Conference | Women’s Enterprise in the French Art Economy
From ArtHist.net:
The Business of Art, au féminin:
Women’s Enterprise in the French Art Economy, Late 1600s to 1945
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), Paris, 26–27 September 2025
Bringing together the history of art, the history of women, and economic history, this colloquium investigates women’s role in the financing of artistic production and development in France (painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative arts, engraving, photography, etc.). Embracing an extended time frame, we intend to interrogate both continuities and transformations in their roles across a significant period, starting from the policies and practices of artistic patronage initiated by Louis XIV up to the particular circumstances of the Occupation. Across this longue durée, women are approached as agents making and moving the money required for artistic invention and production (their own as well as others’) and as integral actors in the operation of art markets, within the bounds imposed by their marital and legal status.
The colloquium focuses particularly on strategies of adapting, circumventing, and assertion deployed by French women or women working in France to negotiate masculine circuits of capital(ists)—strategies that may have gone beyond a mere male/female coexistence to include collaboration, emulation, competition, and conflict. Determined by their access to education, knowledge, and economic information, this positioning emerges clearly in discussions about the financial and legal subordination of women, whether single, married, or widowed. We study their ability to assemble capital, invest in their own names or via proxies, operate shops, form enterprises, and organize companies. We will also interrogate the limits of their range of action and empowerment, and inquire into the possible existence of economic practices specific to women in the arts.
f r i d a y , 2 6 s e p t e m b e r
9.45 Welcome
10.00 Introduction
10.15 Session 1 | Patrons and Philanthropists of the Arts
Moderator: Élodie Vaudry (maîtresse de conférences, Sorbonne Université)
• Aux origines du Comité des Dames de l’UCAD : des femmes actrices de l’économie des arts décoratifs — Coline Dupuis (PhD candidate, UVSQ-Paris Saclay)
• L’art comme instrument d’ascension socio-économique. Le cas Nélie Jacquemart (1841–1912) — Claire Dupin de Beyssat (post-doctoral researcher, École des chartes et Centre national des arts plastiques)
• Et si la « duchesse de Guermantes » (Proust) était réellement engagée dans l’économie des arts ? La comtesse Greffuhle (1860–1952), mécène, collectionneuse et médiatrice des arts — Emma Bayle (Ma2 student, Université de Poitiers)
• Mécène et créatrice : la Baronne d’Oettingen et les avant-gardes —Gwendoline Corthier‑Hardoin (deputy curator, Musée d’art moderne de Céret and associate researcher, Framespa, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès)
12.30 Lunch break
2.30 Session 2 | Art Dealers and
Moderator: Julia Drost (director of research, Centre allemand d’Histoire de l’Art, DFK Paris)
• Marchandes d’art : place et rôle des femmes dans le commerce des œuvres d’art à Paris dans l’entre-deux-guerres — Olivia Delporte, (PhD candidate, Université de Tours)
• « Femmes d’affaires !! / Ton domaine est la création d’art et non le commerce ». Marie Cuttoli : collectionneuse, marchande et éditrice (1922–1935) — Laura Pirkelbauer (PhD candidate, EPHE, Saprat)
• Innovation Irregardless: the entrepreneurship strategies of women artists in 1930s Paris — Charlotte Greenaway (Ma2, IntM, Glasgow University)
• Femmes pionnières du marché de l’art extra-européen durant première moitié du XXe siècle — Nathalie Bertrand (associate professor) and Coralie Panizza (Ma2 student, TELEMMe CNRS, Aix Marseille Université)
• Berthe Weill : s’imposer par la modernité, parcours d’une marchande d’art, éditrice et mécène — Marianne Le Morvan (founder and director of the Berthe Weill Archives, independent scholar, and curator of the exhibition Berthe Weill: Galeriste d’avant-garde at the Musée de l’Orangerie)
s a t u r d a y , 2 7 s e p t e m b e r
9.30 Welcome
9.45 Session 3 | Self-Financing and Creation
Moderator: Justine Lécuyer (Sorbonne Université)
• The Business of Teaching Female Artists in Paris (1848–1870) — Alison McQueen (professor, McMaster University)
• The Woman Artist as a Collector: The Avuncular Economies of Claudine Bouzonnet Stella (1636–1697) — Yasemin Altun (PhD candidate, Duke University)
• Femmes copistes à Versailles : stratégies économiques et institutionnelles sous la Monarchie de Juillet — Agathe Arrighi (PhD candidate, Sorbonne Université)
• Les métiers de la haute couture – les « arts alimentaires » des intellectuelles russes en exil à Paris (1920–1930) — Diana Plachendovskaya (PhD candidate, EHESS)
11.30 Coffee break
11.45 Session 4 | The Economic Life of the Workshop
Moderator: Elsa Jamet (researcher, CNRS, Centre André-Chastel)
• Julie Lavergne (1823–1886) : Une femme au cœur de l’économie d’un atelier de vitrail au XIXe siècle — Auriane Gotrand (Sorbonne Université)
• Au-delà de la muse : Gala Diakonova, Simone Kahn et les engagements économiques des femmes dans les premières années du mouvement surréaliste — Domiziana Serrano (Université Jean Monnet Saint-Étienne, France)
12.45 Lunch break
2.30 Session 5 | Promoting and Financing the Performing Arts
