Historians of Netherlandish Art Fellowships, 2016–17
From HNA:
Historians of Netherlandish Art Fellowships, 2016–17
Applications due by 14 December 2015
We urge members of Historians of Netherlandish Art to apply for the 2016–17 Fellowship. Scholars of any nationality who have been HNA members in good standing for at least two years are eligible to apply. The topic of the research project must be within the field of Northern European art ca. 1400–1800. Up to $2,000 may be requested for purposes such as travel to collections or research facilities, purchase of photographs or reproduction rights, or subvention of a publication. Preference will be given to projects nearing completion (such as books under contract). Winners will be notified in February 2016, with funds to be distributed by April. The application should consist of: 1) a short description of project (1–2 pp), 2) budget, 3) list of further funds applied/received for the same project, and 4) current cv. A selection from a recent publication may be included but is not required. Pre-dissertation applicants must include a letter of recommendation from their advisor.
Applications should be sent, preferably via e-mail, by December 14, 2015, to Paul Crenshaw, Vice-President, Historians of Netherlandish Art. E-mail: paul.crenshaw@providence.edu; Postal address: Providence College, 1 Cummingham Square, Providence RI 02918-0001.
New Book | The Frick Collection: Decorative Arts Handbook
Press release (10 June 2015) from The Frick:
Charlotte Vignon, The Frick Collection: Decorative Arts Handbook (New York: The Frick Collection in association with Scala Arts Publishers, 2015), 172 pages, ISBN: 978-1857599398 $25.
The unique atmosphere of The Frick Collection has as much to do with the decorative arts as with the old master paintings that line the museum’s walls. Indeed the enamels, clocks and watches, furniture, gilt bronzes, porcelain, ceramics, silver, and textiles far exceed in number, and are the equal in quality, of the works on canvas and panel. The institution announces the publication of the first handbook devoted to the decorative arts in the collection. This long overdue book will help convey the balance among the various art forms represented in the house and provide a valuable introduction to this area. Comments Director Ian Wardropper, “Despite the manifest importance of decorative arts at the Frick, until recently our small staff did not include a specialist in the field. Thanks to an endowment campaign and the generosity of a number of supporters a permanent curatorial position was created in September 2009. With energy and imagination, the first incumbent of this curatorship, Charlotte Vignon, has initiated a series of exhibitions that highlight this aspect of the collection. The present handbook is another indication of her scholarly dedication to the decorative arts.”
The Frick Collection: Decorative Arts Handbook offers fresh insight on various works long in the museum’s holdings and also includes commentary on more recently acquired examples. Exquisitely illustrated with new photography, this paperback volume is available in English and French editions.
Henry Clay Frick: Developing a Decorative Arts Collection
Acquiring paintings preoccupied Henry Clay Frick when he moved to New York in the first years of the twentieth century. While renting William H. Vanderbilt’s mansion at Fifth Avenue and 51st Street, he devoted his attention to collecting masterpieces by Rembrandt, Velázquez, and other masters. As the sumptuous house he constructed at 70th Street took shape between 1912 and 1914, he recognized the need for furnishings of a caliber that matched his painting collection. Interestingly, most of his purchases in this area were made just before or after he began to occupy the house and in a very concentrated period of time.
A trip to London and Paris in the spring of 1914 inspired many of the choices Frick would make for his New York mansion. After meeting Victor Cavendish, the ninth Duke of Devonshire, at Landsdowne House in London and his country house at Chatsworth, Frick acquired from him a suite of tapestry furniture thought to be eighteenth-century Gobelins. Impressed by the Wallace Collection and wishing to emulate it, he set out to acquire high-quality decorative arts of different periods and materials, especially porcelain, oriental carpets, and French Renaissance enamels and furniture, such as pieces made by André-Charles Boulle, with their distinctive turtle-shell and brass veneers. In Paris, through the intermediary of the American decorator Elsie de Wolfe, he purchased French furniture from the collection of Sir John Murray Scott (inherited from Lady Wallace, the widow of the founder of the Wallace Collection). In a single month, he spent more than $400,000, more than he had ever spent on collecting in this field.
