Enfilade

On view this summer at the Shelburne Museum:

Rich and Tasty: Vermont Furniture to 1850
Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, 25 July — 1 November 2015

Stand, attributed to Lemuel Bishop, Charlotte, Vermont, ca. 1815. Cherry, birch, mahogany, basswood and brass, 28 x 18 x 15 inches. Private Collection

This exhibition and accompanying catalogue will introduce and identify Vermont high style furniture, previously known only to decorative arts scholars, historians, and collectors. The project arrives twenty years after Shelburne Museum published a seminal checklist of early Vermont Furniture and is the result of two decades of scholarship. The exhibition will feature pieces that will illuminate the craft practices and regional economics that help define Vermont furniture’s stylistic features and unexpected aesthetic innovations, referred to as “rich and tasty” by one Vermont cabinetmaker.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Jean M. Burks and Philip Zea, eds., Rich and Tasty: Vermont Furniture to 1850 (Shelburne, Vermont: Shelburne Museum, 2015), 180 pages, ISBN: 978-0939384112, $30.

Two landmark 1995 publications, The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture 1765–1850 and Vermont Cabinetmakers & Chairmakers Before 1855: A Checklist, reintroduced Vermont high style furniture to decorative arts scholars, historians, and collectors. Equipped with this seminal knowledge, a small cadre of Vermont connoisseurs started scouring country auctions, adding signed and well-documented pieces to their private collections. Twenty years later, it is time to bring these pieces together and share them with the public. This catalog and the accompanying exhibition advances the understanding of Vermont high style furniture—from its features, craftsmanship, and economics, to its unexpected aesthetic innovations. The authors identify key eighteenth-century Vermont pieces before covering a variety of topics, including clockmaking, chairmaking, the half sideboard, furniture from Woodstock, and furniture from Vermont factories. Seventy-five full-color photographs by acclaimed Boston photographer David Bohl and extended catalog entries display furniture from all over the Green Mountain State.

Scenes of Traders in Nagasaki, mid-eighteenth century, detail from a pair of hand scrolls, opaque watercolour, ink and gold on paper, box, wood, paper and ink, each 313 x 35 cm (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide)

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Press release (April 2015) from the Art Gallery of South Australia:

Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 13 June — 30 August 2015
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 10 October 2015 — 31 January 2016

Curated by James Bennett and Russell Kelty

Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices is the first exhibition on view in Australia to present the complex artistic and cultural interaction between Europe and Asia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries—a period known as the Age of Spices. The exhibition includes 300 outstanding and rarely seen works of ceramics, decorative arts, furniture, metalware, paintings, prints, engravings and textiles from both public and private collections in Australia, India, Portugal, Singapore and the United States.

Nick Mitzevich, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia sees this landmark exhibition and its publication as highlighting the Gallery’s international reputation for presenting spectacular exhibitions of historical Asian and European art. Treasure Ships showcases a diverse collection of luxury objects, many of which have never previously been seen on public display in Australia. This has been made possible through the extensive cooperation and support the Gallery has received from institutions, collectors and scholars in Portugal, India, Singapore, Indonesia and the United States, as well as the partnership with the Art Gallery of Western Australia. The Gallery’s two curators James Bennett and Russell Kelty have worked researching the exhibition for over three years, and their professional commitment has ensured the success of this much-anticipated exhibition.

China and Europe–Japan, Surcoat (jinbaori), with mon, late 18th century with 19th-century repairs, brocade created in China, velvet and factory print created in Europe, possibly France, garment constructed in Japan, cotton, wool, silk, velvet, metallic thread, natural dyes, supplementary weft and plain weave, wood, 101 x 85 cm (Helen Bowden Gift Fund 2015, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide)

The works of art selected reveal how the international trade in spices and other exotic commodities inspired dialogue between Asian and European artists, a centuries old conversation whose heritage is the aesthetic globalism we know today. Europe’s infatuation with pepper, nutmeg and cloves has often been explained in terms of the necessity to preserve cooked foods in the days before the invention of refrigeration. “This is a half-truth, which takes little account of the complex reasons the condiments of luxury and status were so avidly sought, often at great expense to human lives,” said Bennett.