Moderator: Nastasia Gallian (associate professor, Sorbonne Université)
• Mademoiselle Castagnery et l’édition gravée de la danse à Paris (1760–1789) — Pauline Chevalier (professor, Université de Tours) and Johanna Daniel
• « C’est une très mauvaise tête, mais l’on ne peut s’en passer ». Antoinette de Saint Huberty et la place des femmes dans l’économie des arts au sein de l’Académie royale de musique à fin du XVIIIe siècle — Caroline Giron-Panel (archivist, Université de Grenoble, Università Ca’Foscari, École nationale des chartes)
3.30 Conclusion
Exhibition | Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750
Opening this month at the NMWA:
Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, 26 September 2025 — 11 January 2026
Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, 7 March — 31 May 2026
Curated by Virginia Treanor and Frederica Van Dam
Maria Schalcken, Self-Portrait in Her Studio, ca. 1680, oil on panel, 17 × 13 inches (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2019.2094).
Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750 showcases a broad range of work by more than forty Dutch and Flemish women artists, including Gesina ter Borch, Maria Faydherbe, Anna Maria de Koker, Judith Leyster, Magdalena van de Passe, Clara Peeters, Rachel Ruysch, Maria Tassaert, Jeanne Vergouwen, Michaelina Wautier, and more. Presenting an array of paintings, lace, prints, paper cuttings, embroidery, and sculpture, this exhibition draws on recent scholarship to demonstrate that a full view of women’s contributions to the artistic economy is essential to understanding Dutch and Flemish visual culture of the period.
Women were involved in virtually every aspect of artistic production in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. During this period, colonial exploitation and the international slave trade enriched Europe’s upper and middle classes, fueling demand for art and other luxuries. From celebrated painters who excelled in a male-dominated field to unsung women who toiled making some of the most expensive lace of the day, to wealthy patrons who shaped collecting practices, women created the very fabric of the visual culture of the era. Within a thematic presentation that considers the intertwined influences of status, family, and social expectations on a woman’s training and career choices, this exhibition demonstrates the many ways in which women of all classes contributed to the booming artistic economy of the day. Whether their work was circulated within aristocratic social circles, sold on the open market, or commissioned by patrons, women shaped and molded the world around them from Antwerp to Amsterdam.
Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750 is organized in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium.
The press release is available here»
Virginia Treanor and Frederica Van Dam, eds., Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam, 1600–1750 (Veurne: Hannibal Books, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-9493416277, $60. With contributions by Klara Alen, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Elena Kanagy-Loux, Judith Noorman, Catherine Powell-Warren, Inez De Prekel, Marleen Puyenbroek, Oana Stan and Katie Altizer Takata. Available in English and Dutch editions.
Frederica Van Dam is the Curator of Old Masters at MSK Ghent. Specializing in early modern Flemish painting, Dr. Van Dam co-curated Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution and led the first monographic show on Theodoor Rombouts (1597–1637). Virginia Treanor is the Senior Curator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She earned her PhD in 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art from the University of Maryland. Since joining NMWA in 2012, Dr. Treanor has curated numerous exhibitions, including multiple installments of the Women to Watch series.
New Book | The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification
From Liverpool UP:
Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu, eds., The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification: Re-presenting a Global Fruit (Liverpool University Press, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1836245933, $115. Proceedings of the British Academy.
The pineapple’s ‘discovery’ by European colonisers in the late fifteenth century and its remarkable global trajectory—from an early modern object of rarity, desire, and horticultural innovation to a cheap, canned consumable and fair-trade logo today—is a story of modern globalisation. The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification is a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary volume intended to provoke timely debate and generate radical rethinking of an overly familiar fruit with associations from luxury to kitsch. It deliberately problematizes the pineapple by investigating understudied tensions between its representational power and the historical and political contexts of its worldwide production and consumption. This connects the global and local at the heart of contemporary debates about the nature and origins of our food. It will have cross-disciplinary appeal for scholars of politics, economics, history, plant sciences, food, and material culture as well as for broader audiences interested in food, gardening, the environment, and visual arts.
