New Book | In the Shadow of the Empress
Maria Theresa was born on this day (13 May) in 1717; from Little, Brown and Company:
Nancy Goldstone, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), 640 pages, ISBN: 978-0316449335, $32.
The vibrant, sprawling saga of Empress Maria Theresa—one of the most renowned women rulers in history—and three of her extraordinary daughters, including Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen of France.
Out of the thrilling and tempestuous eighteenth century comes the sweeping family saga of beautiful Maria Theresa, a sovereign of uncommon strength and vision, the only woman ever to inherit and rule the vast Habsburg Empire in her own name, and three of her remarkable daughters: lovely, talented Maria Christina, governor-general of the Austrian Netherlands; spirited Maria Carolina, the resolute queen of Naples; and the youngest, Marie Antoinette, the glamorous, tragic queen of France, and perhaps the most famous princess in history.
Unfolding against an irresistible backdrop of brilliant courts from Vienna to Versailles, embracing the exotic lure of Naples and Sicily, this epic history of Maria Theresa and her daughters is a tour de force of desire, adventure, ambition, treachery, sorrow, and glory.
Each of these women’s lives was packed with passion and heart-stopping suspense. Maria Theresa inherited her father’s thrones at the age of twenty-three and was immediately attacked on all sides by foreign powers confident that a woman would to be too weak to defend herself. Maria Christina, a gifted artist who alone among her sisters succeeded in marrying for love, would face the same dangers that destroyed the monarchy in France. Resourceful Maria Carolina would usher in the golden age of Naples only to face the deadly whirlwind of Napoleon. And, finally, Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen whose stylish excesses and captivating notoriety have masked the truth about her husband and herself for two hundred and fifty years.
Vividly written and deeply researched, In the Shadow of the Empress is the riveting story of four exceptional women who changed the course of history.
Nancy Goldstone is the author of six previous books including Daughters of the Winter Queen: Four Remarkable Sisters, the Crown of Bohemia, and the Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots; The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom; The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc; Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe; and The Lady Queen: The Notorious Reign of Joanna I, Queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily. She has also coauthored six books with her husband, Lawrence Goldstone. She lives in Del Mar, California.
In Memoriam | Christopher M. S. Johns (1955–2022)
It is difficult to overstate Christopher’s generous and kind contributions to the HECAA community, collectively and individually, for so many members. And, of course, many readers were also just very fortunate to count him as a dear friend. From Vanderbilt:
Christopher M.S. Johns, the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Professor of Fine Arts and professor of history of art and architecture, died at his home on May 8 after a long illness. He was 67.
Johns graduated summa cum laude from Florida State University with a bachelor of arts. He went on to earn both a master of arts and a doctor of arts from the University of Delaware, where his doctoral thesis was titled “The Art Patronage of Pope Clement XI Albani and the Early Christian Revival in Eighteenth-Century Rome.”
“Christopher was a groundbreaking scholar who made significant contributions in areas that included early-modern Italian art and culture, Asian art history, and relationships between art, politics and religion,” said John Geer, Ginny and Conner Searcy Dean of the College of Arts and Science and professor of political science. “However, he also was a friend and colleague who will be remembered for his dedication to mentoring students. Christopher’s legacy will live on in all those students with whom he worked. He will be deeply missed in our college.”
Keep reading here»
New Book | Grafted Arts
Distributed by Yale UP:
Holly Shaffer, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107284, £45 / $55.
Grafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with (or fought against) each other to control western India in the eighteenth century. This book conceptualises the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of ‘graft’—a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials. By tracing grafted arts from multiple perspectives—Maratha and British, artist and patron, soldier and collector—this book charts the methods of empire-building that recast artistic production and collection in western India and from there across India and in Britain. This mercenary method of artistry propagated mixed, fractured and plundered arts. Indeed, these ‘grafted arts’—disseminated across India and Britain over the nineteenth century to aid in consolidating empire or revolting against it entirely—remain instigators of nationalist agitation today.
Holly Shaffer is assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and South Asian arts and their intersections.
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Note (added 17 January 2024) — As announced in January 2024, Grafted Arts was awarded an HBA Book Prize, for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800 and 1960 (alongside Mark Crinson’s Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester).
