New Book | Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art
From Bloomsbury:
Sarah Cohen, Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), 264 pages, ISBN: 978-1350203587, $170 (also available in ebook and PDF formats).
How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters such as Chardin, as well as sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience.
The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.
Sarah Cohen is Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, USA. She has published extensively on representations of the body, both human and animal. Her first book Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture the Ancien Régime was published in 2000.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 The Social Animal
2 The Sensitive Animal
3 Monkey Artists
4 The Language of Brutes
5 Animating Porcelain
6 The Soul of Matter
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Online Talks | HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
Online, Saturday, 17 April 2021, 2:00–3:30pm (EST)
Our next HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase is on Saturday, April 17, 2–3:30pm EST. Please join us via zoom to hear our final seven emerging scholars present their research. Each participant will present for 3–5 minutes, and after the presentations, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dani Ezor (dezor@smu.edu).
Best regards,
HECAA Board
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Zoom: https://smu.zoom.us/j/96125021098
• Carla Hermann (Rio de Janeiro State University), Robert Barker’s Panoramas and Virtual Images of Places
• Chih-En Chen (SOAS, University of London), Trompe l’Oeil Porcelain and Feminine Space in High Qing China
• Jed Surio (Tulane University), A Kingdom of Curious Beasts: Charles Le Brun’s Drawings from the Royal Menagerie
• Megan Baker (University of Delaware), Crayon Rebellion: The Politics of Pastel Portraits in Colonial North America
• Tori Champion (University of Washington), Pinceau à la main: The Intertwined Lives and Careers of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte and Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien
• Kaitlin Grimes (University of Missouri-Columbia), The Material Politics of Ivory in Early Modern Europe
• Aleksander Musiał (Princeton University), Immersion: Classical Reception and Eastern-European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, 1680–1830
Exhibition | À Table!
This summer at the National Museum of Ceramics at Sèvres, with an online version available here:
À Table! Le repas, tout un art / The Meal, a Whole Art
Sèvres — Manufacture et Musée Nationaux, 18 November 2020 — 16 May 2021 [original dates to be extended]
Organized by Anaïs Boucher and Viviane Mesqui
The exhibition À Table! Le repas, tout un art explores the historical and cultural aspects of the art of the table and the art of French gastronomy. It reveals how the opulent and elegant banquets of the Ancien Régime became part of French culture by constituting an ideal of happiness and by transforming everyday lunches and dinners into extraordinary social occasions.
With a chronological approach, the exhibition explains the origins of popular French delicacies and how dining etiquette has evolved from antiquity to today. The selection of a variety of plates, forks, and other objects—functional or of pure fantasy—narrates the amazing stories behind familiar food customs. Sèvres porcelain is in the spotlight as it plays an important role in setting exquisite tables. This feast of Sèvres cups, plates, and glacières is our way to celebrate the 280th anniversary of the Sèvres Manufacture.
Anaïs Boucher and Viviane Mesqui, À Table! Le repas, tout un art (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2020), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-2353403257, €39.
Online Talk | Juliet Carey on Baron Edmond’s Boxes
Next month from Waddesdon Manor, from the programme flyer:
Juliet Carey, Storing and Staging: Baron Edmond’s Boxes
Online, Monday, 10 May 2021, 6pm
Join Senior Curator Juliet Carey to explore the surprising, beautiful boxes in which some of Waddesdon’s most precious objects live when out of the public eye.
We still use the boxes that Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) commissioned for the storage of Sèvres porcelain and small sculptures and antiquities. Their unusually sophisticated fabrication relates to bookbinding, the covers of scientific instruments, etuis for princely treasures, and longstanding Parisian expertise in the protection and transportation of precious things. Far from being neutral or invisible spaces, Edmond’s boxes construct new ways of experiencing their contents—from those that help one to study and categorise vases, Roman glass, and even furniture, to a box that transforms into a stage, creating a private drama of enclosure and revelation around a little marble nymph.
For all their aesthetic and tactile appeal, the protective role of these boxes is underlined by the turbulence of the times that they survived, from revolutions and siege in 19th- century Paris to the Nazi occupation. A recent work by Edmund de Waal responds to this history and provides an intriguing postscript.