Victoria Avery has been Keeper of European Sculpture & Decorative Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, since 2010 prior to which she was Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Warwick. Vicky’s primary field of expertise is European sculpture from 1400 to the present day, but she has broad knowledge of the materiality, making, usage, collecting, and display of early modern European decorative arts. She has curated numerous research-led interdisciplinary exhibitions including Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1450–1800, from which this book emerges.
Melissa Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, and co-curator, with Victoria Avery, of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1450–1800 (Philip Wilson, 2019). She is a cultural historian whose research interests include the history of food, the representation of urban space, and material culture in early modern Italy. Recent publications have focused on selling food on the street, urban kitchens, and the Grand Tour of the eighteenth-century Welsh painter, Thomas Jones. She is co-editor of the journal Global Food History.
c o n t e n t s
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction | The Multi-Faceted Global Pineapple: Motifs, Materialities, and Meanings — Melissa Calaresu and Victoria Avery
Part I | The Global Pineapple
2 From Wild Pine to Domesticated Delicacy: Metabolic and Evolutionary Diversity of the Pineapple — Howard Griffiths
3 From the Caribs to Carmen Miranda: Pineapples Across Time and Space — Rebecca Earle
4 Pineapple as Palimpsest: Island Landscapes as Iconography and Identity in the Anglophone Caribbean — Alissandra Cummins
5 Paradise Lost: The Pineapple Between Tropical Imaginaries and American Mythologies — Melissa L. Caldwell
Part II | The Cultivated Pineapple
6 Transporting Images, Transplanted Fruits: The Pineapple, the Jesuits and the Afro-Asia Trade — Eszter Csillag
7 ‘A Box of Fresh Pineapples to the Holy Father’: Pineapples and the Worlds of Sociability and Science in Eighteenth-Century Rome — Lavinia Maddaluno
8 Princely Fruit: The Pineapple in Print in Old Regime France — E. C. Spary
Part III | The Replicated Pineapple
9 Iconic: The Pineapple in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting — Julie Hochstrasser
10 ‘A Profusion of Pines’: Representations of the Pineapple in Architecture and the Decorative Arts in the Long Eighteenth Century — Kathryn Jones
11 ‘A Profusion of Metaphor’: Modern Literature’s Pineapples — Kasia Boddy
Part IV | The Political Pineapple
12 A Liminal Commodity: Catch-Cropping, Chinese Capitalists and the Colonial State in the Pineapple Industry of Singapore, 1900s–1930s — Michael Yeo
13 A Settler Colonial Experiment: The Pineapple and American Hawai‘i — Henry Knight Lozano
14 Dirty Pineapples from Costa Rica — Martin Mowforth
Bibliography
Index
New Book | Mistress: A History of Women and their Country Houses
Coming soon from Yale UP:
Anthony Fletcher and Ruth Larsen, Mistress: A History of Women and their Country Houses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0300163810, $35.
An insightful, hugely engaging new history of elite women and the country house from the sixteenth to the twentieth century
Grand houses can be found across the countryside of England and Wales. From the Stuart and Georgian periods to the Edwardian and Victorian, these buildings were once home to the aristocratic families of the nation. But what was life like for the mistresses of these great houses? How much power and influence did they really have? Anthony Fletcher and Ruth M. Larsen explore the lives of country house mistresses. Focusing on eighteen women, and spanning five centuries, they look at the ways in which elite women not only shaped the house, household, and family, but also had an impact on society, culture, and politics within their estates and beyond. We meet Brilliana Harley, who defended her castle at Brampton Bryan; Frances Boscawen, who oversaw the building of Hatchlands; and Lady Mary Elcho, who preserved her secret life as mistress to Arthur Balfour. This is a fascinating account of the country house that puts women’s experiences centre stage.
Anthony Fletcher was formerly professor of history at the Universities of Sheffield, Durham, and Essex, and professor of English social history at the University of London. His previous works include Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500–1800 and Growing up in England. Ruth M. Larsen is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Derby. An expert on gender and the country house, she has contributed to several books on the subject.
