Cleveland Acquires Maratti Portrait
Press release (14 March 2018) from The Cleveland Museum of Art:
Carlo Maratti, Portrait of Francesca Gommi Maratti, ca. 1701, oil on canvas, 98.5 × 74.5 cm (Cleveland Museum of Art).
Recent acquisitions by the Cleveland Museum of Art include a magnificent portrait in oil on canvas by Carlo Maratti, the leading painter in Rome at the end of the 17th century; two key works by American photographer Edward Weston that indicate his transition from pictorialism to modernism; and two large-scale contemporary African sculptures by South African artist Kendell Geers and Cameroonian artist Hervé Youmbi.
Carlo Maratti (1625–1715) is often regarded as the last major exponent of a classical tradition that began with Raphael nearly two centuries earlier. Maratti was the leading painter in Rome in the mid to late seventeenth century. Favored by wealthy patrons, Maratti’s primary achievement lay in his ability to synthesize the light and movement characteristic of the Roman Baroque with classical ideals of beauty.
This portrait was painted shortly after Maratti’s marriage to Francesca Gommi in late 1700 as an homage from the artist to his new wife. Gommi had been Maratti’s mistress and artist’s model since at least the 1670s. She is depicted enveloped in lavender-blue drapery, and her hair is elaborately dressed with ribbons and jewels. In her left hand she holds up a drawing to which she gestures with her right. Introducing an allegorical element into a portrait by means of a painting-within-a-painting was a device that Maratti had employed in portraits as early as the 1650s and was probably inspired by portraits of the High Renaissance. The drawing represents Venus in the workshop of Vulcan, forging the love-darts of her adolescent son Cupid.
Although drawings by Maratti are found in major collections throughout Europe and North America, there are relatively few paintings by the artist in public collections outside Italy. Portrait of Francesca Gommi Maratti, a late work by the artist, is particularly appealing for the identity of its sitter and the charming iconography inspired by the artist’s deep love for his subject. The Cleveland Museum of Art has strong holdings in Italian paintings of the 17th century with religious and historical themes. This work is the first Italian Baroque painted portrait to join the collection. Portrait of Francesca Gommi Maratti will go on view in the museum’s Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery beginning March 17, 2018, as part of the museum’s exhibition Recent Acquisitions 2014–2017. . .
The full press release is available here.
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Maratti’s Portrait of Francesca Gommi Maratti, was part of Nicholas Hall’s exhibition Paintings by Carlo Maratti organized to coincide with TEFAF New York in October of 2017. Previously, in July 2016, it was included in Robilant Voena’s installation for Masterpiece London, and before that, in January 2014, it was shown in New York as part of Sotheby’s selling exhibition Painting Passion: The Baroque in Italy, curated by Scott Schaefer.
ASECS 2018, Orlando
2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hilton Orlando Buena Vista Palace, 22–24 March 2018
The 49th annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies takes place at the Hilton Orlando Buena Vista Palace. HECAA will be represented by the Anne Schroder New Scholars’ Session, chaired by David Pullins and scheduled for Friday morning. Our annual luncheon and business meeting follows immediately after that panel. A selection of 26 additional panels is included below (of the 211 sessions scheduled, many others will, of course, interest HECAA members, including the return of the Women’s Caucus Masquerade Ball). For the full slate of offerings, see the program.
H E C A A E V E N T S
Anne Schroder New Scholars Session (HECAA)
Friday, 23 March, 11:30–1:00, Palm I
Chair: David PULLINS, The Frick Collection
1. Margot BERNSTEIN, Columbia University, “Playing Footsie with Carmontelle: Misbehavior and Missteps in a Selection of Eighteenth-Century Profile Pictures”
2. Lauren WALTER, University of Florida, “Doctor, I think they have a case of Anglomanie: Marie Antoinette and the Princesse de Lamballe”
3. Maura GLEESON, University of Florida, “Imag[in]ing the Queen as Muse: A Closer Look at Fleury François Richard’s Portrait of la Reine Hortense”
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Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture Luncheon
Friday, 23 March, 1:00–2:30, Tangerine 4
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O T H E R S E S S I O N S R E L A T E D T O T H E V I S U A L A R T S
T H U R S D A Y , 2 2 M A R C H 2 0 1 8
Women, Portraiture, and Place
Thursday, 22 March, 8:00–9:30, Palm D
Chairs: Heidi A. STROBEL, University of Evansville, and Christina LINDEMAN, University of South Alabama
1. Laura ENGEL, Duquesne University, “Women in White: The Countess of Blessington, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Embodied Memory”
2. Kaitlin GRIMES, University of Missouri-Columbia, “The Materiality of Textiles and the Feminization of ‘Things’ in the Gendered Spaces of Rosalba Carriera’s Pastel Portraits”
3. Catherine M. JAFFE, Texas State University, “Women, Fashion, and Self-Fashioning: Two Portraits of María Lorenza de los Ríos, Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar”
4. Sandra Gómez TODÓ, University of Iowa, “Portraying the Female Masquerader: Fashionability, Public Legitimacy, and the Moralities of the Mask in Georgian Masquerade Portraits”
