New Books | Historical Fiction
Recent historical fiction set in the eighteenth century . . . with a strand of Nordic noir woven in:
Niklas Natt och Dag, The Wolf and the Watchman (New York: Atria, 2019), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1501196775, $28. [Originally published in Swedish as 1793.]
One morning in the autumn of 1793, watchman Mikel Cardell is awakened from his drunken slumber with reports of a body seen floating in the Larder, once a pristine lake on Stockholm’s Southern Isle, now a rancid bog. Efforts to identify the bizarrely mutilated corpse are entrusted to incorruptible lawyer Cecil Winge, who enlists Cardell’s help to solve the case. But time is short: Winge’s health is failing, the monarchy is in shambles, and whispered conspiracies and paranoia abound. Winge and Cardell become immersed in a brutal world of guttersnipes and thieves, mercenaries and madams. From a farmer’s son who is led down a treacherous path when he seeks his fortune in the capital to an orphan girl consigned to the workhouse by a pitiless parish priest, their gruesome investigation peels back layer upon layer of the city’s labyrinthine society. The rich and the poor, the pious and the fallen, the living and the dead—all collide and interconnect with the body pulled from the lake. Breathtakingly bold and intricately constructed, The Wolf and the Watchman brings to life the crowded streets, gilded palaces, and dark corners of late-eighteenth-century Stockholm, offering a startling vision of the crimes we commit in the name of justice, and the sacrifices we make in order to survive.
Niklas Natt och Dag (‘Night and Day’) is a member of the oldest surviving noble family in Sweden. He enjoys playing the guitar, mandolin, violin, and the Japanese bamboo flute. The Wolf and the Watchman, his first novel, was named the Best Debut of 2017 by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers and is being published in thirty countries. He lives in Stockholm with his wife and their two sons.
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Dexter Palmer, Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen: A Novel (New York: Pantheon, 2019), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1101871935, $28.
In 1726, in the town of Godalming, England, a woman confounded the nation’s medical community by giving birth to seventeen rabbits. This astonishing true story is the basis for Dexter Palmer’s stunning, powerfully evocative new novel.
Surgeon’s apprentice Zachary Walsh knows that his master, John Howard, prides himself on his rationality. But John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local journeyman, has managed to give birth to a dead rabbit. When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John and Zachary realize that nothing in their experience as rural physicians has prepared them to deal with a situation like this—strange, troubling, and possibly miraculous. John contacts several of London’s finest surgeons, three of whom soon arrive in Godalming to observe, argue, and perhaps use the case to cultivate their own fame.
When King George I learns of Mary’s plight, she and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences a world far removed from his small-town existence and is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul. All the while Mary lies in bed, as doubts begin to blossom among her caretakers and a growing group of onlookers waits with impatience for another birth, another miracle.
Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels: Version Control, which was selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, and The Dream of Perpetual Motion, which was selected as one of the best fiction debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews. He lives in Princeton.
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Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Blood & Sugar (Mantle Books, 2019), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-1509880775, £15.
Blood & Sugar is the thrilling debut historical crime novel from Laura Shepherd-Robinson. June, 1781. An unidentified body hangs upon a hook at Deptford Dock—horribly tortured and branded with a slaver’s mark. Some days later, Captain Harry Corsham—a war hero embarking upon a promising parliamentary career—is visited by the sister of an old friend. Her brother, passionate abolitionist Tad Archer, had been about to expose a secret that he believed could cause irreparable damage to the British slaving industry. He’d said people were trying to kill him, and now he is missing . . .
To discover what happened to Tad, Harry is forced to pick up the threads of his friend’s investigation, delving into the heart of the conspiracy Tad had unearthed. His investigation will threaten his political prospects, his family’s happiness, and force a reckoning with his past, risking the revelation of secrets that have the power to destroy him. And that is only if he can survive the mortal dangers awaiting him in Deptford . . .
“A page-turner of a crime thriller . . . This is a world conveyed with convincing, terrible clarity.”
–C. J. Sansom
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Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Daughters of Night (Mantle Books, 2020), 448 pages, ISBN: 9781509880829, £15.