The exhibition commences with the small country of Portugal. Located on the periphery of Europe, Portugal re-mapped the West’s view of the world and created a mercantile spice empire stretching halfway around the globe during the fifteenth-sixteenth century. In 1498 Vasco Da Gama’s small fleet became the first to reach India, landing with the famous words, ‘we come in search of Christians and spices’. Within a decade, the Portuguese soldier—aristocrat Francisco de Almeida (1450–1510) had ruthlessly seized control of the Indian Ocean spice trade and established Portugal’s permanent presence in Asia that lasted four hundred years.

Treasure Ships also presents the story of the slave trade, piracy and shipwrecks, as well as illustrating the astonishing beauty of Chinese porcelain, known as ‘white gold’, and celebrating the vibrant Indian textiles created for export around the world. There are several highlights in this exhibition including two works from the personal collection of Queen Adelaide (1792–1849), after whom the city of Adelaide was named in 1836: artefacts retrieved from the Batavia, which sank off the Western Australian coast in the seventeenth century, and a magnificent early 19th-century Chinese punchbowl depicting Sydney Cove that locates Australia within this global history.

It is most appropriate that this exhibition should originate in Adelaide as this is the only Australian city founded on the vision of a Eurasian—the surveyor Colonel William Light (1786–1839) whose Mother was of Malaysian descent and whose remarkable self-portrait features in the exhibition said James Bennett.

Treasure Ships also examines the impact of the Age of Spices on the ‘discovery’ of the Australian continent and the commencement of English occupation in 1788. The colonial art of the period displays the aesthetic reverberations that continued in the Australasian region long after European ships had ceased carrying cargoes of nutmeg and cloves.

James Bennett and Russell Kelty, Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2015), ISBN: 978-1921668227, $70.

William Hogarth, After (detail), 1736, etching and engraving, 41 x 33 cm
(Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main)

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Press release for the exhibition now on view at the Städel Museum:

Vices of Life: The Prints of William Hogarth
Laster des Lebens: Druckgrafik von William Hogarth
Frankfurt’s Städel Museum, Frankfurt, 10 June — 6 September 2015
Schloss Neuhardenberg, Brandenburg, TBA

Curated by Annett Gerlach

From 10 June to 6 September 2015—in its bicentennial year ‘200 Years Städel’—Frankfurt’s Städel Museum will be presenting prints by the English painter, engraver and etcher William Hogarth (1697‒1764). Altogether seventy works including the famous printmaking series A Harlot’s Progress (1732), A Rake’s Progress (1735) and Marriage à la Mode (1745) will be on view in the exhibition hall of the Department of Prints and Drawings. These visual novels from the Städel holdings take the fashions, vices and downsides of modern life in the London metropolis as their themes. Hogarth conceived of his artworks as printed theatre of his times and with them he laid the cornerstone for socio-critical caricature in England. The prints owe their special quality to the keen powers of perception and caustic humour of an artist who contributed so greatly to shaping the image of his era that it is still referred to as ‘Hogarth’s England’ today. Executed during Johann Friedrich Städel’s lifetime, the engravings are among the Städel’s oldest holdings and mirror the critical spirit inherent to this institution since its founding.

William Hogarth was born in London in 1697. In keeping with an early eighteenth-century fashion, his father Richard opened a coffee house at which only Latin was spoken. The business failed, and Richard Hogarth had to serve five years in London’s notorious Fleet Prison for failure to pay his debts. As was usual at the time, his wife and children had to accompany him. In 1713, after his father’s release, William Hogarth began an apprenticeship as a silver engraver where he also learned the rudiments of the complex techniques of intaglio printing—engraving and etching. Following his seven-year training, he went into business for himself as an engraver and attended the privately run St Martin’s Lane Academy, an art school in London, to acquire the art of painting. In 1724 he also became a member of the academy of royal court painter James Thornhill (1675‒1734), whose daughter Jane he married in 1729. It was not with his paintings, however, that Hogarth achieved a breakthrough with the public, but with the prints made after his works on canvas. With the series A Harlot’s Progress, produced in the early 1730s, he founded a new genre he later dubbed modern moral subjects. Hogarth conceived of these subjects as contemporary, moral-didactic history scenes. He thus took a stand against the hierarchization of the visual arts, a firmly entrenched principle of academy doctrine which granted classical history painting pride of place. With his printmaking works, he succeeded in creating a new, up-to-date genre based on the keen observation of reality. In 1755 Hogarth was elected to the Royal Society of Arts, which he quit again just two years later on account of artistic and personal differences. His appointment as royal court painter followed in 1757, but never led to any commissions. The final years of the artist’s life were overshadowed by bitter disputes between himself and his critics. A stroke in 1763 left Hogarth severely handicapped and he died the following year in his home in Leicester Fields, a district of London.