In some cases, furniture and decorative arts were assembled to complement specific rooms of the house. Elsie de Wolf, for example, counseled the acquisition of a desk by the great French eighteenth-century cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener together with Sèvres porcelain for Adelaide Frick’s second-floor dressing room, which was lined with wall panels painted by François Boucher’s workshop. The room and its furnishings were transferred to the first floor in 1935. Other great eighteenth-century French furnishings for Adelaide’s dressing room came through Joseph Duveen, then the head of Duveen Brothers. After Fragonard’s cycle of paintings was installed in the drawing room in 1915–16, Duveen sold Frick many more works to embellish its decor. French Renaissance furniture was bought to complement the collection of sixteenth-century enamels acquired in 1916; Henry’s office was transformed into a gallery for its display. The Italian Renaissance cassoni were always intended to be placed beneath masterpieces of painting in the West Gallery or elsewhere.
Carefully selected blocs of decorative arts, such as the forty-six pieces of Limoges enamel Frick acquired through Duveen from the estate of J. Pierpont Morgan, were one means by which the collection grew quickly. Morgan’s death in 1913 gave Frick the opportunity to choose from one of the finest and largest collections in the world just when he was seeking to expand in this area. Another example was the group of fifty Chinese porcelain jars and vases that Duveen had also acquired from Morgan’s estate. Apart from the windfall of the availability of the Morgan collection, Duveen’s own stock was so extensive and of such quality that Frick could buy from him French royal commissions, such as Gilles Joubert’s chest of drawers, which was among some twenty-five pieces of furniture that arrived at Fifth Avenue and 70th Street during the year 1915.
Later Acquisitions
Generous gifts from members of the Frick family and other donors have continued to enrich the decorative arts collection. The founder’s son, Childs, gave about two hundred pieces of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain in 1965, considerably augmenting those works his father had purchased fifty years earlier. In 1999, Winthrop Kellogg Edey’s extraordinary collection of some forty clocks and watches arrived at the Frick. Henry Arnhold has recently given us the Great Bustard from his distinguished and comprehensive collection of Meissen porcelain, and another one hundred and thirty-five works are pledged to the Frick as a bequest. Individual objects of great merit are prized additions to our holdings. Diane Modestini gave us our first piece of Italian majolica in honor of her husband Mario Modestini in 2008. On occasion, acquisitions are also made, such as the unusual vase japon, purchased in 2011.
Exhibition | Jean-Étienne Liotard: A Cosmopolitan Artist
Press release (12 November 2015) from the Getty:
Jean-Étienne Liotard: A Cosmopolitan Artist
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 20 October 2015 — 24 April 2016
Curated by Ketty Gottardo
Jean-Étienne Liotard, Portrait of Maria Frederike van Reede-Athlone at Seven Years of Age, 1755–56, pastel on vellum, 54.9 x 44.8 cm (Los Angeles: Getty Museum)
Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) excelled at the delicate art of pastel. His finest portraits display an astonishing realism achieved through intense observation and remarkable technical skill and feature royalty, aristocrats, and the bourgeoisie. Jean-Étienne Liotard: A Cosmopolitan Artist, comprised of pastels and drawings from the Getty Museum’s collection and two spectacular loans from a private collection, is now open and continues through April 24, 2016, at the Getty Center.
“For most of his very long career, Liotard worked as an itinerant portraitist,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The works of art in this room testify to the artist’s numerous travels and fame as well as to his astonishing facility in the medium of pastel.”
The remarkable success of pastel in the eighteenth century was due to the high demand for portraits from the nobility and bourgeoisie. The ease and swiftness with which pastel could be used allowed for much shorter sittings that pleased artists and sitters alike. Unlike oil painting, pastel does not need to dry, so drawings could be executed quickly, with changes and corrections easily made. The Portrait of Lord Mountstuart features a young English aristocrat whom Liotard encountered during a brief stay in Geneva in the midst of his Grand Tour to Italy; Mademoiselle Jacquet was a famous singer at the Paris Opera; Jean Tronchin was among Liotard’s cultivated Swiss patrons; and the magnificent Portrait of Baroness Maria Frederike, one of the Getty’s most-beloved treasures, is probably the most famous portrait he executed in Holland.