From the brothels and gin-shops of Covent Garden to the elegant townhouses of Mayfair, Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s Daughters of Night follows Caroline Corsham, as she seeks justice for a murdered woman whom London society would rather forget . . .
Lucia’s fingers found her own. She gazed at Caro as if from a distance. Her lips parted, her words a whisper: ‘He knows.’
London, 1782. Desperate for her politician husband to return home from France, Caroline ‘Caro’ Corsham is already in a state of anxiety when she finds a well-dressed woman mortally wounded in the bowers of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. The Bow Street constables are swift to act, until they discover that the deceased woman was a highly-paid prostitute, at which point they cease to care entirely. But Caro has motives of her own for wanting to see justice done, and so sets out to solve the crime herself. Enlisting the help of thieftaker, Peregrine Child, their inquiry delves into the hidden corners of Georgian society, a world of artifice, deception and secret lives. But with many gentlemen refusing to speak about their dealings with the dead woman, and Caro’s own reputation under threat, finding the killer will be harder, and more treacherous than she can know . . .
New Book | The Art of the Bird
From The University of Chicago Press:
Roger Lederer, The Art of the Bird: The History of Ornithological Art through Forty Artists (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0226675053, $35.
The human history of depicting birds dates to as many as 40,000 years ago, when Paleolithic artists took to cave walls to capture winged and other beasts. But the art form has reached its peak in the last four hundred years. In The Art of the Bird, devout birder and ornithologist Roger J. Lederer celebrates this heyday of avian illustration in forty artists’ profiles, beginning with the work of Flemish painter Frans Snyders in the early 1600s and continuing through to contemporary artists like Elizabeth Butterworth, famed for her portraits of macaws. Stretching its wings across time, taxa, geography, and artistic style—from the celebrated realism of American conservation icon John James Audubon, to Elizabeth Gould’s nineteenth-century renderings of museum specimens from the Himalayas, to Swedish artist and ornithologist Lars Jonsson’s ethereal watercolors—this book is feathered with art and artists as diverse and beautiful as their subjects. A soaring exploration of our fascination with the avian form, The Art of the Bird is a testament to the ways in which the intense observation inherent in both art and science reveals the mysteries of the natural world.
Roger J. Lederer is professor emeritus of biological sciences at California State University, Chico, where he taught courses on ornithology and ecology. He is the author of Beaks, Bones, and Bird Songs: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior; coauthor of Latin for Bird Lovers; and creator of Ornithology.com.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Flemish Baroque Artists, 1580–1700
From the early seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, Flemish painters favoured exotic birds as subjects, especially parrots and peacocks.
Frans Snyders (1579–1657)
Carel Pietersz Fabritius (1622–1654)
Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636–95)
2 Early English Artists, 1626–1716
Animal representations were superseded by religious paintings and portraiture, but painters of these genres often worked with animaliers to add creatures to scenes.
Francis Barlow (1626–1704)
Jakob Bogdani (1658–1724)
Marmaduke Cradock (1660–1716)
3 Natural History, 1680–1806
Explorers brought back specimens from exotic destinations, popularizing natural history. As new birds were discovered, collected, and named, the science of ornithology came into being with the help of artists who illustrated these new discoveries.
Mark Catesby (1682/3–1749)
George Edwards (1694–1773)
Aert Schouman (1710–1792)
4 Before Ecology
Natural history focused on the identification of organisms. Naming became more standardized, thoughtful, and detailed, as did the art that accompanied it.
Thomas Bewick (1753–1828)
Lady Elizabeth Symonds Gwillim (1763–1807)
Alexander Wilson (1766–1813)
5 Early Scientific Illustration
Art began to accurately reflect the habitat and behaviour of birds, as observation revealed the subtle details of their physical appearance and their behavioural patterns.
John James Audubon (1785–1851)
Prideaux John Selby (1788–1867)
Elizabeth Gould (1804–1841)
6 In the Age of Darwin
The age of Darwin was also the golden age of ornithology. Ideas about how birds’ shape, colours and behaviour came to be and what relationships they had were debated.
