New Book | The Art of the Actress
Part of the Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series from Cambridge UP (digital downloads are available for free until 25 January!).
Laura Engel, The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 75 pages, ISBN: 978-1009486811 (hardcover), $65 / ISBN: 978-1108977906 (paperback), $22. Also available digitally through Cambridge UP.
The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities considers how eighteenth-century visual materials across genres, such as prints, portraits, sculpture, costumes, and accessories, contribute to the understanding of the nuances of female celebrity, fame, notoriety, and scandal. The ‘art’ of the actress refers to the actress represented in visual art, as well as to the actress’s labor and skill in making art ephemerally through performance and tangibly through objects. Moving away from the concept of the ‘actress as muse,’ a relationship that privileges the role of the male artist over the inspirational subject, Laura Engel focuses instead on the varied significance of representations, reproductions, and re-animations of actresses, female artists, and theatrical women across media. Via case studies, this Element explores how the archive charts both a familiar and at times unknown narrative about female performers of the past.
Laura Engel is a Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and theater. She is the author of Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 (2019); Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs (2015); and Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011). She also co-edited, with Elaine McGirr, Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 (2014).
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: The Art of the Actress in the Eighteenth Century
1 The Paradox of Pearls
2 The Actress as Artist and the Artist as Actress: Anne Damer and Angelica Kauffman
3 Mary Anne’s Muff: Actresses and Satire
4 Epilogue: Unfinished Business: Elizabeth Inchbald, Lady Cahir, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and the Aftermath of the Art of the Actress
References
Philippe Halbert Named Associate Curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum
From the press release, via Art Daily:
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut has named Dr. Philippe Halbert as Richard Koopman Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts. A graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Halbert earned his PhD in the history of art from Yale University, where he studied the intersections of art, empire, race, and self-fashioning in the Atlantic world. His academic work centers American decorative arts and material culture broadly, from its Indigenous roots to interconnected phenomena of diaspora, creolization, and settler-colonialism. Halbert has served as Interim Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth since November 2022.
“I am committed to telling dynamic, object-centered stories of people and place that transcend geographic, ethnic, linguistic, and temporal bounds,” Halbert said, explaining that his academic interdisciplinary research and professional endeavors are grounded in a desire to encourage appreciation of American decorative arts by specialists and general audiences of all ages.
Proficient in French and Spanish, Halbert has been involved in the development of numerous exhibitions and special installations at the Wadsworth. Oversight responsibilities include over 3,000 decorative arts objects (circa 1650–2020) at the Wadsworth, with duties ranging from daily care of the collection and related research to overseeing rotations in the permanent collection galleries, developing special exhibits, volunteer training, and building partnerships with other institutions and constituents in Hartford and beyond.
Special projects underway and upcoming include New Nation, Many Hands, a special exhibition of federal-era decorative arts and material culture drawn from the permanent collection (on view from June 2023 until September 2024); reinterpretation of the Wetmore parlor, a painted and paneled room from a circa 1746 Middletown, Connecticut, house; and reevaluation of the Wadsworth’s American decorative arts holdings in anticipation of their reinstallation in 2025.
“Philippe is an outstanding scholar and curator of the Atlantic world, especially the interaction between France and North America. His passion for the material culture of vast early America is infectious and his love of curatorial work, breadth of knowledge, and extensive scholarship are incredible assets for the Wadsworth,” said Matthew Hargraves, Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. “We are delighted that he has assumed this new role and look forward to his continued stewardship of our remarkable American Decorative Arts collection.”
Previously in his career, Halbert served as a curatorial intern at various museums, including at the Yale University Art Gallery, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Colonial Williamsburg. He has earned numerous awards and fellowships and been an adjunct lecturer and consultant for various institutions, including at the Embassy of the United States in Paris. He is a resident of West Hartford, CT.
