Exhibition | Petr Brandl: The Story of a Bohemian

Installation view of the exhibition Petr Brandl: The Story of a Bohemian, Waldstein Riding School, Prague (2023).
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Now on view at Národní galerie Praha (as noted at Art History News) . . .
Petr Brandl: The Story of a Bohemian / Příběh bohéma
Waldstein Riding School, National Gallery Prague, 19 October 2023 — 11 February 2024
Curated by Andrea Steckerová
After over fifty years, this exhibition presents the work of the most important Baroque artist in Bohemia, Petr Brandl (1668–1735). On display are his monumental altarpieces—specially restored for the occasion—as well as his portraits and genre paintings of very interesting subject matter. Visitors will also see newly discovered works by Brandl for the very first time. The exhibition is organized around two parallel narratives: the painter’s works and his life.
We have numerous archival documents of Brandl’s life of bohemian revolt, which is remarkable even today, offering interesting contexts for the problems of our time. Brandl was, for instance, a lifelong debtor due to his penchant for the luxury lifestyle of nobility, which he was keen to enjoy himself. It also led him to court battles with his wife Helena over alimony. In addition, Brandl was regularly in trouble with his commissioners, as he often failed to comply with the terms of his contracts. The painter’s unbound life has inspired a contemporary theatre play Three Women and a Hunter in Love, which will be staged together with the exhibition (Geisslers Hofcomoedianten).
None of this, however, changes the fact that Brandl was the highest-paid artist of his time, probably because of his very distinctive and original style of painting, in which we can trace certain parallels with Rembrandt. X-rays and macro-photographs of Brandl’s works complement the exhibition to give visitors a glimpse into the inner workings of his painting.
Andrea Steckerová, Petr Brandl: Příběh Bohéma (Prague: Národní galerie Praha, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-8070358221, 1050 Czech Koruna / $46.
At Sotheby’s | The Collection of Joseph Baillio

Alexandre-François Desportes, Still Life of the Remnants of a Meal with a Lunging Cat, detail, ca. 1720s, oil on canvas, unframed: 74 × 92 cm (Lot 26, estimate: $200,000–300,000).
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This Wednesday at Sotheby’s (with viewing still available Monday and Tuesday) . . .
A Scholar Collects
Sotheby’s, New York, 31 January 2024, 10am, (Sale N11437)
Sotheby’s is honored to present A Scholar Collects, a sale [of 41 lots] comprised of paintings, drawings, and sculpture from the collection of the preeminent scholar Joseph Baillio. A visionary art historian who specializes in the art of eighteenth-century France, Baillio is most well-known for his expertise in the pioneering woman artist Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. His landmark exhibitions on her life and career—first in 1982 in Fort Worth and then in 2016 in New York, Paris, and Montreal—were triumphant in catapulting her to the forefront of scholarship and furthered her indelible mark on the history of art.
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From Neil Jeffares’s accompanying essay on Baillio:
Neil Jeffares, “Joseph Baillio: An Appreciation.”
For most of us the name Joseph Baillio is synonymous with Mme Vigée Le Brun, the artist to whom he has devoted so much of his career and whose reputation now stands at a peak unimaginable before the famous exhibition he organized in the Kimbell Art Museum in 1982. You will of course have a clearer recollection of the vast and astonishing monographic show Joseph presented in the Grand Palais in Paris in 2015 (before moving to New York and Toronto). And we all await the magnum opus, the catalogue raisonné (already signaled in the 1982 catalogue), as the apotheosis of this labor.
But there is so much more to Joseph than just one artist—or even the circle of talent that grew around her . . .
As much as reevaluating and contextualizing familiar masterpieces, Joseph’s work has been the painstaking combination of archival and visual clues to give back the identity of pictures that have been hidden or lost. And he has done that countless times . . .
The full essay is available here»
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of the Duchesse de Guiche, née Louise Françoise Gabrielle Aglaé de Polignac, 1784, pastel on two joined sheets of paper laid on canvas, 80 × 64 cm (Lot 19, estimate: $500,000–700,000).