Edward Lear (1812–1888)
Joseph Wolf (1820–1899)
William Matthew Hart (1830–1908)
7 Art and Science Overlap
As exploration of the natural world expanded, artists became important observers. Comparing species and varieties required artists to put more than one species on a page, and scientific monographs on specific bird groups became more common.
John Gerrard Keulemans (1842–1912)
Robert Ridgway (1850–1929)
Archibald Thorburn (1860–1935)
Bruno Liljefors (1860–1939)
Allan Cyril Brooks (1869–1946)
Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874–1927)
8 Broader Appeal
The skills of artists, the variety of their styles, their publications, and their reach to communities outside of the art world stoked the public’s interest both in birds and art.
Claude Gibney Finch-Davies (1875–1920)
Lilian Marguerite Medland (1880–1955)
Neville William Cayley (1886–1950)
Jessie Arms Botke (1883–1971)
Eric Ennion (1900–1981)
Roger Tory Peterson (1908–1996)
9 Bird Art Support Birds
When the environmental movement began in earnest in the latter half of the twentieth century, people noticed that bird habitats were disappearing and bird numbers declining. Artists helped to increase public awareness of these environmental issues.
Janet Turner (1914–1988)
Arthur B. Singer (1917–1990)
Keith Shackleton (1923–2015)
William Thomas Cooper (1934–2015)
James Fenwick Lansdowne (1937–2008)
10 Ornithological Art Expands
Bird field guides and illustrated books maintain their popularity but artists are also producing novel, creative and bizarre bird art that continues to enthral and inspire.
Raymond Harris-Ching (b. 1939)
Hilary Burn (b. 1946)
Elizabeth Butterworth (b. 1949)
Lars Jonsson (b. 1952)
David Allen Sibley (b. 1961)
Bibliography
Index
Call for Papers | The Animal and the Human in Netherlandish Art
From ArtHist.net:
The Animal and the Human in Netherlandish Art
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 71 (2021)
Proposals due by 10 February 2020; articles due by 3 August 2020
Art begins with the animal. –Deleuze and Guattari (1991)
If the topic of the animal and the human in Netherlandish art evokes images of aristocratic hunt scenes, lap-dogs or Boschian hybrids, current ecological and ethical concerns reveal persistent questions of why and how artists have engaged with the nonhuman animal as subject and object of depiction. From Bosch to Snyders to Broodthaers to Fabre, Netherlandish artists have probed, and continue to probe, changing understandings of the relations and shifting boundaries between the human and the animal. Yet despite the importance of the visual arts to ‘the question of the animal’, the abundance of Netherlandish imagery of animals and human-animal relations has not received sustained attention. Volume 71 (2021) of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek invites investigations into the animal and the human in the art and visual culture of the Low Countries and its diasporas in all periods.
In recent decades the field of animal studies has attracted increasing interest as scholars from various disciplines take other animals seriously as subjects. Animal studies pays close attention to the ways in which humans anthropomorphize animals, whilst adopting a post-humanist perspective in recognizing animals as beings-in-themselves, separate from our interests in them. The field has roots in questions about human beings’ co-existence with and use of other animals, extending the possibility of feeling emotion and pain to other sentient creatures. It also arises from cultural and philosophical interest in attempts to define the self and humanity through interactions with and representations of other animals. Giorgio Agamben for example, has examined the ways in which Western thought has produced ‘the human’ as a distinct and superior animal, or as different in kind from ‘the animal’.
The distinction made by René Descartes—who lived in the Netherlands from 1628 until 1639—between a self-aware, thinking human subject and a reflex-driven beast-machine was an important symbolic moment in the separation of ‘the animal’ from ‘the human’. The early modern period witnessed a tendency to depict animals as objects. Here, knowledge of the nature of a specific species of animal was not a matter of symbolic references and emblematic meanings, but of accurate, ‘scientific’ depiction. Depicted ‘ad vivum’ became an advertising slogan—whether the artist had seen the creature with his or her own eyes or not. In the early 18th century, for example, the magnificent printed publications after Maria Sybilla Merian’s drawings were authorized by the claim to be ‘naer het leven’. This claim to lifelikeness went hand in hand with experiments in observation and representation. One could think of the technologies of the microscope, photography and other forms of imaging including the digital. One might also cite interest in insects, animal anatomy, vivisection, comparative anatomy, taxonomy, or in the natural habitat of animals and their reproduction, animal curiosities, wonders, and genetics.