Conference | Visualizing Antiquity, Part II
From ArtHist.net:
Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints — Part II: Find and Display / Fragment and Whole
Bildwerdung der Antike: Zur Episteme von Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken der Frühen Neuzeit — II. Fund und Aufstellung / Fragment und Ganzes
Online and in-person, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich, 31 January 2024
Organized by Ulrich Pfisterer, Cristina Ruggero, and Timo Strauch
The academy project Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, hosted at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (thesaurus.bbaw.de), and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich (zikg.eu) are organizing a series of colloquia in 2023–2025 on the topic Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Drawings and Prints in the Early Modern Period. The significance of drawings and prints for ideas, research, and the circulation of knowledge about ancient artifacts, architecture, and images in Europe and neighboring areas from the late Middle Ages to the advent of photography in the mid-19th century will be examined. The second colloquium will explore how the various states and contexts of ancient objects, in the broadest sense, between their discovery and their ‘final’ display, were captured and documented in images. Later study days will focus on Collectors, Artists, Scholars: Knowledge and Will in Collection Catalogs and Fake News? Fantasy Antiquities. Participation in the event is free of charge, and the talks will also be broadcast via Zoom (Meeting-ID: 856 5934 5839 | Password: 148258).
p r o g r a m
11.00 Begrüßung & Einführung
11.15 Dokumentation
Moderation: Arnold Nesselrath (Rom)
• Francesco Benelli (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna), ‘Che no sia tondo e che abia dello aovato’: Uffizi U1132A, a stratification of meanings and strategies within the Sangallo’s workshop
• Barbara Sielhorst (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Pars pro toto. Zur visuellen Dokumentation des Palatins in Rom vom Beginn des 18. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts
• Alessia Zambon (UVSQ-University Paris-Saclay), Thomas Burgon’s Excavations in Athens in 1813: Fieldwork and Finds’ Recording
13.00 Mittagspause
14.00 Restaurierung – Rekonstruktion
Moderation: Elena Vaiani (ZIKG München)
• Elena Efimova (Lomonossow-Universität Moskau), Dessins des détails d’ordres: entre un livre de modèles et une collection antiquaire
• Lena Demary (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Transparenz und Verschleierung – Ambivalenzen früher restauratorischer Dokumentationen in Katalogen antiker Bildwerke
• Annie Maloney (Oberlin College), Reconstructing the Fragments of Pietro Santi Bartoli’s Reproductive Corpus
• Koenraad Vos (University of Cambridge), Restorations of Ancient Sculpture as Epistemic Images: Filippo Aurelio Visconti on the Benefits of Intervention
16.20 Kurze Pause
16.30 Aufstelling
Moderation: Henri de Riedmatten (Université de Genève)
• Anna Degler (Freie Universität Berlin), Auf unsicherem Grund. Der sog. Torso Belvedere und die Körperdiskurse in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts
• Daniela Picchi (Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna), Giovanni Nardi and Ancient Egypt at the Medici Court
• Sophie Kleveman (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen), Kommissarisches Antikenwissen und die Regulation des Antikenmarktes im 17. Jahrhundert
• Henri de Riedmatten (Université de Genève), Zusammenfassung und Leitung Abschlussdiskussion
Exhibition | Thomas Frye: An Irish Artist in London
From Ireland’s Office of Public Works:
Neglected Genius — Thomas Frye: An Irish Artist in London
Dublin Castle, 1 December 2023 — 19 March 2024
Curated by William Laffan
The Office of Public Works is pleased to announce the opening of a major exhibition dedicated to Ireland’s most successful design-entrepreneur of the eighteenth century, Thomas Frye (1710–1762).
Born in 1710, most likely in Edenderry, County Offaly, Thomas Frye moved to London as a young man, where he quickly established himself as a successful portrait painter. From the mid-1740s, he ran a factory in Bow, just east of the City of London, set up to recreate Chinese porcelain, which had been admired in Europe for centuries. Under Frye’s management the Bow factory thrived, producing inexpensive ceramics both decorative and utilitarian in a variety of designs.
Frye was among the earliest European artists to collapse the distinction between ‘high’ art and factory-produced design. In an age of increasing specialisation, the manner in which he ranged freely across multiple techniques and media was unique. Although his name is scarcely known today outside specialist circles, Frye has a strong claim to the title of Ireland’s most successful printmaker, industrial artist, and design entrepreneur. At the same time, Frye’s career in London illustrates the incipient globalization of the period. Frye attempted to emulate Chinese technology with raw materials from north America.