Display | Bedford Square: Creating Social Distance
Alison Shepherd, Drawing of ‘First’, ‘Second’ and ‘Third Rate’ Houses, in John Summerson, Georgian London (Yale University Press, 2003), figure 54, image courtesy of Alison Shepherd / Trustees of the Estate of John Summerson..
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Now on view at the Paul Mellon Centre:
Bedford Square: Creating Social Distance
Drawing Room, Paul Mellon Centre, London, 31 January — 9 September 2022
Curated by Martin Myrone with Bryony Botwright-Rance
Bedford Square has always been acclaimed as an outstanding piece of urban planning. Built between 1775 and 1782, the fifty-three houses of the square—all but one arranged in apparently symmetrical order, in four ‘palace-fronted terraces’ around a gated, landscaped garden—are considered exemplars of Georgian architecture. The arrangement of the buildings remains intact, and many original architectural details and even interiors are preserved along with much of the character of the private garden, making Bedford Square one of the most complete survivals of Georgian London. Through literature on Bedford Square’s architectural history and records of its inhabitants, this Drawing Room display at the Paul Mellon Centre highlights the way that classic Georgian architecture created forms of social distancing: in its physical form; in creating closed and exclusive urban sites; through its internal spaces which separated inhabitants and allocated roles in highly predictable ways; and its aesthetic values which lay claim to supposedly timeless and universal principles of classical design and geometrical order.
The accompanying exhibition pamphlet by Martin Mryone is available for download at the PMC.
At Auction | Ewa Juszkiewicz’s Portrait of a Lady (After Boilly)
From the press release (via Art Daily) . . .
21st Century Evening Sale, #20975
Christie’s, New York, 10 May 2022
Lot 9B: Ewa Juszkiewicz, Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019, oil on canvas, 200 × 160 cm. Estimate: $200,000–300,000.
On Tuesday, May 10th, Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly) by widely recognized Polish artist Ewa Juszkiewicz will be offered in one of the most prestigious art sales in the United States at Christie’s New York, sold to benefit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Viewings take place at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries. The artwork has been brought to auction thanks to a generous gift of one of the POLIN Museum donors, American Friends of POLIN Museum, together with the support of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, and Weil Gotshal & Manges. The sale launches the beginning of a series of partnered sales of works of art at Christie’s in order to benefit POLIN Museum. POLIN is the only museum in the world dedicated to commemorating the history of Polish Jews, based in Warsaw, Poland.
The auction explores groundbreaking masterpieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christopher Wool, Yoshitomo Nara, and other defining artists of the 21st century—Jeff Koons, Banksy, and Helmut Newton among others. It also introduces fresh-to-market works by contemporary pioneers like Jonas Wood, Matthew Wong, and Shara Hughes. Engage with this wide spectrum of influential works that reframe the current dialogue and develop new directions for the next generation of artists.
The Polish artist Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984) is known for her adept appropriations of historical portrait paintings. This work—Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly)—is an exquisite example of the artist’s masterful brushwork and keen questioning of gender and class representations within the realm of 18th- and 19th-century European painting.
Louis-Léopold Boilly, Madame Saint-Ange Chevrier, 1807, oil on canvas, 74 × 60 cm (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 7298).
Ana Maria Celis, Christie’s Head of the 21st Century Evening Sale, remarks, “Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly) [Lot 9b] thoughtfully examines the historical erasure of women through Juszkiewicz’s singular and subversive technique. We are honored to offer it in our 21st Century Evening Sale this season to benefit POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The juxtaposition of the classical stylization with the evocative subject matter of a female sitter’s whose head is fully wrapped, sparks new narratives around portrayals of femininity and deconstructs the past to create new dialogues.”
The POLIN Museum is a modern institution of culture—a historical museum that presents 1000 years of Jewish life in the Polish lands. It is also a place of meeting and dialogue among those who wish to explore the past and present Jewish culture, those eager to draw conclusions for the future from Polish-Jewish history, and finally those who are ready to face stereotypes and oppose xenophobia and nationalistic prejudices that threaten today’s societies. By promoting ideas of openness, tolerance, and truth, POLIN Museum contributes to the mutual understanding and respect among Poles and Jews, and other nations at the same time. Despite the global pandemic, after months of closure and economical struggle, it continues its mission, welcomes guests from all around the world at its core exhibition and organizes temporary exhibitions, historical, artistic, and educational events for Polish and international audience.