Call for Papers | Cultural History of the Hunt
From ArtHist.net, which includes the German version:
7th Workshop of the Cultural History of the Hunt Research Network
Online (via Zoom), 3 May 2024
Proposals due by 28 February 2024
The Cultural History of the Hunt research network (Netzwerk Jagdgeschichten) was founded in the summer of 2021 to promote academic exchange on the history of hunting. By viewing the topic of hunting from a transdisciplinary perspective, we aim to critically examine the role of hunting in the constitution, transformation, and perpetuation of the culture/nature-divide and related binary hierarchies. This international network brings together researchers at different career stages and consciously understands itself as open to a variety of research approaches regardless of their methodological, regional, and temporal framework, as well as their points of view concerning animal ethics.
The 7th meeting is thematically open. The workshop is intended to encourage an exchange regarding all questions from the field of cultural-historical research on hunting. Please send your proposals for a 20- to 30-minute contribution (maximum 200 words) and a short CV to Laura Beck (laura.beck@germanistik.uni-hannover.de) and Maurice Saß (maurice.sass@alanus.edu) before 28 February 2024.
New Book | Louis-François Chatard
From Éditions Faton:
Sébastien Boudry, Louis-François Chatard et les peintres doreurs du Garde-Meuble de la Couronne sous Louis XVI (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2023), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-2878443318, €36.
Les peintres et doreurs du Garde-Meuble de la Couronne ont participé à la création des plus beaux sièges du XVIIIe siècle. Leur production illustre la diversité et l’excellence des métiers d’art qui ont fait la réputation de Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Leur travail apporte finition et éclat au décor des bois après le travail du menuisier et du sculpteur qu’ils mettent en valeur.
Sous Louis XVI, Louis-François Chatard en devient le principal fournisseur. Peintre et doreur, il est également parfumeur. Ses confrères peintres et doreurs comme Julliac ou la famille Chaise tiennent également boutique à Paris en tant que marchands et restaurateurs de tableaux. Cet ouvrage nous fait découvrir cette profession et ce savoir-faire, ceux qui l’exercèrent avec excellence, tout en illustrant les mutations des corporations et de l’artisanat à Paris à la veille de la Révolution.
Historien de l’Art spécialisé en mobilier et objets d’art, Sébastien Boudry obtient un DEA (Master) à l’Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne en 2001. Chargé d’études au Centre des Monuments nationaux depuis 2003, il est en charge de la conservation-restauration des collections de plusieurs monuments depuis 2010. A ce titre il a participé aux projets de restauration et de présentation des collections de l’Hôtel de Sully à Paris (2012), du château de Champs-sur-Marne (2012–13), de la villa Cavrois à Croix (2014–15), du château de Voltaire à Ferney (2017–18), de l’Hôtel de la Marine à Paris (2018–2021), et du château de Bussy-Rabutin (2021–22).
Dresden’s Royal East Asian Porcelain Catalogue Now Available
A decade in development, the online catalogue for Dresden’s Royal East Asian Porcelain collection was recently launched by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden:
The Dresden Porcelain Project
Researching the Royal East Asian Collection and the Japanese Palace Inventories
From 2014 to 2024, the Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, has been the subject of a collaboration between an international team of specialists on an extensive research project aimed at cataloguing the collection of East Asian porcelain owned by Augustus the Strong (1670–1733). Of the initially more than 29,000 Chinese and Japanese ceramic objects, about 8200 are still extant in the Porzellansammlung today. The Japanese Palace Inventories were transcribed, translated and analysed as part of the research into the objects’ provenance.
The project’s findings are available here on the digital platform. The Royal Dresden Porcelain Collection is a publication of the Porzellansammlung. It showcases the objects and emphasises the historical context of the collection.