The presentation in the exhibition gallery of the Department of Prints and Drawings focuses primarily on those of William Hogarth’s printmaking series that earned him international fame: A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress und Marriage à la Mode. There is a very simple reason for the fact that his works on paper secured him a place in art history: prints can be circulated far better than paintings. It was by these means that the artist reached the enlightened and educated public of his day in large numbers. Already the first edition of A Harlot’s Progress (1732) comprised 1,240 sold copies. In six episodes, this series describes the rise and fall of a young woman who has come from the country to the city to find work. To earn a living she ends up as a prostitute and lands in prison as a result. The final scene shows the wretched funeral of the protagonist, whose life has already come to an end at the age of twenty-three. Hogarth had numerous real and literary models to look to for his creation of this figure. Inspired by his great interest in the social characterization of his time, he directed his critical, ironical gaze to all strata of society, from the highest nobility to the most abject circumstances. The sick and needy of all generations formed the downside of the economic boom enjoyed by the colonial and commercial metropolis and its many profiteers.

In his second series, A Rake’s Progress (1735), consisting of eight prints, Hogarth tells the story of the social decline of Tom Rakewell, who brainlessly squanders his inheritance and is thrown first into debtors’ prison and then the madhouse. Rakewell’s incarceration on grounds of indebtedness is reminiscent of the artist’s own biography. Entirely unlike his father, however, William Hogarth was an excellent businessman and very clever at taking advantage of the London press—which was flourishing in his day—and its public impact for his own purposes. In newspapers such as the London Daily Post, the General Advertiser or the London Journal he published announcements of his prints and advertised them for subscription.

Hogarth borrowed the title of his third major series, published in 1745, from a comedy by John Dryden (1631‒1700). Marriage à la Mode is about an espousal arranged by the two spouses’ fathers. Neither the bride nor the groom is the least bit interested in the other, both amuse themselves on the side, and the situation comes to a dramatic conclusion. Hogarth’s protagonists feign innocence and practise deception, abandon themselves to their passions and founder on their false ideals. Looking to true stories for orientation and integrating well-known persons and recognizable sites, he warned his public of the dangers of modern life—dangers still very real today. In 1751, with his popular prints Beer Street and Gin Lane, he supported a public campaign against the excessive consumption of gin. The former scene presents the enjoyment of beer as healthy and beneficial in contrast to the destructive effects of gin portrayed in the latter.

From mid century onward, in addition to socio-critical themes Hogarth also devoted himself to matters of national and political relevance, which represent a further focus of the exhibition. In several works, the artist addressed the relationship between France and England, which were at war. The Gate of Calais (1748) was his response to his arrest on suspicion of espionage during one of his trips to France. In 1756, in The Invasion, he again caricatured the French as grotesque, haggard figures who are after the tasty beer and luscious roast beef of the English. Some fifteen years later, in the print The Times, Plate 1 (1762), Hogarth made an urgent appeal for the cessation of the Seven Years’ War.

In 1753, Hogarth published his own art-theoretical deliberations in the book The Analysis of Beauty. In it he concerned himself with the foundations of visual-artistic production and particularly the matter of how to achieve beauty and grace. Hogarth considered the study of nature to be the key to beauty. He called upon his readers to perceive the objects of nature with their own eyes and judge them according to rational criteria. The German writer Christlob Mylius (1722–1754) was in London when Hogarth’s Analysis came out, and he translated it into German the very next year. Johann Friedrich Städel had a copy of this translation in his library, and it will be on display in the show.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Städel Museum is publishing a catalogue by Annett Gerlach with approximately 50 pages, 10€. Following its presentation at the Städel Museum, the show will be on view at Neuhardenberg Castle. The exhibition is being sponsored by the Hessische Kulturstiftung.

Installation view of the exhibition Vices of Life: The Prints of William Hogarth at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum (June 2015)