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Biblical Painting in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Thursday, 22 March, 8:00–9:30, Palm F
Chair: Naomi BILLINGSLEY, University of Manchester
1. Mary PEACE, Sheffield Hallam University, “Reversing the Harlot’s Progress? The Figuring and Refiguring of Magdalens at the London Magdalen Hospital in the Eighteenth Century”
2. Bénédicte MIYAMOTO, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, “1768–1805 – Hanging Biblical Paintings at the Royal Academy”
3. William LEVINE, Middle Tennessee State University, “Retaining the Visual Aura of Biblical Violence in a Commercial Culture in Some Illustrations to Macklin’s English Bible”
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New Scholarship in Art History (SEASECS)
Thursday, 22 March, 8:00–9:30, Sago 1
Chair: Melissa HYDE, University of Florida
1. Jessica FRIPP, Texas Christian University, “From Salon to Salon: Cochin’s and La Tour’s Portraits at the Salon of 1753”
2. Susanna CAVIGLIA, Duke University, “The Aesthetics of Walking in Rome”
3. Franny BROCK, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Madame de Genlis’ New Method and Women Drawing Teachers in Eighteenth-Century France”
4. Hyejin LEE, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Ballooning Memorabilia and the Politics of Remembering Aerial Voyages at the End of the Ancien Régime”
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Currents of Empire: Toward a Global Material Culture
Thursday, 22 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm H
Chairs: Douglas FORDHAM, University of Virginia, and Emily CASEY, St. Mary’s College of Maryland
1. Romita RAY, Syracuse University, “Made in China? Tea in Colonial Calcutta”
2. Susan J. RAWLES, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, “Academic Strategies and the Semiotics of Style: The Matter of Identity in British-Atlantic Portraiture”
3. Rachel ZIMMERMAN, Independent Scholar, “Banyans in Brazil: Elite Dress and Narratives of Interimperial Exchange”
4. Monica Anke HAHN, Temple University, “‘Harlequin Nabob’: Tilly Kettle in India”
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Inventing the Modern Stage in Eighteenth-Century France
Thursday, 22 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm K
Chair: Laurence MARIE, Columbia University
1. Aaron WILE, USC, “Coypel’s Theatricality: The Politics of Affect in the Regency”
2. Alexandra SCHAMEL, University of Munich, “Comedic Style and Anti-illusionism in Marivaux’s Arlequin poli par l’amour”
3. Maria G. TRAUB, Neumann University, “The Woman Who Changed French Theater”
4. Kalin SMITH, McMaster University, “Backstage with the Whigs”
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Letting the Cat out of the Bag: The Cultural Work of Eighteenth-Century Pets
Thursday, 22 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm I
Chairs: Joanna M. GOHMANN, The Walters Art Museum, and Karissa E. BUSHMAN, University of Alabama in Huntsville
1. Bryan ALKEMEYER, The College of Wooster, “Drowned Cats in Eighteenth-Century English Literature”
2. Amanda STRASIK, Eastern Kentucky University, “Reconsidering Girls and Pets in Eighteenth-Century French Art”
3. Tara ZANARDI, Hunter College, CUNY, “Hounds at the Hunt: Charles III, Bourbon Legitimacy, and Empire”
4. Stephanie Alice HOWARD-SMITH, Queen Mary University of London, “Horace Walpole’s ‘Dogmanity’: Lapdogs and Male Sociability, 1738–1789”
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Mesmer Now
Thursday, 22 March, 11:30–1:00, Palm A
Chair: Michael YONAN, University of Missouri
1. Sara LULY, Kansas State University, “That Healing Feeling: Mesmerism and Materiality in Alissa Walser’s Am Anfang war die Nacht Musik (2011)”
2. Bruno BELHOSTE, Université de Paris, Sorbonne, “Mesmer’s Theory of Instinct and the Invention of Magnetic Somnambulism”
3. Oksana RYMARENKO, Russian State University for the Humanities, “The Long History of Mesmerism in Russia”
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Roundtable: How to Publish in an Eighteenth-Century Studies Journal
Thursday, 22 March, 4:15–5:45, Palm A
Chair: Matthew WYMAN-MCCARTHY, Eighteenth-Century Studies
1. Eve Trevor BANNET, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture
2. Tita CHICO, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
3. Robert MARKLEY, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
4. Sean MOORE, Eighteenth-Century Studies
5. Cedric D. REVERAND II, Eighteenth-Century Life
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Men of Parts and Parts of Men: Rethinking Eighteenth-Century Masculinity
Thursday, 22 March, 4:15–5:45, Palm K
Chair: Mary Beth HARRIS, Purdue University
1. Jeremy CHOW, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Part (of) Man?: The Exceptional Eunuch”
2. Sarah E. BERKOWITZ, University of Virginia, “Below Stares: Servants and the Anxiety of Domestic Masculinity”
3. Kelsey BROSNAN, Rutgers University, “Les Académiciennes and the Fragmented Male Nude”
4. Karen J. MANNA, University of Central Oklahoma, “Masculinity in Revolution: Comedy and Satire on the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage”
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The Eighteenth Century on Film (NEASECS)
Thursday, 22 March, 4:15–5:45, Sago 3
Chair: John H. O’NEILL, Hamilton College
1. Christopher C. NAGLE, Western Michigan University, “Austen’s Audio-Vision”
2. Kristin O’ROURKE, Dartmouth College, “Dressing and Undressing in the Rococo: Fantasies and Meanings of the Toilette on Screen”
3. Florian VAULEON, Purdue University, “The Eighteenth Century as Entertainment: The Changing Cinematic Representation of the French Revolution”