This exhibition sets side-by-side Frye’s portraiture in oil, his enamel miniatures, his mezzotints, and the production of the Bow porcelain factory under his management. For the first time equal emphasis is afforded to each facet of this supremely gifted and highly innovative Irish artist. Included are loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum; The Foundling Museum, London; the Holburne Museum, Bath; and the National Gallery of Ireland, along with leading private collections.
William Laffan, the curator of the exhibition states: “Frye must be acknowledged as a pioneering figure in portraiture, porcelain and printmaking, and as one of the most inventive and ‘ingenious’ artists of the Georgian era.”
The Decorative Arts Trust’s Emerging Scholars Colloquium, 2024
The Decorative Arts Trust’s Emerging Scholars Colloquium takes place this Sunday, on the heels of the group’s Antiques Weekend, an annual foray into New York’s Americana Week:
The Decorative Arts Trust’s Emerging Scholars Colloquium
Park Avenue Armory, New York, 21 January 2024
Photo from the 2023 Emerging Scholars Colloquium in the Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room (via the Instagram account of The Decorative Arts Trust).
The Decorative Arts Trust is excited to host its 8th Annual Colloquium featuring young scholars in the decorative arts field. The registration fee for the colloquium is $25; Decorative Arts Trust membership is not required to attend. The event is generously sponsored by Classical American Homes Preservation Trust and Mr. & Mrs. Donald B. Ayres III. Registration is available here.
p r o g r a m m e
9.00 Coffee and bagels
9.30 Welcome by Benjamin Prosky, President, Classical American Homes Preservation Trust
Introductions by Catherine Carlisle, Manager of Educational Programs, Decorative Arts Trust
• Follow the Hearth: Retracing the Spatial History of Edgewater’s Dining Room Mantelpiece — Lauren Drapala (PhD candidate, Bard Graduate Center, and William L. Thompson Collections Fellow, Classical American Homes Preservation Trust)
• An Artifact of Afro-America: A Blanket Chest by Brooks Thompson — Neil Grasty (Undergraduate Student, Morehouse College, and Curatorial Intern, High Museum of Art)
• Loud and Clear: Glass and Obscured Narratives at the New Orleans Museum of Art — Laura Ochoa Rincon (Decorative Arts Trust Curatorial Fellow, New Orleans Museum of Art)
• Does Architecture Move? The Mahadol Palanquin of 18th-Century Gujarat and Marwar — Krishna Shekhawat (PhD Student, University of California, Berkeley)
• ‘Dressing Up’ Egypt: Performing Race and Late 19th-Century Egyptomania — Lea Stephenson (PhD Candidate, University of Delaware)
11.30 Concluding remarks by Matthew Thurlow, Executive Director, Decorative Arts Trust
The Burlington Magazine, December 2023
The eighteenth century in the December issue of The Burlington, which focuses on Spain:
The Burlington Magazine 165 (December 2023)
Francisco de Goya, Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta, 1820, oil on canvas, 115 × 77 cm (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 52.14).
a r t i c l e
• Mercedes Cerón Peña, “Goya’s Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta,” pp. 1300–04.
In 1820 Goya painted a portrait of himself as he had appeared during his serious illness of the year before, attended by his doctor, Eugenio García Arrieta. Newly discovered biographical information about Arrieta suggests that the painting’s red and and green colour scheme may allude to the political views he shared with Goya.
r e v i e w s
• Michael Hall, Review of the new Galería de las Colecciones Reales (Royal Collections Gallery) in Madrid (opened 28 June 2023), pp. 1339–43.
• Stephen Lloyd, Review of the exhibition Return of the Gods (World Museum, Liverpool, (April 2023 — February 2024), pp. 1343–45. “Britain’s largest assemblage of Classical sculpture outside London belongs to National Museums Liverpool . . . In 1959 Liverpool City Council and its museums were gifted the entirety of the Ince Blundell collection—approximately six hundred heavily restored Roman marbles . . . collected by . . . Henry Blundell (1724–1810), a wealthy Catholic landowner, between 1776 and 1809.”