Team
Cora Würmell, Project Leader
Christiaan J. A. Jörg, Academic Supervisor
Karolin Randhahn, Research Associate
Ruth Sonja Simonis, Research Associate
Advisory Board
John Ayers
Helen Espir
Jessica Harrison-Hall
Peter Lam
Hiroko Nishida
Kōji Ōhashi
Rosemary Scott
Authors
Caroline Allen, Masaaki Arakawa, Eline van den Berg, Denise A. Campbell, Jan van Campen, Teresa Canepa, Menno Fitski, Ron Fuchs II, Tomoko Fujiwara, Ernst Geppert, Christiaan J. A. Jörg, Rose Kerr, Regina Krahl, Anette Loesch, Hiroko Nishida, Kōji Ōhashi, Linda Pomper, Karolin Randhahn, Maura Rinaldi, Miki Sakuraba, William R. Sargent, Ruth Sonja Simonis, Filip Suchomel, Daniel Suebsman, Yue Sun, Heike Ulbricht, Ching-Ling Wang, Liang-Chung Wang, Wen-Ting Wu, Cora Würmell, Pei-Chin Yu
More information and additional credits can be found here»
Call for Papers | Commerce and Circulation of Decorative Arts, 1792–1914

Benjamin Eugène Fichel, À l’hôtel Drouot, 1876 , exhibited at the Salon in 1877, oil on canvas, 61 × 90 cm. [The painting sold for €80,000 at a sale held in Paris by Beaussant Lefèvre on 22 June 2017, as reported by the Antiques Trade Gazette. –CH]
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From the Call for Papers, which includes the French Appel à communications:
The Commerce and Circulation of Decorative Arts, 1792–1914:
Auctions, Dealers, Collectors, and Museums
Le commerce et la circulation des objets d’art, 1792–1914:
Ventes aux enchères, marchands/es, collectionneurs/ses et musées
Lyon, 25–27 September 2024
Proposals due by 17 March 2024
This international three-day colloquium, to be held in Lyon, France, from 25 to 27 September 2024, will investigate the role played by auctions, dealers, collectors, and museums in the circulation of the decorative arts from 1792 until 1914. Beginning with the ‘ventes des biens des émigrés’ in Revolutionary France and ending with the onset of World War I, these were years of seismic political and socio-economic change that revolutionised the art market.
It was during the nineteenth century that the decorative arts, originally described as ‘curiosities’ and then ‘antiques’, became the subject of intellectual curiosity. The period under review saw the emergence of a more scholarly approach and publications, the development of the antiques trade and of museum collections devoted to the decorative arts, facilitated by the expansion of global trading networks, extended by colonisation and encouraged by international travel and world fairs. London and Paris led the growth of this market, but economic downturn in Britain and France resulted in the mass export of art to the Americas from the 1880s. At the same time, a new cosmopolitan elite stimulated purchase across Europe, competing with museums for prize objects.
These developments were first charted by Gerald Reitlinger in The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of the Objets d’art Market since 1750 (1963) and then by Clive Wainwright in The Romantic Interior (1989). Art market historiography has increased exponentially over recent years with scholarship on dealers (Lynn Catterson, Paola Cordera, Charlotte Vignon, Mark Westgarth), collectors and museums (Julius Bryant, Ting Chang, Suzanne Higgott, Sophie Le-Tarnec, Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy), collecting culture (Elizabeth Emery, Tom Stammers, Adriana Turpin), and markets and networks of trade (Anne Helmreich, Léa Saint-Raymond), among others as well as a dedicated Journal for Art Market Studies. This has been augmented by the Getty Provenance Index, Bloomsbury Art Market, the Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, the creation of specific publishers’ series (from Brill and Bloomsbury), the digitisation of auction catalogues, and two programmes initiated by INHA (one on Connoisseurs, Collectors and Dealers of Asian Art in France, 1700–1939, and the other on Sales of Antiquities in Nineteenth-Century France).