4. Nicole GARRET, Stony Brook University, “Where are the Jacobite Women in Outlander?”
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Street Scenes
Thursday, 22 March, 4:15–5:45, Sago 1
Chair: James WATT, University of York
1. Meredith GAMER, Columbia University, “Street Theater: ‘Vulgar’ Visualities from Tyburn Tree to the Newgate Drop”
2. Emily THAMES, Florida State University, “Views of Eighteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the Work of José Campeche (1751–1809)”
3. Alison O’BYRNE, University of York, “Picturing the Streets in Thomas Malton’s Picturesque Tour (1792)”
4. Ian NEWMAN, University of Notre Dame, “Porous Buildings”
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Members Reception
Thursday, 22 March, 6:00–7:30
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F R I D A Y , 2 3 M A R C H 2 0 1 8
Roundtable: Engaging with the Scholarship of Mary Sheriff (SEASECS)
Friday, 23 March, 8:00–9:30, Sago 4
Chair: Michael YONAN, University of Missouri
1. Katherine ARPEN, Auburn University
2. Meredith GAMER, Columbia University
3. Elizabeth C. MANSFIELD, Getty Foundation
4. Paula Rea RADISICH, Whittier College
5. Heidi A. STROBEL, University of Evansville
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The Imprint of Women: Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers
Friday, 23 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm L
Chairs: Cynthia ROMAN, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, and Cristina S. MARTINEZ, University of Ottawa
1. Paris Amanda SPIES-GANS, Princeton University, “Maria Cosway’s ‘Genius’ for Print”
2. Heather MCPHERSON, University of Alabama at Birmingham, “Caroline Watson and the Theatre of Printmaking”
3. Kelsey D. MARTIN, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Divine Secrets of a Printmaking Sisterhood: The Professional and Familial Networks of the Hortemels and Hémery Sisters”
4. Amy TORBERT, Harvard Art Museums, “‘Hannah Humphrey, Widow Print Seller’: Women Publishing and Selling Prints in London, 1740–1800”
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Back to Black: Goya and Color (Ibero-American SECS)
Friday, 23 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm J
Chair: Frieda KOENINGER, Sam Houston State University
1. Eva SEBBAGH, Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV), “When Color Turns Into Setting: Ways and Means of the Use of Solid Colors in Goya’s Painting”
2. Elena DEANDA, Washington College, “Singing the Blues and Muddying the Waters: Goya, Cadalso, and the Color of Desire”
3. Guy TAL, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design, and Art, “The Pastel Colors of Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath”
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Eighteenth-Century Sauce-Boxes
Friday, 23 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm F
Chair: Jade HIGA, University of Hawaii
1. Beth CSOMAY, Duquesne University, “Enchanting Elvira: Mary Robinson’s Radical in Vancenza: Or The Dangers of Credulity”
2. Paula Rea RADISICH, Whittier College, “Saucy Face: Quentin de la Tour’s L’Auteur qui rit (The Artist Laughing) (1737)”
3. Sara TAVELA, Misericordia University, “Getting Saucy in Centlivre”
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Roundtable: Soft Materials, I
Friday, 23 March, 11:30–1:00, Palm J
Chair: Timothy CAMPBELL, University of Chicago
1. Daniel O’QUINN, University of Guelph, “Damask between Skin and Paper: The Soft Materials of Intimate Transculturation”
2. Douglas FORDHAM, University of Virginia, “Aquatint and ‘Soft’ Imperial Power”
3. Sarah T. WESTON, Yale University, “Transparent, Reflective, and Opaque Surfaces in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie”
4. Annika MANN, Arizona State University, “The Fomite”
5. Alicia L. KERFOOT, SUNY College at Brockport, “Frances Burney’s Embroidered Mourning Piece: The Wanderer and the Materiality of Grief”
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Roundtable: Soft Materials, II