• Humphrey Wine, Review of the catalogue raisonné by Joseph Assémat-Tessandier, Louis Lagrenée, dit l’Aîné (1725–1805) (Arthena, 2022), pp. 1364–65.
Louis-Michel van Loo, Portrait of Isabel Farnese, 1737, oil on canvas, 341 × 264 cm (Madrid: Galería de las Colecciones Reales).
• Rebeka Hodgkinson, Review of Stephanie Barczewski, How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023), pp. 1370–71.
• Peter Humfrey, Review of Eveline Baseggio, Tiziana Franco, and Luca Molà, eds., La chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi e la comunità veneziana dei Servi di Maria, secoli XIV–XIX (Viella, 2023), pp. 1374–75. “The demolition of the great fourteenth-century church of the Servi in about 1812–13 represents one of the most grievous of the many losses suffered by Venice’s artistic heritage during the Napoleonic period.”
o b i t u a r y
• Saloni Mathur, Obituary for Kavita Singh (1964–2023), pp. 1379–80.
Professor of art history and Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kavita Singh became internationally known for her publications on the history and politics of museums and the pre-modern art of South Asia. An authority on Indian court paintings, she was an inspiring colleague and teacher who publicly championed both her university and the study of Mughal art in the subcontinent.
New Book | Mariana de Neoburgo
The English description of the book from CEEH:
Gloria Martínez Leiva, with a foreword by Javier Jordán de Urríes, Mariana de Neoburgo, última reina de los Austrias: Vida y legado artístico (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2022), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-8418760082, €50.
Maria Anna of Neuburg (1667−1740), the second wife of Charles II (Carlos II), was queen consort of Spain for ten years and queen dowager for another forty. However, she is a little-known figure to whom historians have barely paid attention. This study takes a look at her life, her image and her artistic patronage, which was not unaffected by the heightened political tension that characterised European history around 1700 and resulted in a change of dynasty in Spain.
Against this turbulent international backdrop, the survey of the queen’s life explores in depth important aspects of court art such as the decoration of her apartments in the royal palaces and sites in which she lived, drawing on documents held in Spanish and foreign archives. It also examines the residences she occupied as a widow in Toledo and Guadalajara, as well as her homes and palaces in Bayonne during her thirty-two-year exile. The approximately one hundred known portraits of her help both unravel her personality and trace the artistic, stylistic and conceptual evolution of the genre over more than half a century, showing how her image—first as queen consort and subsequently as queen dowager—was shaped and publicly projected.
A comprehensive overview of the works of art she commissioned—especially from Luca Giordano—or owned, the portrait gallery she assembled, the paintings she sent to her brother the elector palatine, her richly stocked library and her exceptional founding of the chapel of Loreto in Chiusa (Italy) sheds new light on the patronage of Maria Anna, who is finally studied in her full dimension as the last Habsburg queen.
Gloria Martínez Leiva, who received a PhD in art history for her thesis on Maria Anna of Neuburg, has focused her research on the Spanish royal collections, on which she has published many articles. She is co-author of Quadros y otras cosas que tiene Su Magestad Felipe IV en este Alcázar de Madrid. Año de 1636 (2007) and El inventario del Alcázar de Madrid de 1666. Felipe IV y su colección artística (2015). She has pursued a career in cultural institutions such as Patrimonio Nacional and the Fundación Universitaria Española. She is director of the platform InvestigArt.
Call for Papers | Panel on Ships at ASPHS 2024 in Lisbon
The Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies annual conference will be held in Lisbon, 8–12 July 2024.