POLIN Museum understands its mission as a social responsibility, and is also responding to different current situations. To this end, alongside the efforts of many others, the Museum has responded to the current war in Ukraine, having just opened a new temporary exhibition, What’s Cooking? Jewish Culinary Culture, at a time when Warsaw is receiving a steady flow of Ukrainian refugees in great need of shelter and food. Within the Cooking for Ukraine project, POLIN Museum’s restaurant is preparing free hot meals featuring Jewish specialities and is delivering them directly to those in greatest need. “We must not remain indifferent,” Zygmunt Stępiński, Director of POLIN Museum, remarks.
Many of POLIN Museum’s activities, including Cooking for Ukraine, are supported by donors and friends from Poland and abroad, with a special support from American Friends of POLIN Museum. In the words of Stepinski, “We are grateful for the support of American Friends of POLIN Museum and Christie’s who believe in our mission and work with us to write the next chapter in the history of Polish Jews and Jewish life in Poland.”
A representative of Christie’s states: “Christie’s is proud to support philanthropic initiatives through our networks, whether by facilitating the sale of artwork to benefit important causes; offering, when we can, our salerooms as a venue for fundraising events; or providing expert charity auctioneers.”
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Note (added 24 May 2022) — Ewa Juszkiewicz’s Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly) [Lot 9b] sold for $1.56million, more than five times its high estimate. It’s one of the paintings that Jason Farago addresses in his article for The New York Times: Jason Farago, “Catch a Rising Star at the Auction House,” The New York Times (23 May 2022). No longer does museum validation or scholarly attention determine a painting’s value. Now, the collectors’ hunger comes first, and institutions must follow.
Exhibition | Young Gainsborough: Rediscovered Landscape Drawings
Thomas Gainsborough, Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk, 1748, oil on canvas, 122 × 155 cm
(London: The National Gallery, NG925)
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Now on view at the National Gallery of Ireland:
Young Gainsborough: Rediscovered Landscape Drawings
York Art Gallery, 1 October 2021 — 13 February 2022
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 5 March — 12 June 2022
Nottingham Castle Museum, 2 July — 25 September 2022
Thomas Gainsborough, Study for Cornard Wood, ca. 1748 (Royal Collection Trust).
In 2017 an exciting discovery was made among the drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The art historian Lindsay Stainton identified an album of 25 drawings—previously anonymous—as the work of the young Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), one of the greatest British painters of the eighteenth century. Sketched in the countryside around his native Suffolk or conjured from his imagination, these beautiful drawings from the late 1740s shed new light on our understanding of the artist’s early career. The drawings will be presented alongside paintings and works on paper borrowed from collections across the UK and Ireland, including the National Gallery’s recently conserved masterpiece Cornard Wood (1748). Together, they will shed new light on Gainsborough’s early landscape practice and the techniques that made him one of the country’s most significant and influential artists. In addition to the drawings from the Royal Collection Trust, the exhibition is supported by generous loans from the National Gallery, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and Colchester and Ipswich Museums.
The wall labels from the York installation are available for download here»
New Book | Lives of Gainsborough
From The Getty:
Philip Thicknesse, William Jackson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, with an introduction by Anthony Mould, Lives of Gainsborough (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1606066645, $13.
A collection of contemporary texts about Thomas Gainsborough, a leading British portraitist and landscape painter in the eighteenth century.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was a leading English landscape and portrait painter, draftsman, and printmaker who is now considered one of the most important British artists of the eighteenth century. This volume illuminates his life, career, personality, and passions through three diverse character sketches by Philip Thicknesse, an eccentric British adventurer, businessman, and writer; William Jackson, an artist and close friend to Gainsborough; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, an English portrait painter and the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. An obituary published shortly after Gainsborough’s death lends insight into the artist’s impact. An introduction by Anthony Mould, a British art dealer and independent scholar, offers an overview of Gainsborough’s life and career.
At Auction | Chardin’s Basket of Wild Strawberries
Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Basket of Wild Strawberries, shown at the Salon of 1761, oil on canvas, 38 × 46cm. The painting sold for €24,381,400 on 23 March 2022 at Artcurial in Paris. More information is available here.
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From The New York Times and Art Daily:
Laura Zornosa, “Louvre Bids to Keep a Chardin Bought by U.S. Museum in France,” The New York Times (4 May 2022). The Kimbell Art Museum in Texas is revealed to be the buyer of “Basket of Wild Strawberries,” at auction. The Louvre has been working to name it a national treasure.