Call for Papers | Cut along the Dotted Line
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
As noted at Fabula:
Découper suivant les pointillés / Cut along the Dotted Line
Images manufacturées à manipuler, XVIIIe–XXIe siècles
Craft Practices around Manufactured Pictures, 18th–21st Centuries
Organized by Johanna Daniel and Hélène Valance
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, 31 March — 1 April 2026
Proposals due by 30 September 2025
Cut, folded, pierced, embroidered, glued: a material as fragile as it is ubiquitous, paper is a medium allowing for the expression of multiple skills. These manipulations free the printed image from flatness, while enhancing its materiality. From the plane surfaces of the ‘constructions’ plates marketed by the Pellerin printing house in Epinal at the end of the 19th century, for instance, emerged three-dimensional models of airplanes, of Noah’s Ark, or of the Eiffel Tower, bringing a whole world to life. Shadow and transparency effects used in miniature theaters, paper folding, coloring, or collage activities : all these manipulations multiply the potential of paper as a material and, at the same time, of the image. These pictures are not simply produced as images to be contemplated, but they require their audiences to actively engage in the realization of their full potential.
This symposium will focus on the triangular relationship between image, paper, and manipulation. It will consider pictures manufactured and designed to be handled, constructed, and augmented by their audiences. It will also examine amateur craft practices based on serially or mass-produced pictures, whether or not these are meant for such practices (such as ephemeras turned into scrapbooks, hand-colored prints, or embroidered religious images and postcards).
Although these images and techniques are widespread (Hans Christian Andersen, for example, left a large collection of amateur cut-outs), they have only been the subject of occasional academic research. Art and material culture historians have mostly focused on the works of renowned artists, such as Max Ernst or Pierre Alechinsky. A few recent studies have addressed anonymous works, particularly collage and scrapbooking (Garvey 2012, Sebayashi 2016, Elliott, Gowrley, and Etga 2019, Gowrley 2024). Paper as a material has received a renewed attention (Laroque and Lee 2016, Laroque and Pierrard 2020, De Mayer, Kaminska, and Thibault 2024). However, gestures surrounding pictures have so far been relatively rarely taken into consideration (Kisiel 2021-23).
This conference will explore the practices developed around a variety of pictures produced in series or on a massive scale, from the 18th to the 21st centuries. From backlit optical views marketed in Europe in the 1760s to the cutting, folding, and coloring activities circulated in children’s magazines today, via religious imagery and advertising materials, we will examine the interactions between paper and other materials (fabric, cardboard, wood), tools (scissors, needles, punches), as well as the physical environment (light, wind, fire). What does the materiality of paper do to the image? We will question the gestures and know-how involved in the production of these works, examining how these techniques were and are acquired and transmitted (school, home), as well as the expectations regarding the users’ skills. The conference will analyze the constraints and negotiations imposed by the articulation between mass- or serially-produced pictures, and individual practices. What forms and spaces of autonomy are allowed by these manipulations? What gestures, artistic and social practices, and uses of images are visible here? It will consider the techniques and networks of production and commercialization of these printed images in the general landscape of picture-making: what cultural, ideological, and economic networks are at play here?
Proposals may address one or several of the following questions, without being limited to these suggestions:
Designing printed images to be manipulated
Prints such as cutouts, fashion engravings, or optical views began to be produced specifically to be cut out, glued, and augmented with different materials in the late 17th century. With the industrialization of imagery in the 19th century, this type of production expanded dramatically. How did and do the designers of these images anticipate the future interventions of consumers in their creative process? How does this impact the way they drew and engraved? Do these images allow for free, autonomous uses? From 19th century scrap sheets to contemporary youth magazines, who are the designers of paper models? What specific skills do they demonstrate?
Feasibility and technical skill
Although small and large constructions from the Pellerin house in Epinal were inexpensive, they were far from being within everyone’s reach: they required a great deal of skill, and their production relied on the acquisition of advanced manual competences. How was the expertise surrounding these images passed on? What theories of education or domestic economy accompany them? How have they evolved since the 18th century? How much individual creativity is involved, and conversely, what constraints are imposed by models and instructions?
Circulation and social interactions
Paper crafts are remarkably mobile, crossing socio-cultural and geographical boundaries—and even temporal ones, despite their often ephemeral nature. We will focus on the joint circulation of images and practices related to paper: Who are the actors of these production and circulation networks? What is their general economic environment? Which images circulate in which formats? Which specific audiences do these images address, and are they diverted for other uses? What types of social relationships developed around these practices?
Conservation, transmission, and digitization of images to be manipulated
Considered as popular productions and classified as ephemera, pictures designed to be manipulated have been imperfectly preserved, because they have been of less interest to fine arts institutions than to collectors. However, there are important collections (the Musée de l’Image in Épinal, the dépôt légal at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Papier Museum in Düren) which pose specific problems of inventory, cataloguing, and public outreach around these collections. We are particularly interested in the challenges of collecting “manipulated” objects alongside printing plates that have not been altered in any way. We would like to interrogate public outreach activities around these productions (print reissuing, pedagogical workshops, contemporary creation). We also invite proposals for papers on digitization issues, which may especially question the relationship between flat images and volume.