Friday, 23 March, 4:30–6:00, Palm J
Chair: Timothy CAMPBELL, University of Chicago
1. Sean SILVER, University of Michigan, “How Soft are Networks?”
2. Amelia RAUSER, Franklin and Marshall College, “Soft Neoclassicism: Looking Hard at Fashionable Dress”
3. Ashley HANNEBRINK, Harvard University, “Sculpting in Clay: The Softness of Neoclassical Terracotta Models”
4. Sara LANDRETH, University of Ottawa, “Cavendish’s 3D Printing: Soft Materials and Vanishing Figures”
5. David A. BREWER, The Ohio State University, “On Folding”
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Description d’une personne…ou de toutes sortes d’objets: Portraits in the Eighteenth Century (Society for Eighteenth-Century French Studies)
Friday, 23 March, 4:30–6:00, Palm F
Chair: Barbara ABRAMS, Suffolk University
1. Corinne STREICHER-ANGLADE, Université du Québec à Montréal, “Le Portrait (dé) voile” / “Portraiture (Un) Veiled”
2. Servanne WOODWARD, The University of Western Ontario, “Visagéités élusives” / “The Evasive Qualities of Facial Portraiture”
3. Mira MORGENSTERN, City College of New York, CUNY, “Seeing / through Portraits in La Nouvelle Héloise”
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S A T U R D A Y , 2 4 M A R C H 2 0 1 8
Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Saturday, 24 March, 8:00–9:30, Palm K
Chair: Birgit TAUTZ, Bowdoin College
1. Monika NENON, University of Memphis, “Blue Hearts and Snuff Boxes: The Role of Objects in German Literary Circles of Sensibility”
2. Magelone BOLLEN, Independent Scholar, “Furnishing with Scissors: The Augsburger Klebealbum (ca. 1783)”
3. Lindsay DUNN, Texas Christian University, “Behind the Looking Glass: Marie-Louise, House of Habsburg-Lorraine, and Identity”
4. Sabine VOLK-BIRKE, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, “Sacred Pleasure / Idolatrous Vice: The Rosary”
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Goethe and the Visual Arts
Saturday, 24 March, 8:00–9:30, Palm F
Chair: Matt FEMINELLA, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
1. Andrea MEYERTHOLEN, University of Kansas, “Polarity, Empiricism, and Abstraction: Goethe and the Emergence of Abstract Art”
2. F. Corey ROBERTS, Calvin College, “From Aesthetic Experience to Artistic Inspiration: Visual Arts as the Impetus for Poetic Creation in Goethe’s Early Writings”
3. Peter ERICKSON, Colorado State University, “The ‘Primitive Hut’ in Eighteenth-Century Architecture Theory: Laugier, Goethe, Hegel”
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Non-Human Encounters
Saturday, 24 March, 8:00–9:30, Sunburst 2
Chair: Catherine CHIABAUT, Yale University
1. Nathan D. BROWN, Furman University, “Voltaire’s Lion: The Limits of Human(ism) in Voltaire’s Le Marseillais et le Lion”
2. Pichaya DAMRONGPIWAT, Cornell University, “Birth and the Posthuman: Cats, Rabbits, and Frankenstein’s Monster”
3. Philippe S. ROBICHAUD, Université du Québec à Trois- Rivière/Paris-Sorbonne, “Un bruit d’une espèce nouvelle: Vitalist Materialism and the Human Voice”
4. Alexander WRAGGE-MORLEY, University College London, “The Connoisseur as Centaur: Humans, Animals, and Aesthetic Experience, 1700–1750”
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Freakery: The Limits of the Body
Saturday, 24 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm H
Chair: Stan BOOTH, University of Winchester
1. Erika MANDARINO, Tulane University, “M. de Listonai’s Moon Men, or, The Sixth Sense of Selenopolis”
2. Chris MOUNSEY, University of Winchester, “Sea-Green Incorruptible: Benjamin Martin and Other Prosthetic Eyes”
3. Charlotte ROBINSON, University of Winchester, “The Animate Extension: Jane Barker and her Amanuensis”
4. Karissa E. BUSHMAN, University of Alabama in Huntsville, “Disability and Damaged Bodies in Goya’s Works”
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The Visual Text and the Textual Visual
Saturday, 24 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm L
Chair: Leah ORR, University of Louisiana, Lafayette
1. Tili Boon CUILLÉ, Washington University in St. Louis, “Illustration as Mediation in Duclos’ Acajou et Zirphile”
2. Elizabeth DEANS, George Washington University, “Dabbling in Design: Architectural Albums as Autodidactic Tools for Amateurs”
3. Teri DOERKSEN, Mansfield University, “Teasing the Text, or, Miss Tit-Ups Visits the Convent: Illustration Cards as Eighteenth-Century Fanfic”
4. Andreas MUELLER, University of Northern Colorado, “Visualizing Trauma and Transgenerational Memory in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year”
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Maker’s Knowledge
Saturday, 24 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm K
Chairs: Ruth MACK, SUNY Buffalo, and Sean SILVER, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
1. Lynn FESTA, Rutgers University, “Bricoleur Realism (or Maker’s Knowledge as Reality Effect)”
2. Crystal LAKE, Wright State University, “Making Fictions: Early Readers and Their Crafts”
3. Maggie MCGOWAN, Yale University, “Cultivating Skill in William Cowper’s The Task”
4. Chloe Wigston SMITH, University of York, “Craft and Chemistry in the School of Arts”
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Art, Alchemy, and Royal Rivalry: The Eighteenth-Century Manufactory