Standard registration is £10. Students, please email enquiries@waddesdon.org.uk from your academic email to register for a free place. A zoom link will be emailed to participants 24 hours before the event.
New Book | Culloden: Battle & Aftermath
Friday is the 275th anniversary of the battle of Culloden (fought on 16 April 1746). To mark the anniversary, the National Trust for Scotland will present a series of online events on Saturday, 17 April, entitled Culloden: A Place Worth Protecting. Paul O’Keeffe’s book is the latest to tackle the subject; from Penguin Press:
Paul O’Keeffe, Culloden: Battle & Aftermath (London: Bodley Head, 2021), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-1847924124, £25.
Charles Edward Stuart’s campaign to seize the British throne on behalf of his exiled father ended with one of the quickest defeats in history: on 16 April 1746, at Culloden, his 5,000-strong Jacobite army was decisively overpowered in under forty minutes. Its brutal repercussions, however, endured for months and years, its legacy for centuries.
Paul O’Keeffe follows the Jacobite army, from its initial victories over Hanoverian troops at Prestonpans, Clifton and Falkirk to their calamitous defeat on the field of Culloden. He explores the battle’s aftermath which claimed the lives, not only of helpless wounded summarily executed and fugitives cut down by pursuing dragoons, but also of civilians slaughtered by vengeful government patrols as they ‘pacified’ the Highlands. He chronicles the wild, nationwide celebration greeting news of the government victory, the London stage catering to patriotic fervour with new songs like ‘God Save the King’, popular musical theatre, and operas by Gluck and Handel. Meanwhile, the public was also treated to the grimmer spectacle of Jacobite prisoners, tried for high treason, paying for their participation on block and gibbet throughout the country. Many others—granted ‘the King’s mercy’—suffered the lingering fate of forced labour on fever-ridden plantations in the West Indies and Virginia.
O’Keeffe reveals the unexpected consequences of the rising—mapping the Scottish Highlands to aid military subjugation would eventually lead to the foundation of the Ordnance Survey—and traces the later careers of the battle’s protagonists: the Duke of Cumberland’s transformation from idolised national hero to discredited ‘butcher’ and Charles Edward Stuart’s from ‘Bonny Prince’ to embittered alcoholic invalid.
While in the long term the doomed Stuart cause acquired an aura of romanticism, the Jacobite Rising of 1745–46 remains one of the most bloody and divisive conflicts in British domestic history, which resonates to this day.
Paul O’Keeffe is a freelance lecturer and writer based in Liverpool. He gained his PhD with a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, and won critical acclaim with his 2000 study of Lewis, Some Sort of Genius.
Exhibition | Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore
The exhibition opens this Saturday; from the press release:
Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore
Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland, 17 April 2021 — 23 January 2022
Curated by Daniel Fulco
This exciting exhibition, organized by the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts and curated by Daniel Fulco, Agnita M. Stine Schreiber Curator, is the first monographic look at the work of the enigmatic and compelling African American artist Joshua Johnson (ca. 1763–1824) since 1988. Often considered the first professional Black artist in America, Johnson was a freed slave who achieved a remarkable degree of success as a portraitist in his lifetime by painting affluent patrons in his native Baltimore. Johnson’s subjects consisted of politicians, doctors, clergymen, merchants, and sea captains.
Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore contextualizes Johnson both historically and culturally and explores further the key forms of natural symbolism represented in his paintings. Featuring works by Johnson and his contemporaries, key loans come from the Maryland Center for History & Culture, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. This exhibition also will include a fully illustrated scholarly interpretive catalogue and a diverse range of related educational programs. Museum Director Sarah J. Hall says, “This exhibition has been in planning for three years, and has ended up being a particularly timely investigation of both art history and Black history. Additionally, it adds to our understanding of regional history in terms of both the practice of portraiture and our understanding of those who made and commissioned portraits. Happily, the exhibition will be on view for a full six months in order to allow as many people as possible to enjoy Johnson’s work and the wide variety of related public programs scheduled.”