This is an international interdisciplinary symposium. We welcome contributions from various fields (art history, education sciences, design, material and cultural history, communication sciences, or literature) and areas of specialization (with no regional restriction, from the 18th century to the present day). The call is also open to curators and conservators, collectors, contemporary creators, publishers, and professional users. Proposals may take several forms including individual 20-minute presentations, practical workshops, interviews, or panel discussions. Proposals, written in French or English and under 450 words, must be submitted by 30 September 2025. They should be accompanied by a brief bio-bibliographical note and sent to helene.valance@inha.fr and johanna.p.daniel@gmail.com.
Scientific Committee
Manuel Charpy, Laboratoire InVisu, CNRS
Pauline Chevalier, Université de Tours
Ariane Fennetaux, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3
Marine Kisiel, Palais Galliera
Séverine Montigny, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris
Aurélie Petiot, Université Paris Nanterre
b i b l i o g r a p h y
Audin, Marius, Marshall, Alan, Moglia, Bernadette, Ephemera : les imprimés de tous les jours, 1880–1939, Lyon, Musée de l’imprimerie, 2001.
Brust, Beth Wagner, The Amazing Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
De Maeyer, Juliette, Kaminska, Aleksandra, and Thibault, Ghislain, Histoires matérielles du papier, 2024, online : https://doi.org/10.13098/infoclio.ch-lb-0012
Dolan, Alice, « An Adorned Print: Print Culture, Female Leisure and the Dissemination of Fashion in France and England, around 1660–1779 », V&A Online Journal, no 3, 2011, online : .
Elliott, Patrick, Freya Gorwley, and Yuval Etgar, Cut & Paste: 400 Years of Collage, Edimbourg, National galleries of Scotland, 2019.
Garvey, Ellen Gruber, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.
Gobbé-Mévellec, Euriell, and Hamaide, Eléonore, « “Déployer sa fragilité” : quand le pop-up transforme les petites mains en grands lecteurs », Elfe XX–XXI, n°13, 2024, online: http://journals.openedition.org/elfe/6868
Gowrley, Freya, Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage, Princeton University Press, 2024.
Han, Huirong, Revolutionary Chinese paper cuts from the Newark Museum, Newark, Newark Museum, 2015.
Ingold, Tim, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Abingdon-on-Thames 2013.
Jammes, André. Papiers dominotés : trait d’union entre l’imagerie populaire et les papiers peints : France, 1750–1820. Paris, Éditions des Cendres, 2010.
Kisiel, Marine, et al., « Gestes d’Images » seminar, laboratoire InVisu-INHA, 2021–2023. Online : https://gestesdimages.inha.fr/
Kopylov, Marc, and Jammes André. Papiers dominotés français : ou l’art de revêtir d’éphémères couvertures colorées : livres et brochures entre 1750 et 1820, Paris, Éditions des Cendres, 2012.
Laroque, Claude, and Valérie Lee (eds.), Papiers en volume, traditions asiatiques et occidentales (actes de la journée d’étude du 4 novembre 2016), site de l’HiCSA, 2018. Online :
Laroque, Claude, and Maryse Pierrard (eds.), Histoire du papier et de la papeterie : actualités de la recherche II (Actes de la journée d’étude du 13 octobre) Online : 2020) https://hicsa.pantheonsorbonne.fr/sites/default/files/2023-09/livre_laroque_02-2.pdf
Laroque, Claude, and Maryse Pierrard (eds.), Les Papiers filigranés de la période 1830–1950 (Actes de la journée d’étude du 8 octobre 2021), Paris, sites de l’HiCSA et de l’ENS. Online : https://hicsa.pantheonsorbonne.fr/sites/default/files/2023-09/livre_laroque_02-2.pdf
Lerch, Dominique, et al, Les Images de dévotion en Europe XVIe–XXIe siècle : Une Précieuse Histoire, Beauchesne, 2021.
Le Thomas, Claire, Racines populaires du cubisme : pratiques ordinaires de création et art savant, Dijon, les Presses du réel, 2016.
Magnien, Gabriel, Canivets : découpures et silhouettes. Lyon: Imprimeries réunies, 1947.
Mainardi, Patricia, Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2017
Montigny, Séverine « Les grands magasins parisiens, fabriques du petit consommateur ». L’échauguette, carnet de recherche de la BHVP, 27 mai 2025, online : https://doi.org/10.58079/140r4
Oelschlägel, Petra, and Anna Arnold, Aus Papier!, Dortmund, Verlag Kettler, 2021.