Saturday, 24 March, 9:45–11:15, Palm F
Chair: Tara ZANARDI, Hunter College, CUNY
1. Elizabeth LIEBMAN, Independent Scholar, “Recreating Adam: Artificial Stone in Eighteenth-Century Britain”
2. Sarah GRANDIN, Harvard University, “‘De la plus grande estendue’: Savonnerie Carpets and the Manufacture of Grandeur under Louis XIV”
3. Agnieszka Anna FICEK, The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Courtly Figures: Collecting Meissen and the Creation of National Identity in the Court of Augustus II and Beyond”
4. Matthew MARTIN, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, “Porcelain and Royal Power—The Royal Sèvres Manufactory”
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Sharing the World through Travel Writing and Painting (SEASECS)
Saturday, 24 March, 2:00–3:30, Sunburst 1
Chair: Denis GRÉLÉ, University of Memphis
1. Charles A. GRAIR, Texas Tech University, “Georg Forster, Johann Goethe, and the Development of Modern Travel Narratives in Germany”
2. Lauren DISALVO, Dixie State University, “The ‘Flying Figures’ of Roman Wall Painting and the Female Portrait in the Long Eighteenth Century”
3. Mandy PAIGE-LOVINGOOD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Agency in Absence: Contextualizing Jean-Baptiste Debret’s Slave Images in the Long Eighteenth Century”
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Masquerade Ball
Saturday, 24 March, 9:00pm
To Benefit the ‘Now and Later Non-Tenure Track Fund’
Sponsored by the ASECS Executive Board and the Women’s Caucus; tickets and masks available for purchase at the door (cash or check)
Melinda Watt Appointed Curator of Textiles at AIC
Press release (12 March 2018) from the AIC:
Melinda Watt, Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles at the Art Institute of Chicago (Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
James Rondeau, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, announced today the appointment of Melinda Watt as the new Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles. Watt most recently served as Curator in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture (2016–18) and supervising curator for the Antonio Ratti Textile Center (2009–18) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she oversaw exhibitions, research, and collections management for over 16,000 Western European textiles and 500 fans and led one of the largest, most technically advanced facilities for the study and storage of textiles in any major art museum in the world. She helped define a comprehensive, inclusive strategy for the care and research of works from all of the world’s civilizations—archaeological fragments, tapestries, carpets, quilts, ecclesiastical vestments, silks, embroideries, laces, velvets, and more—from 3000 BC to the present.
Watt will now lead the Art Institute of Chicago’s internationally renowned Department of Textiles and oversee its extensive collection of more than 13,000 textiles and 66,000 sample swatches ranging from 300 BC to the present, with particular strengths in Pre-Columbian textiles, European vestments, tapestries, woven silks and velvets, printed fabrics, needlework, and lace. The department has also strong holdings in 16th- and 17th-century English needlework, printed and woven materials of the 18th and 19th centuries, American quilts and woven coverlets, Eastern textiles, and 20th-century fiber art.
In announcing this appointment, Rondeau said: “Melinda has an outstanding reputation as a talented curator, an expert researcher and respected scholar, and brilliant administrator and leader. I am thrilled for our museum and our visitors that she is joining us in this crucial position and will re-energize our ambitious efforts to grow and elevate the reputation of our renowned Textiles department and present innovative and dynamic exhibitions.”
Watt shared: “From the earliest days of my career, I have admired the supreme quality and breadth of the textile collection at the Art Institute, so it comes as a great honor to be asked to lead the Department of Textiles. This is truly a unique opportunity to augment the museum’s already stellar collection and to have an impact on the scholarly field at large.”
Watt began her tenure at The Met in 1994, in The Costume Institute as a Study Storage Assistant, and soon took on increasingly complex and leadership roles, culminating in her leadership of the Antonio Ratti Textile Center beginning in 2009 and a curatorial rise within the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts to become a full Curator in 2016. Her exhibitions at The Met include: The Secret Life of Textiles: The Milton Sonday Archive (2017–18), American and European Embroidered Samplers, 1600–1900 (with Amelia Peck, 2015–16), Elaborate Embroidery: Fabrics for Menswear before 1815 (2015), William Morris: Textiles and Wallpapers (with Connie McPhee and Alison Hokanson, 2014), Interwoven Globe: The International Textile Trade, 1500–1800, (co-curator with Amelia Peck et al., 2013–14), An ‘Industrial Museum’: John Forbes Watson’s Indian Textile Collection (2013–14), Renaissance Velvet: Textiles for the Nobility of Florence and Milan (2011–12), and European Textiles from the Collection of Friedrich Fischbach (2010).