To date, however, scholarship has largely centred on the fine arts. This conference will focus on the commerce and global circulation of the decorative arts in order to open new perspectives and approaches that will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the art market. ‘Decorative arts’ are taken to include: furniture, metalwork, clocks, silverware, ceramics and glass, enamels, small sculpture, hardstones, ivories, jewellery, textiles, tapestries, and boiseries, from Ming dynasty porcelain, Mamluk glass, and Augsburg Kunstkammer objects to Boulle furniture, and Thomire bronzes, not to mention the contemporary Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements.
We hope to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue among participants specialising in art history, material culture and economic history. We welcome presentations using new methodologies or technologies for interpreting dealer/ collector/museum records and auction results as well as well as more traditional case studies. Topics for consideration will investigate the inter-relationships between the decorative arts market, connoisseurship, taste, and collecting practice. They may include, but are not limited to the following:
• The repercussions of political and socio-economic change on the circulation of objects
• Auctions and their impact on networks of local and international exchange
• Collectors’ preferences and methods of acquisition (auctions, dealers, agents, and advisors)
• The role of dealers, agents, curators and advisors, their influence on taste and collecting practice
• Networks of trade between Europe, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, and further afield
• Collaboration and competition within and between networks across borders
• The influence of the circulation of antiques on workshop practice and craftsmanship in the decorative arts
• The involvement of museums in the art market, their role at auctions, and the relations between dealers and curators, trade expertise, and scholarly research
• The impact of public exhibitions on the art market and the trade in decorative arts
• Connoisseurship and expertise across borders: the interrelationship between the discourse of decorative art history and the market (including the use of photography, sale catalogues, museum catalogues, and scholarly publications and journals)
• Cultural transfers through collecting practice
• The visualisation and staging of the collecting space/ interior
• The use of digital tools to analyse the circulation of the decorative arts
We encourage submissions from both early career researchers (PhD candidates) and established scholars, involved in the study of trade, art markets, collections, as well as museums and provenance research. This will be an ‘in-person’ event. It is hoped to cover accommodation for speakers for the duration of the conference. The symposium will be bi-lingual (English is preferred). Please submit abstracts for 20-minute papers (of no more than 350 words), together with a brief biography as an email attachment to camille.mestdagh@univ-lyon2.fr and diana_davis@hotmail.co.uk no later than 17 March 2024. Applicants selected by the scientific committee will be notified by 22 April 2024. Further updates will be posted on the event webpage. We hope to publish a volume of essays stemming from revised conference papers.
Organising Committee
Natacha Coquery (Professeure, Université Lumière Lyon 2, LARHRA), Camille Mestdagh (Post-doctoral researcher, Université Lumière Lyon 2, LARHRA), Igor Moullier (Maître de conférences, ENS Lyon, LARHRA), Rossella Froissart (Directrice d’études, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études-PSL, SAPRAT), Diana Davis (Independent researcher, PhD, University of Buckingham, UK)
Scientific Committee
Arnaud Bertinet (Maître de Conférences, Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne), Jérémie Cerman (Professeur, Université d’Artois, Arras), Paola Cordera (Associate Professor, Politecnico di Milano), Elizabeth Emery (Professor, Montclair State University, New Jersey), Sandra van Ginhoven (Head, Getty Provenance Index, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles), Anne Helmreich (Director, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington), Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (Lecturer, University of Edinburgh), Johannes Nathan (co-founder of the Centre of Art Market Studies, Technische Universität, Berlin), Anne Perrin-Khelissa (Maître de conferences HDR, Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès), Florencia Rodríguez Giavarini (Doctoral fellow, UNSAM-CONICET, Buenos Aires), Adriana Turpin (Head of Research, IESA, Paris)
This colloquium forms part of a wider project on the market for decorative arts: OBJECTive – ANR/ Lyon 2 Université / LARHRA : OBJECTive – ANR Objects through the Art Market: A Global Perspective – LARHRA.