Pelachaud, Gaëlle, Livres animés : Du papier au numérique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2011.
Plunkett, John, « Light work : Feminine Leisure and the Making of Transparencies », in Hadjiafxendi Kyriaki and Zakreski Patricia (eds.), Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century, Artistry and Industry in Britain, Burlington, Ashgate, 2013, p. 45‑67.
Rickards Maurice, Twyman Michael, De Beaumont Sally, and Tanner Amoret, The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: a Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian, New York, Routledge, 2000.
Sadion, Martine (ed.), 14–18 L’Enfant découpait des images, Épinal, Musée de l’image, 2014.
Schneider, Malou (ed.), Des Mondes de papier: l’imagerie populaire de Wissembourg, Strasbourg, Musées de la ville de Strasbourg, 2010.
Sebayashi, Nathalie, « Appropriation par le collage : Le cas de l’album factice », Histoire de l’art, n° 78-1, 2016, p. 71–85.
Taveneaux, Evelyn, La piété en dentelles : les images de dévotion et leurs dentelles, 1830–1910, Nancy, Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1992.
Tucker, Susan, Katherine Ott, and Patricia Butler (eds.), The Scrapbook in American Life, Temple University Press, 2006.
Exhibition | Encounters
Cornelis Ploos van Amstel after Samuel van Hoogstraten, Boy with a Hat in a Front Door, detail, 1763, etching, roulette in brown and red (Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, Christoph Müller Stiftung / Kilian Beutel).
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From the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin:
Encounters: ‘I Am All That!’ | Christoph Müller’s Gift, Part 2
Begegnungen: Das alles bin ich! | Die Schenkung Christoph Müller II
Kupferstichkabinett at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 26 August — 30 November 2025
The exhibition I Am All That! presents the generous gift of some 200 works that art collector Christoph Müller has made to the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings). The works on paper—drawings, prints, and watercolours—not only show a broad panorama of visual themes spanning five centuries, but also reflect the influences on the collector and his interests. One aspect of the collection at a time will be featured in four successive presentations. Opening on the 26 August 2025, the presentation focusses on people, interpersonal relationships, and encounters.
Anton Graff, Portrait of Provost Johann Joachim Spalding, ca. 1800, pastel (Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett, Christoph Müller Stiftung).
Portraits and plant studies, harbours and history paintings, landscapes and genre scenes: this exhibition shows the entire spectrum of an extraordinary collection. A fascinating cross-section of European art history unfolds within works from early modern history to the present. The exhibited works on paper originate from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and France—telling of people and nature, history and everyday life, beliefs, feelings, and the power to create. Representations of figures and nudes are on view, as well as seascapes, nature studies, animals, forests, and quite a lot more.
A selection of Müller’s generous gift will be presented to the public from 20 May 2025 to 14 June 2026 in four changing displays in the ‘Kabinett in der Galerie’ space at the Gemäldegalerie (Old Masters Paintings). The first presentation, A World of Words and Images (on view from 20 May to 24 August 2025), referenced Müller’s endeavours as a publisher and critic, as well as his passion for art and collecting.
The second presentation, Encounters, focuses on depictions of people and interpersonal relationships. Some of the featured artworks show moments of togetherness, such as social events, mutual exchange, or shared glances. The images depict romantic liaisons, domestic scenes, and social interactions, and reflect the personality of a tireless collector who nurtured numerous friendships and loved parties. These are juxtaposed with portraits, figurative representations, and detailed studies that centre the individual. Whether pictured in silent contemplation or facing the viewer, these subjects are a testament to the reality that human existence is constantly oscillating between proximity and seclusion, between moments of shared experience and periods of solitude..
Future Presentations
On Travelling and Being at Home
2 December 2025 — 8 March 2026
Leaf by Leaf: A Life with Art
10 March — 14 June 2026
Christoph Müller (1938–2024) was a German publisher, theatre and art critic, art collector, and patron, who made many generous gifts to public museums during his lifetime. As the editor-in-chief and co-publisher of the Schwäbisches Tagblatt, he shaped the German media landscape from 1969 to 2004. Müller’s passion for art is reflected in an impressive collection of works from various epochs and regions. He collected across the board, led by individual and personal preferences, as well as sound connoisseurship. His penchant was for 16th- and 17th-century Dutch art. In 2007, he gave the Kupferstichkabinett a significant collection of 370 Dutch and Flemish drawings and prints from the 16th to 18th centuries. With the current gift all collection areas of the Kupferstichkabinett’s holdings are being appreciably enhanced and enriched. Christoph Müller died in Berlin in 2024, at the age of 86. The exhibition should be understood as recognition of his impact in supporting the arts, as a sign of gratitude and an invitation to share his joy in art—a thought that continually motivated him.