On a computer screen, the still life Basket of Wild Strawberries by the 18th-century French painter Jean Siméon Chardin is quiet and unassuming. His talent in capturing the reflection of light off the rim of a water glass is muted in that setting. In person, though, it casts a spell.
“It’s deceptively simple, and it’s absolutely captivating and it’s magical,” said Eric Lee, the director of the Kimbell Art Museum, which bought the work at auction in France in March for more than $22 million. “The painting completely mesmerized me, and it mesmerizes almost anyone who sees it.”
But now the Kimbell, whose successful bid for the work was first reported by the Art Newspaper of France, has to wait to see whether it can actually export the picture, which it purchased at the auction house Artcurial in Paris.
The Louvre has requested that the artwork be classified as “a national treasure” and is looking for sponsorship to purchase it. Under French law, the export can be frozen for 30 months, or 2 1/2 years.
“We are fully mobilized to bring it into the national collection,” Laurence des Cars, president and director of the Louvre, told Le Figaro in March. . . .
The full article is available here»
Exhibition | La Chine
Closing this weekend in Dresden at the Kupferstich-Kabinett:
La Chine: The 18th-Century China Collection in the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett
Residenzschloss, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 19 November 2021 — 8 May 2022
In the early eighteenth century, when the legendary art collection of August the Strong (1670–1733), came into being, Asia was viewed with excited fascination in Europe.
In addition to today‘s world-famous porcelain wares, more than 1100 Chinese drawings and watercolour paintings on paper and silk, as well as woodcuts and coloured prints, were brought to Dresden. This important collection, along with 850 chinoiserie prints, is preserve in the Kupferstich-Kabinett of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. In the first inventory of the Kupferstich-Kabinett, drawn up in 1738, the objects were listed under the categories ‘La Chine’ and ‘La Chine européenne’.
An outstanding feature is the large collection of Chinese popular prints. In China itself, such New Year pictures, congratulatory leaflets, and theatre scenes were considered mere commodities, so that hardly any have been preserved. The prints were cheap to buy. With their wideranging symbolism, usually promising good fortune and prosperity, these sheets were hung up in homes for the New Year or passed on as a blessing, for example, and usually were not preserved. In Europe, Chinese folk art was seen as documenting the costumes and customs of distant lands. In the courtly sphere, the sheets were used as wall decorations, for example. They also served as models for chinoiserie prints. These provided motifs for decorations on buildings and furniture, as well as for porcelain painting.
Ines Beyer, Transformation
The first copperplate prints created in China were made by Matteo Ripa in collaboration with artists from the court painting workshops, on commission to the Kangxi Emperor, after woodcuts illustrating the Emperor’s own poems. The work by Ines Beyer entitled Transformation, based on the eighth view in the series, creates a link to the present day.
Cordula Bischoff and Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick, La Chine: Die China-Sammlung Des 18. Jahrhunderts Im Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2021), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-3954986286, €38.
New Book | British Dandies
Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Dominic Janes, British Dandies: Engendering Scandal and Fashioning a Nation (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1851245598, £30 / $45.
Reveals how the scandalous history of fashionable men and their clothes is a reflection of changing attitudes to style, gender, and sexuality.
Well-dressed men have played a distinctive part in the cultural and political life of Britain over several centuries. But unlike the twenty-first-century hipster, the British dandies provoked intense degrees of fascination and horror in their homeland and played an important role in British society from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. This book explores that social and cultural history through a focus on three figures: the macaroni, the dandy, and the aesthete. The first was noted for his flamboyance, the second for his austere perfectionism, and the third for his perversity. All were highly controversial in their time, pioneering new ways of displaying and performing gender, as demonstrated by the impact of key figures such as Lord Hervey, George ‘Beau’ Brummell, and Oscar Wilde. Illustrated with contemporary prints, portraits, and caricatures, this groundbreaking study tells the fascinating—and scandalous—story of fashionable men and their clothes.
Dominic Janes is professor of modern history at Keele University.
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
1 British Dandies
2 Dressing the Sexes in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
3 A Georgian Taste for Macaroni
4 Fine and Dandy in the Regency
5 Victorians and the Aesthetic Pose
6 Fashion and Scandal in the Twentieth Century
Notes
Bibliography
Picture Credits
Index
Enfilade 
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