Lecture | Pascale Ballesteros on Painters Historicizing 18th-C Fashion
This spring at BGC:
Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros, Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Decisive Museological Action of French Historicizing Painters
A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 3 April 2024

Dress detail from the collection of the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, formerly known as Musée Galliera.
On January 10, 1907, the Société de l’Histoire du Costume was founded in Paris to create a ‘Musée du Costume’. Sixteen of the founders were painters, and most of them were artists that historicized the eighteenth century. In this lecture, curator and scholar Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros considers the influence of artists such as Maurice Leloir (1853–1940), Gustave Jean Jacquet (1846–1909), and François Flameng (1856–1923) in the formation of the eighteenth-century fashion collection of the Palais Galliera and the construction of its image.
Responsible for the nineteenth-century collections at Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros has curated several exhibitions including Fastes de cours et cérémonies royales in 2009 at the castle of Versailles and L’art de paraître au 18e siècle at Nantes and Dijon Fine Arts Museums in 2021 and 2022. She teaches fashion history and fashion materials at Sorbonne Université. Her next exhibition will deal with women, travels, art, and fashion in the Enlightenment.
Registration is available here»
Call for Papers | Dress and Painting: Clothing and Textiles in Art
From the Call for Papers:
Dress and Painting: Clothing and Textiles in Art
The Association of Dress Historians International Conference
National Portrait Gallery, London, 7–8 October 2024
Proposals due by 28 April 2024
The Association of Dress Historians are delighted to introduce our two-day autumn conference for 2024 on the theme of Dress and Painting: Clothing and Textiles in Art. The conference aims to bring together scholars, professionals, and practitioners to explore and examine the wide range of interconnections between dress, textiles, and painting across any culture or region of the world, from before classical antiquity to the present day.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
– Aileen Ribeiro, Professor Emeritus of the Courtauld Institute of Art
– Timothy McCall, Associate Professor of Art History at Villanova University
– Anna Reynolds, Deputy Surveyor of The King’s Pictures at Royal Collection Trust
Papers are invited that investigate, but are not limited to, any of the following prompts:
• The value (and limitations) of painted sources for historians of dress including portraits, genre scenes, illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, and miniatures
• The reality (or otherwise) of clothing portrayed in paintings through comparison with extant garments, documentary sources, etc
• The practices of dressing up (e.g. fancy dress, professional robes) or dressing down (e.g. déshabillé) for portraits
• The symbolism of dress in paintings
• The role of clothing in interpretations of meaning or narrative
• Individual artists and their different approaches to depicting dress
• Artists’ involvement in decisions about what sitters should wear for portraits
• Artists’ personal attitudes to fashion and the selection of clothing worn in self-portraits
• Techniques used by artists to represent textiles and three-dimensional garments in paint
• The draped figure in painting, depictions of the clothed and unclothed body
• The role of the specialist drapery painter in artists’ studios
• Overlapping spheres of production in the raw materials for paintings and textiles e.g. pigments and dyes, linen canvas, animal hair
• Paintings as fashion illustration, and their role in the fashion design process
• Textile designs inspired by paintings
• Painters who were also fashion/textile designers
• Museum practices of exhibiting paintings alongside items of dress
We welcome submissions for 15- to 20-minute research presentations. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of no more than 200 words alongside a biography of no more than 50 words and an optional illustrative image* with caption to be included in an online programme to dressandpainting@dresshistorians.org by 00:00 BST on 28 April 2024. The conference is guest chaired by Anna Reynolds (Royal Collection Trust) and co-convened by Kirsten Burrall (Deputy Chair of ADH).
* Please send images as separate tiff or jpeg attachments and include the relevant caption beneath your abstract. Image captions are not included in abstract word count.
New Book | The Domino and the 18th-C London Masquerade
Part of the Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series from Cambridge UP:
Meghan Kobza, The Domino and the Eighteenth-Century London Masquerade: A Social Biography of a Costume (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 75 pages, ISBN: 978-1009468244 (hardcover), $65 / ISBN: 978-1009045551 (paperback), $22. Also available digitally through Cambridge UP.