A sense of wonder could be evoked by the techniques of representation and the materiality of works of art. For example: Joris Hoefnagel and Otto Marseus van Schrieck famously inserted real insect-wings in their images, like, later, Fabre. This opens up the question to the use of animals in works of art in a broader sense: as a source for pigments and dyes, for glue and for brushes; or as source for parchment and vellum; or as elements of site-specific installations. How were these animal products obtained and processed? How did/does awareness of this affect interpretation of the works they constitute?
This volume invites new work that engages with the humanities beyond the human. Contributions might explore northern European art works that visualise animal mutations, metamorphoses, fables, struggles, fetishizing, speciation, preservation, and the monstrous. They might also engage with artistic critiques of taxonomies, habitats, hybridities, consumption, and the post-human.
The NKJ is dedicated to a particular theme each year and promotes innovative scholarship and articles that employ a diversity of approaches to the study of Netherlandish art in its wider context. More information is available here. Contributions to the NKJ (in Dutch, English, German, or French) are limited to a maximum of 7,500 words, excluding notes and bibliography. Following a peer review process and receipt of the complete text, the editorial board will make final decisions on the acceptance of papers.
Please send a 500-word proposal and short CV by 10 February 2020 to:
Eric.Jorink@huygens.knaw.nl
Joanna.Woodall@courtauld.ac.uk
Edward.Wouk@manchester.ac.uk
Schedule of production
Deadline for submission of proposals: 28 February 2020
Notifications about proposals: by 15 March 2020
Submission of articles for peer review: 3 August 2020
New Book | The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist
From Yale UP:
Kate Fullagar, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0300243062, $40.
A portrait of empire through the biographies of a Native American, a Pacific Islander, and the British artist who painted them both.
Three interconnected eighteenth-century lives offer a fresh account of the British Empire and its intrusion into Indigenous societies. This engaging history brings together the stories of Joshua Reynolds and two Indigenous men, the Cherokee Ostenaco and the Raiatean Mai. Fullagar uncovers the life of Ostenaco, tracing his emergence as a warrior, his engagement with colonists through war and peace, and his eventual rejection of imperial politics during the American Revolution. She delves into the story of Mai, his confrontation with conquest and displacement, his voyage to London on Cook’s imperial expedition, and his return home with a burning ambition to right past wrongs. Woven throughout is a new history of Reynolds, growing up in Devon near a key port in England, becoming a portraitist of empire, rising to the top of Britain’s art world and yet remaining ambivalent about his nation’s expansionist trajectory.
Kate Fullagar is an associate professor of Modern History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of The Savage Visit, the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes, and co-editor of Facing Empire.
New Book | The Barbarian Invasions
Newly published English translation of the original French edition of 2015, from October Books and MIT Press:
Éric Michaud, The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019), 280 pages, ISBN: 9780262043151, $35 / £28.
How the history of art begins with the myth of the barbarian invasion—the romantic fragmentation of classical eternity.
The history of art, argues Eric Michaud, begins with the romantic myth of the barbarian invasions. Viewed from the nineteenth century, the Germanic-led invasions of the Roman Empire in the fifth century became the gateway to modernity, seen not as a catastrophe but as a release from a period of stagnation, renewing Roman culture with fresh, northern blood—and with new art that was anti-Roman and anticlassical. Artifacts of art from then on would be considered as the natural product of ‘races’ and ‘peoples’ rather than the creation of individuals. The myth of the barbarian invasions achieved the fragmentation of classical eternity.
This narrative, Michaud explains, inseparable from the formation of nation states and the rise of nationalism in Europe, was based on the dual premise of the homogeneity and continuity of peoples. Local and historical particularities became weapons aimed at classicism’s universalism. The history of art linked its objects with racial groups—denouncing or praising certain qualities as ‘Latin’ or ‘Germanic’. Thus the predominance of linear elements was thought to betray a southern origin, and the ‘painterly’ a Germanic or northern source. Even today, Michaud points out, it is said that art best embodies the genius of peoples. In the globalized contemporary art market, the ethnic provenance of works—categorized, for example, as ‘African American’, ‘Latino’, or ‘Native American’—creates added value. The market displays the same competition among ‘races’ that was present at the foundation of art history as a discipline.