An artist whose ancestry was both African and European, Johnson was primarily a self-taught painter. He was especially adept at capturing his sitters’ features and the details of their clothing, which offered subtle insights into their personalities. Johnson’s attention to detail and extensive inclusion of moths, fruits, and flowers in his paintings indicate that he carefully absorbed techniques and motifs from traditional European portraiture to create symbolic meaning. Furthermore, Johnson combined these elements with the latest trends in his genre, responding closely to work of the Peales, Charles Peale Polk, and Mid-Atlantic limners such as Frederick Kemmelmeyer and Caleb Boyle.
Given his background and the era in which he lived, Johnson was impelled to overcome many racial and social hurdles in pursuing his profession and he persevered remarkably in that endeavor. As described in an advertisement in the Baltimore Intelligencer from 1798, Johnson referred to himself in the third person as “A self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art; and having experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies, it is highly gratifying to him to make assurances of his ability to execute all commands with an effect, and in a style, which must give satisfaction.”
Joshua Johnson, Portrait of the James McCormick Family, 1804–05, oil on canvas, 51 × 69 inches (Collection of Maryland Center for History and Culture, Baltimore, gift of Dr. Thomas C. McCormick, 1920.6.1).
Such issues of race in Early American society still remain relevant and while a compelling and important theme to consider in relation to Johnson’s life and work, the exhibition also examines how his work engages with key developments in Maryland’s artistic heritage from approximately 1760 until 1840. Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore also explores issues related to politics, slavery, abolitionism, and society in antebellum Maryland.
As a complement to the Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore, the Museum will be installing a companion exhibition. Face to Face: Portraits from the 18th and 19th Centuries (April–October 2021), featuring European and American portraits from the permanent collection. These works expand the context of the Johnson exhibition and allow for a deeper understanding of the artist’s portraiture both before and during his lifetime.
Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore is organized by the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts. This exhibition is generously supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation, Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area, Maryland Marketing Partnership, and Community Foundation of Washington County Maryland, Inc. This exhibition also is made possible with the support of an anonymous donor, Mr. and Mrs. James N. Holzapfel, Dr. & Mrs. George E. Manger, Dr. and Mrs. Robert S. Strauch, and Mr. & Mrs. Thomas B. Riford.
Daniel Fulco, ed., with David Taft Terry and Mark B. Letzer, Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore (Hagerstown, MD: Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, 2021), 106 pages, ISBN: 978-09144950301 (paperback), $25 / ISBN: 978-09144950408 (ebook), $10.
Daniel Fulco is Agnita M. Stine Schreiber Curator at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts. David Taft Terry is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Geography and Coordinator, Museum Studies & Historical Preservation Program at Morgan State University. Mark B. Letzer is President & CEO of the Maryland Center for History and Culture.
A variety of engaging complementary on-line programs are scheduled to enhance enjoyment of the exhibition, including discussions, lectures, and lesson-plans for use in classroom or at home. Check wcmfa.org, or the Museum’s social media pages for more information on registration and access.
About the Museum
Located in beautiful City Park, Hagerstown, Maryland, the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1931, the legacy of Hagerstown native Anna Brugh Singer and her husband, Pittsburgh-born artist William Henry Singer, Jr. Featuring a collection of more than 6,000 objects, the Museum has important holdings of American painting, Old Masters, decorative arts, and sculpture. The Museum schedules an ambitious program of exhibitions, lectures, concerts, tours, and talks featuring national and international artists, and annually organizes and hosts the Cumberland Valley Artists and Cumberland Valley Photographers exhibitions, as well as a yearly showcase of the art of K-12 students in Washington County Public Schools. Its free youth art education programs have served four generations of local families. The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts has been free to the public since 1931.
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Note (added 7 January 2022) — The posting was updated with the extended date; the exhibition was originally scheduled to close 24 October 2021.
New Book | Pictured Politics
I’m sorry to be months late with this posting. See also Tara Zanardi’s review for Journal18 (November 2020) and Michael Schreffler’s review from caa.reviews (February 2021). –CH
From the University of Texas Press:
Emily Engel, Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-1477320594, $60.