This Element presents new cultural, social, and economic perspectives on the eighteenth-century London masquerade through an in-depth analysis of the classic domino costume. Constructing the object biography of the domino through material, visual, and written sources, Meghan Kobza brings together various experiences of the masquerade and expand the existing geographical, chronological, and socio-economic scope of the entertainment beyond the masquerade event itself. The book examines the domino’s physical and figurative movements from the masquerade warehouse, through eighteenth-century fashionable society, and into print and visual culture, drawing upon masquerade warehouse records, newspapers, manuscripts, prints, and physical objects to establish a comprehensive understanding of the domino and how it reflected contemporary experiences of the real and imagined masquerade. Analysing the domino through interdisciplinary methodologies illustrates the impact material and visual sources can have on reshaping existing scholarship.
Meghan Kobza is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University, where she completed her PhD in 2020. As a social historian, she is particularly interested in the history of eighteenth-century leisure culture in the British Empire and transatlantic world.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 The Masquerade and the Domino
2 Three Dominos
3 The Domino as a Commodity
4 Everywhere and Nowhere
Conclusion
References
Call for Papers | ‘The Hearts of the Leuchtenberg’
From the Call for Papers (see the DFK’s website for the German and French versions) . . .
‘The Hearts of the Leuchtenberg’: Cultures of Remembrance of a 19th-C. European Noble Family
‘Die Herzen der Leuchtenberg’: Erinnerungskultur(en) einer europäischen Adelsfamilie im 19. Jahrhundert
Munich, Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, 24–26 October 2024
Proposals due by 15 April 2024
On the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of the founding father of the Leuchtenberg dynasty—Eugène de Beauharnais, who died on 21 February 1824 in Munich—the German Center for Art History Paris (DFK Paris) is co-organizing, with the Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau and the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, an international colloquium on the cultures of remembrance within the Leuchtenberg family. The Leuchtenbergs’ French-Napoleonic origins, as well as the loss of former greatness that accompanied the family’s exile in Bavaria and change of name, had a lasting impact on their position in the Kingdom of Bavaria, where, following Eugène’s appointment as the Duke of Leuchtenberg and Prince of Eichstätt by Maximilian I Joseph on 15 November 1817, they were the highest-ranking nobles outside the royal family.
The development of the various memorial practices and/or memorial concepts of this important noble family is to be examined against the backdrop of the specific cultures of remembrance that characterized the first half of the nineteenth century, which were shaped equally by the new emotional culture of the era of sentimentality as by the Restoration period with its anti-French tendencies. Their rich material legacy—which includes souvenir albums, commemorative pieces of jewellery, hand-crafted objects and furnishings, which today remain preserved in public and private collections—partakes of the epochal phenomenon of the “unübersehbare[n] Konjunktur des dinglichen Andenkens in der materiellen Kultur des 19. Jahrhunderts” (unmistakable boom in souvenirs within the material culture of the nineteenth century) [Holm/Oesterle 2005]. In addition to objects, the Leuchtenbergs left behind abundant correspondence and diaries. Along with collections, libraries, and archives; moreover, they bequeathed a aristocratic culture of remembrance and a material culture that consisted not only of monuments—such as the heart urns, former in the chapel of the Palais Leuchtenberg in Munich and today in the Wittelsbachergruft in St Michael—but also charitable foundations and portraits. As “means of remembrance,” these are eloquent expressions of the intimate relationships among the individual family members, which intensified with the early death of the father and with the conditions of spatial separation that resulted from the family’s successful marriage politics. Aside from its main historical residences in France, Italy, and Bavaria, the family is traceable through the marriages of Joséphine von Leuchtenberg (1807–1876) in Sweden, of Amélie (1812–1873) in Brazil, of Auguste (1810–1835) in Portugal, and of Eugénie (1808–1847) and Théodelinde (1814–1857) in southern Germany (principalities of Hohenzollern-Hechingen and Württemberg). The Russian phase of the family’s history began on 14 July 1839 with the marriage of the youngest son and heir, Maximilian, 3rd Duke of Leuchtenberg (1817–1852), to Maria Nikolaevna, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas I.