Éric Michaud is Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and a 2018–19 Fellow at the Italian Academy at Columbia University.
Exhibition | Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870
Jean Honoré Fragonard, Mountain Landscape at Sunset, ca. 1765, oil on paper, 8 × 13 inches
(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, Chester Dale Fund, 1997.22.1)
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From the press release (6 December 2019) for the exhibition:
True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 2 February — 3 May 2020
Fondation Custodia, Paris, 13 June — 13 September 2020
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 3 May — 29 August 2022
Curated by Mary Morton, Ger Luijten, and Jane Munro
An integral part of art education in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, painting en plein air (‘in the open air’) was a core practice for artists in Europe. Intrepid painters—developing their abilities to quickly capturing effects of light and atmosphere—made sometimes arduous journeys to study landscapes at breathtaking sites, ranging from the Baltic coast and Swiss Alps to the streets of Paris and ruins of Rome. True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870 presents some 100 oil sketches made outdoors across Europe by artists such as Carl Blechen, Jules Coignet, André Giroux, Anton Sminck Pitloo, Carl Frederik Sørensen, and Joseph Mallord William Turner. On view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, from February 2 through May 3, 2020, the exhibition presents dozens of recently discovered studies and explores issues of attribution, chronology, and technique.
“The Gallery is fortunate to have one of the finest public collections of landscape sketches by 18th- and 19th-century European painters, largely due to acquisitions made by the late Philip Conisbee during his time as the Gallery’s senior curator of European paintings from 1993 to 2008,” said Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art, Washington. “True to Nature builds on recent scholarship as well as the discovery of paintings that have come to light since the 1996 exhibition organized by Conisbee, In the Light of Italy: Corot and Early Open-Air Painting. That exhibition sparked curatorial and collector interest in this genre, and True to Nature continues to expand our understanding of this relatively unstudied, yet central, aspect of European art history. The Gallery is grateful to work with the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, and the Fitzwilliam Museum to bring together highlights from the best collections of European landscape sketches from this period.”
True to Nature begins as European artists would have in the late 18th and early 19th century—in Rome. The study of ancient sculpture and architecture, as well as of Renaissance and baroque art, was already a key part of an artist’s education, but Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s influential treatise on landscape painting, published in 1800, went further to recommended that young artists develop their skills by painting oil sketches out of doors. Valenciennes advised exploring the Roman countryside, as he had in Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna (c. 1782/1785). This section includes examples by a range of European artists who followed his advice, such as Michel Dumas, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, and Johan Thomas Lundbye. Also included is The Island and Bridge of San Bartolomeo, Rome (1825/1828) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Corot was a key figure in 19th-century landscape painting, bringing the practice of open-air painting back to France and inspiring a younger generation of impressionist painters.
Other sections focus on both natural and man-made features that proved challenging to painters, such as waterfalls, trees, skies, coastlines, and rooftops. Examples include rare studies by well-known artists such as John Constable’s Sky Study with a Shaft of Sunlight (c. 1822, Fitzwilliam Museum), Jean Honoré Fragonard’s Mountain Landscape at Sunset (c. 1765), and Odilon Redon’s Village on the Coast of Brittany (1840–1916, Fondation Custodia) as well as sketches by lesser-known painters like Louise-Joséphine Sarazin del Belmont, one of the few known women artists active during this period. True to Nature illustrates how pervasive plein-air painting became across Europe with examples by many Belgian, Danish, Dutch, German, Swiss, and Swedish artists who studied in Italy before returning home to paint their native surroundings. Sketches by Carl Blechen include an example from his time in Italy, View of the Colosseum in Rome (1829, Fondation Custodia), as well as a study made at home in Germany, View of the Baltic Coast (1798-1840), Fondation Custodia).
