, La Live de July, and Lempereur.
Teacher of Charles-Joseph Natoire and François Boucher and a contemporary of Antoine Watteau and Jean-François de Troy, Le Moyne reached the height of his glory with his Apotheosis of Hercules, painted between 1732 and 1736 on the immense ceiling of the Salon d’Hercule, located between La Chapelle Royale and the royal apartments of the Château de Versailles. After so many years spent in oblivion, Le Moyne is finally recognized today as one of the major artists of the 18th century, exerting a seminal influence on the following generations.
Unfortunately, only few of the works that Le Moyne realized at the beginning of his career, between 1710 and 1715, have been identified. Nonetheless, he left an important corpus of landscapes, religious works, and courtship scenes. He is considered one of the greatest draftsmen of all time and one of the best European artists of illusionistic ceiling painting since the time of Pietro da Cortona and Charles Le Brun. Moreover, Le Moyne contributed with his easel paintings and his technique to the creation of a new, more seductive model for the representation of the female nude in Europe. Lastly, on a technical level, he brightened the palette of French painting and realized sketches with a particularly quick and agile brushstroke.
Nearly forty years after his first monograph devoted to the painter, Professor Jean-Luc Bordeaux proposes a renewed survey of the oeuvre of François Le Moyne (1688–1737). Bordeaux analyses Le Moyne’s contributions to the French rococo as well as lesser-known aspects of his artistic production and career. With almost 140 paintings and 250 drawings, this new catalogue raisonné is an extended edition of the one published in 1984, with significant additions. It also includes an appendix of around twenty pages that describes a considerable amount of works by Le Moyne, now lost but attributed to him by famous collectors of the time and 18th century experts such as Gersaint, Mariette, Paillet, and Remy.
New Book | Colonial Watteau
From De Gruyter:
Charlotte Guichard, Watteau – kolonial: Herrschaft, Handel und Galanterie im Frankreich des Régence / Colonial Watteau: Empire, Commerce, and Galanterie in Regency France (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-3422990463, €17 / $20. English and German.
What were the early visions of Empire in Regency France? The book offers a interpretation of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (1717) by framing it in the context of French colonial expansion in the years of the Regency. Born in Louis XIV’s reign, galant aesthetics contributed to frame the colonial encounter in French America. Fantasies of maritime departure, embarkation and/or debarkation, also expressed a longing for colonial travel and exploration. The imperial imagination fueled with codes of galanterie was very developed in the circles of Watteau’s amateurs. From Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (1717) to its visual reenactment in 1763, the book argues that galanterie served as a visual and conceptual model of French commercial and colonial relations.
Wie sahen die frühen imperialen Visionen im Frankreich der Régence aus? Das Buch bietet eine neue und auch provokative Deutung von Jean-Antoine Watteaus Pilgerfahrt zur Insel Cythera (1717), indem es das Werk in den Kontext der französischen kolonialen Expansion in den Jahren der Régence stellt. Die galante Ästhetik, die während der Herrschaft und im Imperium Ludwigs XIV. entstand, trug dazu bei, die koloniale Begegnung in Französisch-Amerika zu gestalten. Die Fantasien vom Aufbruch zur See, vom Einschiffen oder Ausschiffen, allesamt Merkmale des Gemäldes, drückten auch die Sehnsucht nach kolonialen Reisen und Entdeckungen aus. Die imperiale Imagination, die sich aus den Codes der Galanterie speiste, war in den Kreisen von Watteaus amateurs, die ihrerseits den Modernen nahestanden, die neue ästhetische Formen in Kunst und Literatur förderten, sehr ausgeprägt. Von Watteaus Pilgerfahrt zur Insel Cythera (1717) bis zu ihrer visuellen Nachstellung im Jahr 1763 diente die Galanterie als visuelles und konzeptionelles Modell der französischen Handels- und Kolonialbeziehungen.
Charlotte Guichard, Research Professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.
Oxford Art Journal, December 2023
The 18th century in the latest issue of the Oxford Art Journal:
Oxford Art Journal 46.3 (December 2023)
a r t i c l e s
• Aaron Wile, “Absolutism, the Royal Body, and the Origins of Mythologie galante: Charles de La Fosse at the Trianon,” pp. 327–55.
Charles de La Fosse, The Rest of Diana, 1688, oil on canvas, 128 × 160 cm (Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon).
Mythologie galante, a sensual mode of mythological painting that is one the defining developments of eighteenth-century French art, is usually associated with aristocratic resistance to Louis XIV. This article examines three mythological paintings created by Charles de La Fosse for one of the king’s pleasure palaces in 1688, long identified as a major turning point towards mythologie galante, in order to reassess the origins and meaning of the genre. Situating the paintings within the long arc of Louis XIV’s representational politics, I propose that the collapse of the fiction of the king’s two bodies during the second half of his reign and the subsequent redefinition of the king’s public and private spheres allowed La Fosse to develop a new mythological idiom based in touch, intimacy, and sentiment. The resulting works contravened painting’s traditional role under absolutism to form royal subjects, redefining it as a medium of sympathetic encounter. La Fosse’s paintings open up, from this perspective, an alternate account of modern art and subjectivity—one that took shape not in opposition to absolutist culture but from its very heart.
• Robert Jones, “Joshua Reynolds and Deafness: Listening, Hearing, and Not Hearing in Eighteenth-Century Portraiture,” pp. 357–77.
Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Joshua Reynolds, 1767, oil on canvas, 127 × 102 cm (National Trust, Saltram).
This article examines the significance of deafness in painting and proposes a new trope for the form of picturing undertaken by eighteenth-century art, ‘the listening portrait’. As a first step it recovers and explores the significance of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s own deafness, as represented by his self-portraits as well as images by Nathanial Dance, Angelica Kauffman, and Johan Zoffany. Sound is necessarily absent from painting, audible speech impossible. Having explored these apparent limits (found in eighteenth-century theorizations of art) the essay asks more fundamentally what work is done by the representation of someone striving to listen. By considering this question, it is possible to understand these images as engaging in a more sensitive ethical enquiry concerned with what an aural impairment might mean, and how it is distinct from a refusal or unwillingness to listen. Deafness is consequently shown to be not merely something that paintings show, rather the issue of hearing or not hearing frames their pictorial and moral purpose. Throughout the article recognition of the specificity of Georgian sociability on the one hand, and eighteenth-century artistic theory and practice on the other, seeks to enable the claims of Medical Humanities to recognize previously hidden narratives.
r e v i e w s
• Andrew McClellan, “Purpose, Power, and Possibility: A History of Museums Past and Present,” pp. 493–501.
Review of Krzysztof Pomian, Le musée, une histoire mondiale, 3 volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 2020–22), volume 1: Du trésor au musée, 687 pages, ISBN: 978-2070742370, €35; volume 2: L’ancrage européen, 1789–1850, 546 pages, ISBN: 978-2072924705, €35; volume 3: À la conquête du monde, 1850–2020, 936 pages, ISBN: 978-2072982781, €45.
Enfilade 
leave a comment