In his Treatise on Painting (1781), Liotard recommended the use of nine tones—four light, four dark, and one medium—to build up pastel images. Colors were blended with brushes, fingers, a stump, or even his own long beard. Liotard preferred to use vellum—made from calf skin—for his support, which imitated the texture of skin in portraits. “The delicate tone of skin seen in Liotard’s Portrait of Jean Tronchin (1759) is remarkable. Liotard used the texture of the vellum, along with a fine sfumato effect, to define his rich, fleshy, and aged face,” says Ketty Gottardo, associate curator of drawings and curator of the installation.
Liotard innovated a drawing technique that reinforced his compositions with large areas of tone applied to the verso (back), which would create glowing, translucent effects on the recto (front). After drawing the basic outlines of a composition, Liotard would turn over the sheet of paper and hold it against a window or source of light in order to trace it onto the verso with a thin stick of black chalk. Then he would fill in entire areas of the verso with watercolor, chalk, or pastel which served to enhance the colors on the front.
Additional information is available at Iris: The Online Magazine of the Getty.
Exhibition | Art of the Fold: Drawings of Drapery and Costume
Press release (2 September 2015) for the exhibition now on view at the Getty:
Art of the Fold: Drawings of Drapery and Costume
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 6 October 2015 — 10 January 2016
Curated by Stephanie Schrader
Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle, The Duchess of Chaulnes as a Gardener in an Allée, 1771, watercolor and gouache over black and red chalk (The J. Paul Getty Museum)
Drawn from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s renowned permanent collection, Art of the Fold: Drawings of Drapery and Costume explores how artists harnessed the expressive potential of cloth to convey meaning.
“From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the convincing depiction of voluminous folds of fabric was a standard part of artistic training and practice,” explains Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Focusing on the relationship between the body and clothing, artists of this period exploited drapery and costume to enhance the depiction of a figure’s emotional state and place in society. The drawings in this exhibition demonstrate the many ways in which artists employed drapery to evoke moods, shape identities, and tell stories.”
In Standing Female Saint (about 1450), from the Circle of Martin Schongauer, the abstract pattern of drapery folds generates an agitated sense of motion. Rather than outlining the body beneath it, the flowing tunic accentuates an emotional fervor typical of German fifteenth-century devotional imagery.
Drapery also played a crucial part in artists’ characterization of the human figure. In Hans Brosamer’s Study of a Pleated Skirt and Study of a Hanging Drapery (about 1500) the artist accurately depicts the tonal variations and ranges of light and shade created by folded fabric, capturing the natural flow of cloth with a refined linear quality and variegated hatchings. By isolating drapery from a human form, while at the same time making it anthropomorphic, the artist celebrates drapery as an independent subject.
In drawings of soldiers, peasants, nobles, and foreigners, clothing served as a primary indicator of social standing and class. In Jacob Jordaens’ Man Kneeling, Facing Right (about 1630) the artist applied opaque watercolor in thick layers creating angular, broken folds that animate the pose and heighten the sense of piety. Often a figure’s clothing indicates status or rank in the social hierarchy, and the flamboyant uniforms of the mercenary soldiers and the elegant attire of the upper classes convey their status.
In their depictions of costume, artists often departed from strict naturalism and relied upon their vivid imaginations. “Drawings of foreigners suggest how dress is embellished and exoticized, whereas theatrical costumes further illustrate how clothing can mask the identities of individuals represented,” says Stephanie Schrader, curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, who organized the exhibition.
A checklist of the 38 works on view is available as a PDF file here.
Exhibition | The Luxury of Time: European Clocks and Watches
From The Met:
The Luxury of Time: European Clocks and Watches
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 16 November 2015 — 27 March 2016
Clockmaker: Ferdinand Berthoud (French, 1727–1807); Case maker: Balthazar Lieutaud (French, ca. 1720–1780, master 1749). Longcase astronomical regulator (detail), ca. 1768–70. Case: oak veneered with ebony and brass, with gilt-bronze mounts; Dial: white enamel; Movement: gilded brass and steel; Height: 90.5 in. (229.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (1982.60.50).