Featuring almost eighty illustrations from between 1590 and 1830, Pictured Politics is the sole study in English or Spanish to examine the role of portraiture in constructing the history of South American colonialism.
The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.
Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent’s multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.
Emily Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published widely on visual culture in early modern South America. She is a coeditor of Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches and A Companion to Early Modern Lima, as well as the founding associate editor of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Art and Authority in Late Colonial South American Portraiture
1 New Pictorial Practices: Early Official Portraits in Viceregal Peru
2 Visualizing Empire’s History: Royal Portraits in the Iberoamerican World
3 Picturing Viceregal Authority in the Lima City Council
4 Municipal Collecting: Viceregal Portraits in Bogotá and Buenos Aires
5 Portrayal in a Time of Transition: Early Nineteenth-Century Portraits
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Official Portraits
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Online Roundtable | Teaching the Long 18th Century
From the roundtable flyer:
Teaching the ‘Long’ 18th Century
Online, Friday, 23 April 2021, 9–11am (EST)
Organized by Sarah Betzer and Dipti Khera
After Thomas Baldwin, A Balloon-Prospect from above the Clouds, plate from Thomas Baldwin, ‘Airopaidia’ (London, 1786), opposite p. 154.
Roundtable featuring:
• Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University
• Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Hunter College, City University of New York
• Emma Barker, The Open University, London
• Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Cornell University
• Prita Meier, Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
• Nancy Um, Binghamton University, State University of New York
• Stephen Whiteman, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
This roundtable brings together scholars from a broad array of geographical foci and institutional perspectives who have been at the forefront of efforts to rethink approaches to thinking, researching, and, crucially, teaching the art and material culture of an interconnected ‘long’ eighteenth century. Convened in conjunction with a session at the 2021 College Art Association conference, the roundtable will appear in distilled form in a dedicated issue of Journal18, forthcoming in Fall 2021. Two key aims animate the roundtable and its afterlife in Journal18: 1) to reflect upon teaching the ‘long’ eighteenth century, particularly in light of renewed debates on the reparation of objects, revision of histories, and inclusion of colonized and enslaved voices in museums, plantation sites, and public squares; and 2) to compile a list of resources and open-access supporting materials that are pragmatically useful for colleagues engaged in teaching the ‘long’ and ‘broad’ eighteenth century.
Organized by Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia, and Dipti Khera, Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Looking Ahead to ASECS 2022 in Baltimore
52nd Annual Meeting of ASECS
Hilton Baltimore, 30 March — 2 April 2022
The next ASECS Annual Meeting will be held at the Hilton Baltimore, March 30 — April 2, 2022. The Clifford Lecture will be delivered by Jennifer Morgan of the History Department at New York University. The deadline for affiliate societies and caucuses to submit proposals for their guaranteed panels is April 30, 2021. The deadline for session proposals from individual members is May 15, 2021; the Call for Papers will be posted in early June. The deadline for submissions to sessions and roundtables will be September 15, 2021.
From HECAA’s Board | Condemnation of Anti-Asian Violence
HECAA’s board sent the following message to its membership on Tuesday, 6 April 2021, with an eye toward starting a conversation at the annual business meeting at ASECS (online) on Saturday at 3:55pm:
In the wake of the recent deadly attacks in Atlanta, and in the face of systemic racism and persistent xenophobia inside and outside our discipline, the board of HECAA offers the following statement of solidarity.
We condemn anti-Asian violence in all its forms and deplore the historical imbalances of power that have enabled racist violence to go unaddressed for so long. We stand in solidarity with our Asian, Asian-American and Pacific Islander students and colleagues, offering our gratitude to those who have reached out to share their experiences of racism in academia and the world at large. As historians of the eighteenth century, we acknowledge our responsibility to address not only the racism present in the world today, but also its eighteenth-century roots. In the face of continued intolerance, we dedicate ourselves to the work of educating ourselves, our students, and our communities about the historical origins ongoing legacy of racial prejudice, affirming our commitment to HECAA as an open and inclusive forum for scholarship and intellectual exchange.
Enfilade 
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