Exhibition | Chardin and the Marcille Family
Opening soon at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Orléans:
The Marcille Chardin Family: A Passion from Orléans
Les Chardin des Marcille: Une passion orléanaise
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans, 9 September 2025 — 11 January 2026
Rarely has a painting aroused so much passion as Le Panier de fraises des bois (1761) by Jean Siméon Chardin, the quintessential work of French painting, put up for sale in 2022 and acquired for a record price by the Musée du Louvre after having remained in the prestigious collection of the Orléans-born Eudoxe Marcille (1814–1890) since the mid-19th century.
His name alone evokes that of Chardin. His father, François Marcille (1790–1856), from a family of seed brokers in the Beauce region, had taken a visionary interest, as early as 1822, in all those artists from the time of Louis XV that nobody looked at anymore, to the point of assembling the largest collection of his time, with 4,500 works including dozens of Bouchers, Fragonards, Greuze, Prud’hon and Géricault… and, above all others, thirty Chardin. This consuming passion was passed on with his collection to his two sons, Eudoxe and Camille. Camille, who became curator of the Chartres museum, and Eudoxe, director of the Musée d’Orléans from 1870 to 1890, continued to promote Chardin’s work, even buying back after their father’s death, beyond the works he had designated for each, what could continue to be assembled from this ideal nucleus. Quite naturally, the Goncourt brothers, great biographers of 18th-century artists, drew on this reference collection, in which Chardin’s entire career is represented, to write the first biography of the painter of silent still lifes and pantries in 1863.
Chardin was at home in Orléans and, in a way, always had been. His friendship with Aignan Thomas Desfriches (1715–1800), the entrepreneur who had made Orléans an artistic capital in the 18th century, could be seen in the checkered scarf Chardin wears in his self-portrait, which came from Desfriches’ home. Desfriches himself owned numerous paintings by Chardin. He was followed by Casimir de Cypierre (1783–1844), son of the Intendant d’Orléans under Louis XVI, whose name a quay bears, who owned at least three. François Marcille and his son Eudoxe continued to nurture this Orléans passion. Around the exceptional loan of Panier de fraises des bois, five other Chardin paintings from the legendary Marcille collection are brought together for the first time since the 1979 retrospective. They are accompanied by the Self-portrait with bezicles (spectacles), an eventful acquisition which, in 1991, brought this artist, so dear to the heart of Orléans, into the pastel cabinet, but whose memory alone inhabited the collections. Chardin, more than ever, is at home in the Musée d’Orléans, which this family of discreet enthusiasts has helped to elevate, through François’ research and Eudoxe’s twenty years at the service of its collections, into a place of rediscovery and sharing.
With the exceptional participation of the Musée du Louvre. The exhibition benefits from exceptional loans from the Musée du Louvre, the Musée Jacquemart-André, the Musée de Picardie, private collectors, and the Marcille family descendants.
Exhibition | Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons
Flora Yukhnovich in Her London Studio, 2024
(Photo by Kasia Bobula © Flora Yukhnovich)
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Opening this week at The Frick; see the preview by Ted Loos for The New York Times (28 August 2025) . . .
Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons
The Frick Collection, New York, 3 September 2025 — 9 March 2026
Taking inspiration from the French Rococo, Italian Baroque, and Abstract Expressionist movements, Flora Yukhnovich (b. England, 1990) creates works that are at once modern and timeless by translating historic compositions into contemporary abstractions. Using the Frick’s Four Seasons by François Boucher as a point of departure, Yukhnovich’s site-specific mural will cover the walls of the museum’s Cabinet. This project is accompanied by the publication of a new volume in the Frick’s acclaimed Diptych series, which highlights a single masterpiece from the permanent collection by pairing complementary essays by a curator and a contemporary artist, musician, or other cultural luminary. This volume will feature a text by Yukhnovich and an essay by Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, on the significance of Boucher’s beloved series.
Flora Yukhnovich’s Four Seasons is made possible by Hauser & Wirth and Victoria Miro.
Xavier Salomon and Flora Yukhnovich, Boucher’s Four Seasons (London: D. Giles, 2026), 80 pages, ISBN: 978-1913875732, $30.
New Book | The Frick Collection: The Historic Interiors
From Rizzoli:
Xavier Salomon, with photographs by Miguel Flores-Vianna, The Frick Collection: The Historic Interiors (Rizzoli Electa, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0847874361, $65.