Time is all around us, displayed on our phones and computers. Today, almost nobody needs to own a watch or a clock to tell the time. Access to the right time is not the luxury it once was. Yet the fascination with clocks and watches persists, and the thriving market for mechanical timekeepers is deeply aware of their history. Clocks and watches have always been about more than just telling time: they have been treasured as objects of desire and wonder, personal items imbued with value that goes beyond pure functionality. As works of art, they represent the marriage of innovation and craftsmanship.
This exhibition explores the relationship between the artistry of the exterior form of European timekeepers and the brilliantly conceived technology that they contain. Drawn from the Museum’s distinguished collection of German, French, English, and Swiss horology from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, the extraordinary objects on view show how clocks and watches were made into lavish furniture or exquisite jewelry.
The creation of timekeepers required that clockmakers work with cabinetmakers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, enamelers, chasers and gilders, engravers, and even those working in sculpture and porcelain. These craftsmen were tasked with accommodating internal mechanisms by producing cases that, in both shape and function, adapted to timekeeping technologies. Their exteriors are often as complicated as the movements they house. Examining the dialogue between inside and out, adornment and ingenuity, The Luxury of Time
reveals the complex evolution of European clockmaking and
the central place of timekeepers in the history of decorative arts.
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The catalogue is scheduled for publication in February. From Yale UP:
Clare Vincent and Jan Hendrik Leopold, with Elizabeth Sullivan, European Clocks and Watches in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2016), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1588395795, $65.
Among the world’s great technological and imaginative achievements is the invention and development of the timepiece. Examining for the first time the Metropolitan Museum’s unparalleled collection of European clocks and watches created from the early middle ages through the 19th century, this fascinating book enriches our understanding of the origins and evolution of these ingenious works. It showcases 54 extraordinary clocks, watches, and other timekeeping devices, each represented with an in-depth description and new photography showing the exterior as well as the inner mechanisms. Included are an ornate celestial timepiece that accurately predicts the trajectory of the sun, moon, and stars and a longcase clock by David Roentgen that shows the time in the ten most important cities of the day. These works, created by clockmakers, scientists, and artists in England, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, have been selected for their artistic beauty and design excellence, as well as for their sophisticated and awe-inspiring mechanics. Built upon decades of expert research, this publication is a long-overdue survey of these stunning visual and technological marvels.
Clare Vincent is associate curator, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. J. H. Leopold was former assistant keeper in charge of the horological collections at The British Museum. Elizabeth Sullivan is research associate, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
New Book | How to Read Chinese Ceramics
Published by The Met and distributed by Yale UP:
Denise Patry Leidy, How to Read Chinese Ceramics (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1588395719, $25.
Chinese ceramics are among the most significant and widely collected decorative arts produced anywhere in the world, with a history that spans millennia. Despite the saturation of Chinese ceramics in global culture—in English, the word ‘china’ has become synonymous with ‘porcelain’—the function of these works and the meaning of their often richly decorated surfaces are not always readily apparent.
This new installment in the successful How to Read series enlightens readers on Chinese ceramics of all kinds, using highlights from the outstanding collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art as a teaching tool. Accessible to a general audience and written by an expert on the subject, this book explains and interprets 40 masterworks of Chinese ceramics. The works represent a broad range of subject matter and type, from ancient earthenware to 20th-century porcelain, and from plates and bowls to vases and sculptural figures. Lavish illustrations showcase these stunning works and the decorations that adorn them, including symbolic scenes, flowers, and Buddhist and Chinese historical figures.
Denise Patry Leidy is curator in the Department of Asian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
An interview with Leidy is available here»
Exhibition | Chinese Lacquer: Treasures from the Irving Collection
清乾隆 剔彩玉玦形漆盒 / Box in the Shape of an Archaic Jade Jue, Qianlong period (1736–95), carved red and green lacquer; 3.2 x 9.2 x 13 cm (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.500.1.9a, b).
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Now on view at The Met:
Chinese Lacquer: Treasures from the Irving Collection, 12th–18th Century
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 15 August 2015 — 19 June 2016
Lacquer, the resin of a family of trees found throughout southern China—as well as in Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan—is an amazing material. When exposed to oxygen and humidity, lacquer hardens or polymerizes, becoming a natural plastic and an ideal protective covering for screens, trays, and other implements. Mixed with pigments, particularly cinnabar (red) and carbon (black), lacquer has been also used as an artistic media for millennia.