Earlier in her career, Watt lectured and instructed at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, at New York University, and at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, NY. She has also lectured and published widely, from New York to Chicago and Copenhagen to Beijing, on subjects as diverse as Renaissance and Baroque luxury textiles, Anglo-Indian hangings, flora and fauna in English embroidery, Isabella Stewart Gardner’s pearls, mid-century American fashion, nature in western art, and dressing for 17th-century portraiture.
Watt earned her BFA, with a concentration in Art History, at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. She holds an MA in Costume Studies from New York University.
New Book | Die Fresken von Joseph Mages
Published by Schnell & Steiner and now available from Artbooks.com:
Angelika Dreyer, Die Fresken von Joseph Mages (1728–1769): Zwischen barocker Frömmigkeit und katholischer Aufklärung (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2017), 312 pages, ISBN: 9783795432560, 76€ / $95.
Josef Mages (1729–1769) setzte sich in seinen Freskenausstattungen richtungsweisend mit den Reformbestrebungen der katholischen Aufklärung auseinander. Seinen vom künstlerischen Umfeld der Augsburger Kunstakademie geprägten Deckenmalereien wird hier erstmals eine umfassende Studie gewidmet, die zugleich eine wesentliche Lücke in der Erforschung des süddeutschen Barocks schließt.
Neben einer exemplarischen Künstlersozialgeschichte stehen insbesondere die jeweiligen Auftraggeber sowie ihre vorwiegend religionspolitischen Ansichten und Absichten bei der Auftragsvergabe im Vordergrund der Untersuchung. Dabei nahm die vor allem im Bistum Augsburg wesentlich an Bedeutung gewinnende Auseinandersetzung über eine aufgeklärte Erneuerung der nachtridentinischen Frömmigkeitspraxis entscheidenden Einfluss auf die ikonographischen Inhalte und formale Gestaltung der Freskomalereien von Josef Mages. Im Gegensatz zu dem maßgeblich von Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) initiierten religiösen Wandel und seinen Auswirkungen auf die raumbestimmende Kirchenausstattung wurden die Deckengemälde in Altomünster bei Freising oder in Oberschönenfeld von den weit existenzielleren Sorgen der dortigen Konventualen geprägt. Diese können als frühe malerische Vorboten der vom katholischen Klerus mit sorgenvollem Blick verfolgten Entwicklung hin zur späteren Säkularisation gesehen werden.
Call for Papers | Collecting Dutch and Flemish Art in Germany
From H-ArtHist:
Collecting Dutch and Flemish Art in Germany, 1500–1900
Conference ANKK and RKD, Den Haag, 18–20 October 2018
Proposals due by 15 April 2018
Much of Dutch and Flemish Art was acquired by German collectors, so that today there are more of these artefacts in German collections than in those of other countries. The 2018 conference of the ANKK seeks to analyse the ways in which Netherlandish art was and is collected in the German speaking countries and how this influenced not only scholarship but also the art market.
The German organisation for the Study of Netherlandish Art and Culture [Arbeitskreis Niederländische Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte e.V.] will hold its decennial as an international conference in Den Haag in cooperation with the RKD from 18 to 20 October 2018. The RKD is currently investigating the cultural exchange between the Netherlands and Germany between 1500 and 1900 in its three-year project Gerson Digital: Germany. The basis of the project is the pioneering publication by Horst Gerson (1907–1978), Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Amsterdam 1983, ed. princ. Haarlem 1942), in which the circulation and imitation of Dutch paintings in Europe are processed by country.
Proposals for 20-minute papers could address—but are by no means limited to—the following topics:
• spaces of the art market for Netherlandish Art and the main art centres for the German speaking countries, public and private collections, and clerical institution
• prize formation mechanisms for Dutch and Flemish Art
• networks of artists, dealers and collectors (both private and institutional), as well as writers on art and other audiences
• new scientific methods and methodologies of research and their influence on scholarship or collecting
• ‘art agents’ and their changing roles
• the nature of collections (municipal or princely), their buildings, and shared knowledge spaces
• interdependences of primary and secondary art markets for Netherlandish art
We also aim to have one open session of lightning talks in which any future, present or past project or exhibition, unrelated to the above-mentioned panels, can be presented in exactly eight minutes. Please indicate in your abstract whether your proposal is meant for the lightning talks or the more traditional panel format. No matter which format you prefer, we also encourage junior researchers to send us their proposals. Please send an abstract of the proposed paper (maximum of 500 words) in German or English and a short curriculum vitae to both the RKD (leeuwen@rkd.nl) and the ANKK (bmuench@uni-bonn.de) by 15 April 2018.