After a multiyear renovation, The Frick Collection returns to its lauded Gilded Age mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Spectacular photography by Miguel Flores-Vianna and insightful text by Xavier F. Salomon, the museum’s chief curator, unite to celebrate one of the preeminent fine and decorative art collections in the world.
Richly illustrated with newly commissioned photography, this publication chronicles the history of the iconic 1914 residence of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, while offering a room-by-room tour that showcases each space’s evolution from a private residence to part of The Frick Collection. The personal and cultural significance of the mansion’s interiors is explored, from the stately drawing rooms and intimate boudoirs to the galleries that house masterpieces by Bellini, Fragonard, Goya, Ingres, Manet, Rembrandt, Titian, and Vermeer.
The mansion at One East Seventieth Street stands as a testament to Frick’s refined taste, immense wealth, and unparalleled art collection. The reader will experience a captivating exploration of the mansion’s creation, from Frick’s initial vision of a “comfortable, well-arranged house, simple, in good taste, and not ostentatious” to the multifaceted collaboration between the strong-willed patron and his team of architects, interior decorators (including Sir Charles Carrick Allom and Elsie de Wolfe), and art dealers. This book is a reintroduction to the marvels of the Frick’s collections and an introduction to the gloriously revived interiors of an internationally lauded jewel of a museum.
Xavier F. Salomon is Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection. Miguel Flores-Vianna is a London-based writer, editor, and photographer, whose images appear regularly in Architectural Digest and Cabana magazine.
Journal of the History of Collections, July 2025
The long eighteenth century in the latest issue:
Journal of the History of Collections 37.2 (July 2025)
a r t i c l e s
• Christian Huemer and Tom Stammers, “Perspectives on the Study of the Art Market,” pp. 215–20.
As interest in art-market studies continues to grow, the editorial team of the Journal of the History of Collections decided to interview Christian Huemer, director of the Belvedere Research Center in Vienna, and editor of the Brill series Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets; and Tom Stammers, who is leading the new MA in Art and Business at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, to find out more about the subject and how it does and does not overlap with the study of collecting.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Girl Reading a Book, ca. 1770s, oil on canvas (London: The Wallace Collection).
• Yuriko Jackall, “French Art / English Taste: Richard Wallace’s Fragonards,” pp. 269–82.
Although an active collector of a broad range of objects, Sir Richard Wallace is more commonly known for his taste in nineteenth-century pictures, arms and armour, Renaissance maiolica and Kunstkammer objects than for his interest in eighteenth-century French painting. Nonetheless, he did add two significant works by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Girl Reading a Book and A Boy as Pierrot, to the large and distinguished collection of rococo art that he had inherited from his supposed father, the 4th Marquess of Hertford. This paper focuses on these two acquisitions, and suggests that their purchase represents a calculated move by Wallace to enhance the existing holdings of his collection. By adding these two paintings, he sought not only to augment the art-historical value of the collection that it was now his responsibility to shepherd, but also to improve its appeal within the context of late nineteenth-century British taste.
• Ollie Croker, “The Architect as Agent: Charles Heathcote Tatham at Woburn Abbey and Castle Howard,” pp. 359–72.
The acquisition of Classical antiquities by the British nobility in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occurred within a complex social network. While the activities of prominent figures within this network have been well documented, those of lesser-known agents remain overlooked. This discussion focuses on Charles Heathcote Tatham (1772–1842), an architect involved in acquiring vases and sculptures for display at Woburn Abbey and Castle Howard. Acquisitions for both houses coincide with Tatham’s work designing galleries for these two estates. This suggests a means of collecting that has been less often studied: an architect is commissioned to acquire objects specifically for the interior decoration of his own architectural creations. Tatham’s dual role as architect and agent raises questions about the nature of these acquisitions, and the cultural associations his clients aimed to establish.
r e v i e w s
• Wu Yunong, Review of Becky MacGuire, Four Centuries of Blue and White: The Frelinghuysen Collection of Chinese and Japanese Export Porcelain (Ad Ilissvm, 2023), pp. 391–92.
• Adriana Turpin, Review of Ulrike Müller, Private Collectors in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, ca.1780–1914: Between Public Relevance and Personal Pleasure (Brepols, 2024), pp. 392–94.
• Marjorie Schwarzer, Review of Jonathan Conlin, The Met: A History of a Museum and its People (Columbia University Press, 2024), pp. 394–96.
• Jonathan Conlin, Review of Erica Ciallela and Philip Palmer, eds., Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy (DelMonico Books, 2024) and Vanessa Sigalas and Jennifer Tonkovich, eds., Morgan―The Collector: Essays in Honor of Linda Roth’s 40th Anniversary at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, 2023), pp. 396–97.
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