This installation, which features all of the most important examples of Chinese lacquer in the Museum’s collection, explores the laborious techniques used to create scenes based on history and literature, images of popular gods and mythical and real animals, and representations of landscapes and flowers and birds.
Exhibition | Chinese Textiles: Ten Centuries of Masterpieces
清中期 納紗繡戯服男帔 / Theatrical Robe for a Male Role, second half of the 18th century, silk florentine stitch embroidery on silk gauze, 140.7 x 226.7 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.30.10).
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Now on view at The Met:
Chinese Textiles: Ten Centuries of Masterpieces from the Met Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, London, 15 August 2015 — 19 June 2016
This installation, which explores the cultural importance of silk in China, showcases the most important and unusual textiles from the Museum’s collection. In addition to three rare pieces dating from the Tang dynasty (618–906), when China served as a cultural hub linking Korea and Japan to Central and West Asia, and ultimately to the Mediterranean world, the exhibition also includes eleventh- and twelfth-century tapestries from Central Asia, as well as contemporaneous Chinese examples of this technique.
Spectacular embroideries—including an imperial fourteenth-century canopy decorated with phoenixes and flowers, and a monumental late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century panel showing phoenixes in a garden—are also on view, together with theatrical garments, court costumes, and early examples of badges worn at court to designate rank.
Exhibition | Supernatural Shakespeare
Marking the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, Shakespeare 400 promises “a year of celebrations” in 2016, not only in the UK but around the world. The AIC will be among those participating:
Supernatural Shakespeare
Art Institute of Chicago, 11 April — 10 October 2016
Moses Haughton II, after Henry Fuseli, The Nursery of Shakespeare, 1810 (Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Chalkley Hambleton)
The title characters of William Shakespeare’s plays might get the most name recognition, but the Bard’s meddling witches and mischievous faerie folk often steal the scenes and have rightly become some of his most memorable characters. This focused Shakespeare 400 installation features three atmospheric engravings of fantastical Shakespearian scenes by various artists emulating works by the renowned Gothic artist Henri Fuseli (1741–1825). Fuseli himself favored heroic subjects taken from Shakespeare along with other celebrated writers including Dante Alighieri and John Milton. Fuseli’s theatrical paintings hang in the nearby gallery: his macabre Head of a Damned Soul from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ (1770/78) and his mystical Milton Dictating to His Daughter (1794) among them.
The selections for the intimate Supernatural Shakespeare presentation copy several paintings Fuseli created for the 1790s Boydell Shakespeare Gallery in London, one of the catalysts for the Romantic revival of Shakespeare in the early 1800s. The Nursery of Shakespeare (1810) depicts the baby Bard already beset by host of phantasmal inspirations. The Witches Appear to Macbeth and Banquo (1798) portrays the three sorceresses getting ready to triple the antihero’s toil and trouble, while Titania and Bottom with Ass’s Head (1796) features the enchanted odd couple carousing in their sylvan bower.
On May 1, these fantastical characters and prints are joined by song as musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play selections from Felix Mendelssohn’s beloved A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Art Institute’s Fullerton Hall.
New Book | Venetian Painting Matters, 1450–1750
Forthcoming from Brepols:
Jodi Cranston, ed., Venetian Painting Matters, 1450–1750 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 200 pages, ISBN: 9782503535265, $115.
This book brings together essays about painting in Venice during three centuries of remarkable artistic production, influence, and exchange. The chronological scope of the anthology reflects the crucial interrelationship between the life of the arts and the republic, but also indicates the longevity of the distinctive, but not in the least isolated, mode of making and looking that engaged painters and viewers both inside and outside of Venice. The focused themes that emerge in the essays—the artist’s self-perception, the role of innovation and tradition in formal and material aspects of pictorial composition, the artistic exchange between Venice and other cities, both east and west, and the unique political and social pressures on artistic production and reception—reflect the Venetian engagement with many of the central concerns that preoccupied early modern artists. The dialogue established between Venetian art and society underpins all of the essays in the anthology; however, their critical focus remains on the formal, stylistic, and structural aspects of the pictures and how these visual mechanisms express meaning and shape viewer response.
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