The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The exhibition is curated by Mary Morton, curator and head of the department of French paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington; Ger Luijten, director, Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, Paris; and Jane Munro, keeper of paintings, drawings and prints, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Ger Luijten, Mary Morton, and Jane Munro, eds., with additional contributions by Michael Clarke, Ann Hoenigswald, and Anna Ottani Cavina, True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870 (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2020), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1911300786, £45 / $55.
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Note (added 29 June 2022) — The original Fitzwilliam dates (6 October — 31 January 2021) were updated.
Exhibition | Witnessing Terror: French Revolutionary Prints, 1792−94
Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert, after Fulchran Jean Harriet, The Night of the 9 and 10 Thermidor, Year II, ca. 1794–1805
(London: UCL Art Museum, LDUCS-10581)
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Opening next week at UCL:
Witnessing Terror: French Revolutionary Prints, 1792−94
UCL Art Museum, London, 14 January — 12 June 2020
Curated by David Bindman, Colin Jones, and Richard Taws
The period of the French Revolution known as the Terror, which lasted from 1792 until 1794, gave rise to many of the most memorable and dramatic images of this crucial moment in modernity. These images were central to revolutionary attempts to regenerate all aspects of life—from clothing and speech to money and maps, and with the introduction of the Republican Calendar, to remake even time itself. In our contemporary political context, in which ‘Terror’ has taken on a variety of disturbing meanings, and in which the proliferation of images plays an increasingly significant role in how we comprehend acts of political violence, it is ever more important to examine this radical period in French history.
Tracing the tumultuous period from the trial and execution of Louis XVI to the fall of Robespierre, Witnessing Terror includes a variety of printed images representing key events and personae. From portraits of revolutionary martyrs to dramatic scenes of Parisian crowds, these prints give us insight into how people understood life during the Terror. As well as a number of caricatures, street scenes, and more overtly artistic prints, the exhibition displays everyday objects, such as paper money, well-worn passports, and playing cards. Drawing out the contemporary relevance of this revolutionary iconography, Witnessing Terror also shows work by the renowned conceptual artist, poet, and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925−2006) that engages with the long-term legacy of the Terror.
The Terror remains a vexed term that has for many become synonymous with the French Revolution, clouded by myths that emerged in the years that followed. A system of political institutions and practices, the Terror was accompanied by new rhetorical and cultural strategies. It did not happen overnight but developed as a tactical response to a series of military crises, rumours, and fears. Images played a crucial role in the operation of Terror, as well as in its subsequent representation. This exhibition considers what it means to witness Terror, then and now. In particular, it features extracts from the recently discovered letters of Catherine-Innocente de Rougé, duchesse d’Elbeuf (1707−1794), who maintained a correspondence with an unknown friend throughout the Revolution. Living in her private residence, the Hôtel d’Elbeuf, which was located only metres from government offices during the Terror, the duchesse d’Elbeuf commented freely on the situation in Paris in a way that would have sent her to the guillotine, had her correspondence been found.
This exhibition is part of a programme of ongoing engagement with UCL Art Museum’s unique holdings of prints related to the French Revolution, acquired via the Cultural Gifts Scheme. It follows Revolution under a King: French Prints, 1789−92 (UCL Art Museum, 2016) and Rousseau 300: Nature, Self and State, an exhibition in collaboration with UCL Centre for Transnational History (UCL Art Museum, 2012).
Exhibition | Dutch Drawings of the Eighteenth Century
Jan van Huysum (1682–1749), A Crab, 18th century, watercolour and pencil on laid paper, 18 × 29 cm
(Frankfurt am Main: Städel Museum)
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Opening in the fall at the Städel Museum:
Passion for Pictures: Netherlandish Drawings of the Eighteenth Century
Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 1 October 2020 — 10 January 2021
Curated by Annett Sandfort
With nearly 600 works, the Städel Museum has one of the most extensive and artistically significant collections of eighteenth-century Dutch drawings outside the Netherlands. From 1 October 2020 to 10 January 2021, the Stadel is for the first time dedicating an exhibition to this valuable collection. On display will be eighty representative drawings by artists who are hardly known today, but who were often very successful in their time, as well as by art-loving amateurs who drew at a high level. The exhibition will bring together preparatory drawings for large-format wall and ceiling decorations by Jacob de Wit; book illustrations by Bernard Picart; Dutch topographies by Cornelis Pronk, Paulus Constantijn la Fargue, and Hendrik Schepper; atmospheric landscape drawings by Jacob Cats, the brothers Jacob and Abraham van Strij, and Franciscus Andreas Milatz; decorative floral and fruit still lifes by Jan van Huysum and his numerous successors; as well as depictions of exotic animals by Aert Schouman and satirical genre scenes by Cornelis Troost and Jacobus Buys. The selected works impressively illustrate the revaluation and emancipation of the drawing in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century, as well as the preference for picturesquely executed, coloured drawings and the repeatedly sought-after examination of the art of the seventeenth century, the Netherlands’ Golden Age. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue of holdings impressively illustrate the spectrum and quality of the collection of eighteenth-century Dutch drawings in the Städel Museum.