Ships and Their Contents: Shipbuilding, Shipwrecks, and Global Circulation in the Iberian World, 1600–1800
Chaired by Sabina de Cavi and Luis Gordo Peláez
Proposals due by 21 January 2024
In a recent talk organized by the Getty Research Institute, Mirko Sardelić (Senior Research Associate of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts / The University of Western Australia) theorized about Renaissance ships as mobile cross-cultural systems. In response to the increasing academic interest in maritime history, ars navigandi, and maritime archaeology, this panel aims at discussing the materiality of ships and their role as cultural and artistic media in a transoceanic context. It focuses on the global trade in the Iberian World that was dominated by the two main urban centers and port cities of Seville and Lisbon and often interacted and clashed with English and Dutch interests. We welcome contributions on topics such as: the materiality and daily life on the early modern ship; economic partnerships for shipbuilding; shipwrecks, their representation and remains; the iconography of transatlantic cargo ships and the global trade (cartography); cargoes of art and precious goods; smuggling, docks and customs across the globe; marines and the maritime society in the broadest sense (gente di mare). Please submit a 300-word proposal, 5 keywords and a one-page CV before 21 January 2024 to Sabina de Cavi (scavi@fcsh.unl.pt) and Luis Gordo Peláez (luisgordopelaez@csufresno.edu).
New Book | Praying to Portraits
Largely a 17th-century story, but also entirely relevant to the 18th century with good 18th-century examples—and to my thinking, a really smart, helpful book for thinking about portraits of any sort (and incredibly well-written). –CH
From The Pennsylvania State UP:
Adam Jasienski, Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and the Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-0271093444, $120.
In Praying to Portraits, art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait.
Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to ‘true’ effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies.
Highly original and persuasive, Praying to Portraits profoundly revises our understanding of early modern portraiture. It will intrigue art historians across geographical boundaries, and it will also find an audience among scholars of architecture, history, and religion in the early modern Hispanic world.
Adam Jasienski is Associate Professor of Art History in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Portraits and Sacred Images in Early Modernity
1 Sacrificing the Self
2 True Portraits, Lying Portraits
3 Repainting Portraits
4 Portraits as Sacred Images
Conclusion: The Life Histories of Sacred Portraits and the History of Sacred Portraiture
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Part of the Furniture: The Library of John Bedford
Joseph Moxon, Practical Perspective; or Perspective Made Easie (London, 1670)
(University of Leeds)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Now on view at the University of Leeds, with additional information at the Antique Collecting Magazine. Also, see this posting at Antique Dealers Blog by one of the show’s curators, Mark Westgarth.
Part of the Furniture: The Library of John Bedford
Brotherton Gallery, University of Leeds, 9 January — 21 December 2024
Curated by Mark Westgarth, Rachel Eckersley, and Rhiannon Lawrence-Francis
Rare and beautiful books chart the evolution of furniture design over the centuries and the journey from drawing board, to workshop, to home
Selected from the world-leading library of antiques dealer John Bedford (1941–2019), ornate patterns by a renaissance pioneer, designs by Chippendale, Sheraton, Pugin, and Morris, elaborate trade cards, colourful catalogues, drawings, and manuals show how ideas and trends took shape, gained influence, and were eventually revived as fashions came full circle.
Upholsterer and furniture dealer Daniel Thorn might be less of a household name, but his personal sketchbook of designs for drapery, curtains, and furniture is a lively working record of the looks of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. Other highlights include the only complete coloured copy of The Ladies Amusement, an 18th-century book of decorative designs made to cut out and paste. Henry Lawford’s gloriously garish 1855 fold-out sofa catalogue sweeps away clichés of dismal Victoriana in a colour-lithographed riot of puce, lavender, and pea-green.
The exhibition also celebrates Bedford’s life, his vast knowledge, and his generous legacy to the University of Leeds, which enabled the extension and refurbishment of The Brotherton Research Centre and the establishment of The John Bedford Fellowship, in addition to the donation of his dazzling library.
Part of the Furniture: The Library of John Bedford is curated by Mark Westgarth, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Art & Antiques Market; Rachel Eckersley, Rare Book Specialist; and Rhiannon Lawrence-Francis, Special Collections Curator.
Henry Lawford, The Cabinet of Practical, Useful, and Decorative Furniture Designs (J. S. Virtue & Co., 1855)
(University of Leeds)
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