Exhibition | Salazar: Portraits of Influence in Spanish New Orleans
Josef Salazar y Mendoza, Portrait of Don Antonio Mendez (1750–1829) and His Family, 1795, oil on canvas, 36 × 49 inches (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Patrick).
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Now on view at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art:
Salazar: Portraits of Influence in Spanish New Orleans, 1785–1802
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, 8 March — 2 September 2018
Curated by Cybele Gontar
In conjunction with the tricentennial celebration of New Orleans, Salazar: Portraits of Influence in Spanish New Orleans tells the story of Yucatán-born Josef Francisco Xavier de Salazar y Mendoza (ca. 1750–1802), whose career spanned most of the Spanish administration of New Orleans. The exhibition offers a view of Spanish colonial New Orleans through a re-examination of about 30 of Salazar’s portraits. His oeuvre is contextualized in relation to works and other historical artifacts reflective of the city as a site of mobility and transatlantic artistic exchange.
The catalogue is available from ArtBooks.com:
Cybele Gontar, ed., Salazar: Portraits of Influence in Spanish New Orleans, 1785–1802 (New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2018), 240 pages, ISBN: 9781608011544, $65.
The catalogue includes a comprehensive collection of Salazar’s portraits and essays that explore the historical and artistic implications of the era. The oeuvre of this Mexican artist is contextualized in relation to works by other early New Orleans portraitists including Antonio Meucci, Francois M. Guyol de Guiran (1775–1849), and Louis Collas (1775–1856).
Exhibition | New Orleans, the Founding Era
François Chéreau, Le Missisipi ou la Louisiane dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, ca. 1720, hand-colored engraving (The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1959.210).
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Now on view at THNOC:
New Orleans, the Founding Era
The Historic New Orleans Collection, 27 February — 27 May 2018
Curated by Erin Greenwald
In commemoration of the city’s 300th anniversary in 2018, The Historic New Orleans Collection provides a multifaceted exploration of the city’s first few decades and its earliest inhabitants with New Orleans, the Founding Era, an original exhibition and bilingual companion catalog. The exhibition brings together a vast array of rare artifacts from THNOC’s holdings and from institutions across Europe and North America to tell the stories of the city’s early days, when the city consisted of little more than hastily assembled huts and buildings.
Beginning with the region’s Native American tribes, through the waves of European arrival and the forced migration of enslaved African people, the exhibition reflects on the complicated and often conflicted meanings the settlement’s development held for individuals, empires, and indigenous nations. It features works on paper, ethnographic and archaeological artifacts, scientific and religious instruments, paintings, maps and charts, manuscripts and rare books. These original objects are complemented by large-scale reproductions and interactive items. More than 75 objects are on loan from organizations in Spain, France, Canada, and around the United States. A number of items, like a pair of 18th-century Native American bear-paw moccasins from the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and pieces of 15th-century Mississippian pottery from the University of Mississippi, have rarely traveled beyond their home institutions.
Digital interactives will include a gallery of photographs from archaeological digs at a variety of French Quarter sites, a game quizzing visitors on supplies needed for a new home in the settlement and a 1731 inventory of enslaved Africans and African-descended people living on a West Bank plantation.
Erin Greenwald, ed., New Orleans, the Founding Era / La Nouvelle-Orléans, les années fondatrices, translated by Henry Colomer (New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2018), 176 pages, ISBN 978-0917860744, $50.
The companion catalog—a bilingual edition, in English and French—will feature essays describing the different populations who inhabited precolonial New Orleans and the surrounding areas, as well as the forces driving the settlement’s growth. Essayists include exhibition curator Erin M. Greenwald and historians Emily Clark, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Robbie Ethridge, Gilles-Antoine Langlois, Yevan Terrien, Daniel Usner, and Cécile Vidal. Gérard Araud, ambassador of France to the United States, contributed the book’s foreword.
Erin M. Greenwald is curator of programs at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Formerly, as curator at The Historic New Orleans Collection, she was project director of the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded traveling exhibition Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865. Greenwald holds a PhD in history from the Ohio State University.
Henry Colomer is a French documentary filmmaker and translator. He has directed some thirty films, including various portraits of artists and writers (L’exilé, Iddu, Ricercar, Vies métalliques), as well as a number of documentaries about the upheavals of the twentieth century (Monte Verità, Sous les drapeaux). Colomer has won several awards (Best Historic Documentary, Festival of History Films, Pessac, 1998, 2008; Focal International Award, London, 2010).
New Book | Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany
From Cambridge UP:
Sarah Easterby-Smith, Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, 1760–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-1107126848, $99.