The exhibition was curated by Annett Sandfort (Collection of Prints and Drawings, Städel Museum), with support from the Stiftung Gabriele Busch-Hauck.
Note (added 7 October 2020) — The original version of this posting included the provisional titles: Dutch Drawings of the Eighteenth Century / Niederländische Zeichnungen des 18. Jahrhunderts. The exhibition press release is available here.
Cornelis Troost (1696/1697–1750), Suijpe Steijn, 1742, gouache paint on laid paper, 41 × 62 cm
(Frankfurt am Main: Städel Museum, photo by U. Edelmann)
Exhibition | The Gosford Wellhead
Opening in the summer at The Met:
The Gosford Wellhead: An Ancient Roman Masterpiece
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1 June 2020 — 14 February 2021
Puteal (wellhead) with Narcissus and Echo, and Hylas and the Nymphs, 2nd century, Roman, marble, 41 inches hight (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019.7).
An ancient Roman marble wellhead (puteal) of the second century AD is the focus of an exhibition—along with some two dozen works, primarily from The Met collection—that will explore a wide range of topics, including virtuoso Roman sculpture; the Roman adaptation of Greek art and mythology; Greek and Latin literature; early excavations of Rome and its port; the restoration of antiquities in the late eighteenth century; the Grand Tour and the British collecting of antiquities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the rediscovery of a masterpiece that was lost to scholars for centuries. Excavated in the Roman port of Ostia in 1797, the wellhead entered a private collection in the nineteenth century and was recently acquired by The Met. The acquisition is part of The Met’s 2020 Collections Initiative in celebration of the Museum’s 150th anniversary.
The press release (17 May 2019) announcing the acquisition is available here»
New Book | The Irish Aesthete: Ruins of Ireland
From Simon & Schuster:
Robert O’Byrne, The Irish Aesthete: Ruins of Ireland (London: CICO Books, 2019), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1782496861, $25.
Fantastical, often whimsical, and frequently quirky, these atmospheric ruins are beautifully photographed and paired with fascinating text by Robert O’Byrne. Born out of Robert’s hugely popular blog, The Irish Aesthete, there are Medieval castles, Georgian mansions, Victorian lodges, and a myriad of other buildings, many never previously published. Robert focuses on a mixture of exteriors and interiors in varying stages of decay, on architectural details, and entire scenarios. Accompanying texts tell of the Regency siblings who squandered their entire fortune on gambling and carousing, of an Anglo-Norman heiress who pitched her husband out the window on their wedding night, and of the landlord who liked to walk around naked and whose wife made him carry a cowbell to warn housemaids of his approach. Arranged by the country’s four provinces, the diverse ruins featured offer a unique insight into Ireland and an exploration of her many styles of historic architecture.
Robert O’Byrne is a writer and lecturer specialising in the fine and decorative arts. He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House, The Last Knight: A Tribute to Desmond FitzGerald, 29th Knight of Glin, Romantic Irish Homes, and Romantic English Homes. A retired Vice-President of the Irish Georgian Society and trustee of the Alfred Beit Foundation, he is currently a trustee of the Apollo Foundation and the Artists Collecting Society. Among other work he writes a monthly column for Apollo magazine, and is also a regular contributor to The Burlington Magazine and the Irish Arts Review. For the past five years, O’Byrne has written an award-winning blog, www.theirishaesthete.com.
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