The aim of the colloquium is to document, for the first time, the “artifacts and media” scattered around the world from the Leuchtenberg estate and to jointly reassess them through the lens of the culture of remembrance, including questions of materiality and mediality, investigation of haptic properties and performativity, and the presentation of exact provenances. The ways in which objects were gifted, dedicated, passed down, and perhaps exchanged among the Leuchtenbergs are crucial for understanding their precise location in the memorial practices of the family. In addition to the sentimental-emotional orientation—e.g. commemorative objects “die der bedürftigen Seele zur Anlehnung dienen” (that offer support for the needy soul) [Praz], or the “Interieur als Fluchtorte in die Erinnerung” (interior as a place of escape into memory)—the question of commemorative motivation also arises in the case of the newly princely Leuchtenbergs. The exploration of “sozialer Sinn- und Zeithorizonte” (social horizons of meaning and time), for instance by examining the referentiality to the past and a still-to-be-defined orientation of the family’s culture(s) of remembrance, is intended to contribute to a better understanding of the Leuchtenberg family, which had to reinvent and assert itself as a dynasty in its time—as a Gedächtnisgemeinschaft, or community of memory [Jan Assmann; Pierre Nora].
The colloquium marks the conclusion of a long-term research project, wherein, after France and Italy, Bavaria is the current focus of research as the last of the three stages of Prince Eugène’s life. The period under investigation includes the lifetime of his wife Augusta Amalia of Bavaria (d. 1851), who as a supervisory entity decisively steered and shaped the mementos of Prince Eugène (Honneur et fidelité), as well as his direct descendants. Comparative examples from other families or national contexts that address questions around the aristocratic culture of remembrance in the nineteenth century are just as welcome as transdisciplinary and transcultural research approaches. Possible topics are: objects and object biographies (e.g. souvenirs, memorial jewellery, hand-crafted items); the culture of gifting; commemorative albums, including questions about performativity; communication culture (e.g. letters, diaries); memory in literature (e.g. biographies, editions of letters); monuments (e.g. commemorative plaques, grave monuments); collections (e.g. archives between Funktionsgedächtnis and Speichergedächtnis, libraries, art collections); places; domestic culture and materiality; festivals; travel; image culture (e.g. portraits); and the cults of family and friendship.
The colloquium will take place 24–26 October 2024 in the Mars-Venussaal of the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich. Junior scholars are welcome to submit their proposals. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes, followed by a 15-minute discussion. Proposals are requested in German, French, or English by 15 April 2024 and should not exceed approximately 3,000 characters (including spaces), a short biography and contact details (email address, address, and institution). Submit proposals to the following address: leuchtenberg@dfk-paris.org. A notification of the acceptance of submissions will be made by the beginning of May 2024.
Organizing Committee
• Elisabeth Caude, Director of the Service à Compétence Nationale des musées nationaux des châteaux
de Malmaison et Bois-Préau, de l’île d’Aix et de la Maison Bonaparte à Ajaccio
• Dr Jörg Ebeling, Research Director, German Center for Art History Paris
• Dr Sybe Wartena, head of department, Furniture, games, musical instruments and models, Bavarian
National Museum, Munich
Scientific Committee
• Dr Birgit Jooss, Head of Art and Tradition, Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds
• Dr Sylvia Krauss-Meyl, Former Archive Director, Bayerischen Hauptstaatsarchiv München
• Lars Ljungström, Head of the Department of Collections and Documentation, Swedish Royal Collections
• Prof. Dr Hans Ottomeyer, Former President, Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin
• Marina Rosa, Chair, Centro documentazione Residenze Reali Lombarde
A select bibliography for the Leuchtenberg Family is available with the full Call for Papers.



















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