Sarah Easterby-Smith rewrites the histories of botany and horticulture from the perspectives of plant merchants who sold botanical specimens in the decades around 1800. These merchants were not professional botanists, nor were they the social equals of refined amateurs of botany. Nevertheless, they participated in Enlightenment scholarly networks, acting as intermediaries who communicated information and specimens. Thanks to their practical expertise, they also became sources of new knowledge in their own right. Cultivating Commerce argues that these merchants made essential contributions to botanical history, although their relatively humble status means that their contributions have received little sustained attention to date. Exploring how the expert nurseryman emerged as a new social figure in Britain and France, and examining what happened to the elitist, masculine culture of amateur botany when confronted by expanding public participation, Easterby-Smith sheds fresh light on the evolution of transnational Enlightenment networks during the Age of Revolutions.
C O N T E N T S
Figures
Maps
Acknowledgements
Note on the Text
Abbreviations
Introduction: Cultivating Commerce
1 Plant Traders and Expertise
2 Science, Commerce, and Culture
3 Amateur Botany
4 Social Status and the Communication of Knowledge
5 Commerce and Cosmopolitanism
6 Cosmopolitanism under Pressure
Conclusion: Commerce and Cultivation
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Shockingly Mad: Henry Fuseli
Henry Fuseli, The Discovery, 1767/69, pen and brown ink and brush and brown wash, over graphite with traces of opaque brown paint, on cream laid paper, tipped onto ivory laid paper, 53 × 66 cm (Art Institute of Chicago, 1956.33). From the AIC notes, “This powerful drawing—a bravura exercise in virtuoso line and tonal washes—illustrates a story from Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavater’s book De Spectris (On Ghosts), published in 1569. It describes a priest who, dressed in a sheet, haunts his wealthy niece who is living in his house, in an attempt to rape her and cheat her of her fortune. Terrified, the niece enlists the aid of a friend who exposes the repentant priest. The curious badminton match visible in the background—not in the story, but added by Fuseli as a critical commentary—is a reference to a proverb composed in Latin by the Dutch poet Jacob Cats (1577–1660): ‘Amor ut pila vices exiget’, ‘Love, like a ball, demands reciprocation’.”
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From the AIC:
Shockingly Mad: Henry Fuseli and the Art of Drawing
Art Institute of Chicago, 18 November 2017 — 1 April 2018
Curated by Kevin Salatino
A witness to political revolutions and radical aesthetic shifts, Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) forged a pictorial sensibility of his own, characterized by anatomical, gestural, and psychological extremes. Bizarre, exaggerated, theatrical, and often melodramatic, his drawings embraced obscure literary and historical subjects intended to elicit profound emotional response.
Fuseli was born in Switzerland but traveled to Germany and Italy early in his career, eventually settling in London, where he played a prominent role in the newly established Royal Academy. While he worked in various media, Fuseli excelled at drawing. This medium was central to his practice, evidenced by the extraordinary number of drawings he made—ranging from quick sketches to watercolors that often exceeded the ambitions of his oil paintings.
The Art Institute is home to a remarkably rich collection of Fuseli’s surviving works, including large-scale drawings; smaller, less-finished sketches; and significant paintings and prints. Shockingly Mad: Henry Fuseli and the Art of Drawing considers drawing as an expressive means unto itself, paralleling the broader arc of Fuseli’s career as writer, painter, critic, and teacher. As comparisons to the work of his contemporaries reveal, Fuseli can be said to have forged a radical new drawing style. With roots in Classical antiquity and Renaissance Italy, Fuseli’s passionate, unrestrained approach reflects the revolutionary spirit of his age, which was marked by social and political upheaval. The Art Institute’s holdings are complemented by a number of important local, national, and international loans, and the exhibition itself is accompanied by the adjacent installation Gods and (Super)heroes: Drawing in an Age of Revolution—a selection of drawings by Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, and others that further contextualizes Fuseli as a draftsman.
Lecture Series | Thinking about Exhibitions
This spring’s public lecture course at the Mellon Centre:
Thinking about Exhibitions: Interpretation, Reconstruction, and Curation
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, Thursdays, 8 March — 12 April 2018 (excluding 29 March)
This five-part lecture course explores an exciting behind-the-scenes look at the research, writing, borrowing, design, and installation processes involved in putting on a major exhibition. Thinking about Exhibitions will use as case studies exhibitions held at major institutions around the world. Viewers can watch the lectures live on our Livestream page. Videos of the lectures will then be made available on our website 24 hours after the lecture.
8 March 2018
Mark Hallett | Looking Back: Three Eighteenth-Century Exhibitions
15 March 2018
Mark Hallett and Christine Riding | Looking Back: Hogarth, 2006–07 (Paris: Musée du Louvre; London: Tate Britain; and Barcelona: Caixa Forum)
22 March 2018
Mark Hallett and Sarah Victoria Turner | Looking Forward: The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, 2018 (London: Royal Academy)
5 April 2018
Mark Hallett and George Shaw | Looking Forward: George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field, 2018–19 (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art; and Bath: Holburne Museum)
12 April 2018
Looking Back: Curating and Scholarship
The syllabus is available here»
Week One features our Director of Studies, Mark Hallett, discussing the history of exhibitions in Britain and reconstructs three eighteenth-century exhibitions.
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