The Burlington Magazine, April 2015
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 157 (April 2015)
A R T I C L E S
• Marie-Anne Dupuy-Vachey, “Fragonard’s ‘Fantasy Figures’: Prelude to a New Understanding,” pp. 241–47.
• Yuriko Jackall, John K. Delaney, and Michael Swicklik, “Portrait of a Woman with a Book: A Newly Discovered ‘Fantasy Figure’ by Fragonard at the National Gallery of Art, Washington,” pp. 248–54.
R E V I E W S
• Richard Wrigley, “Reassessing François-André Vincent,” — Review of recent exhibitions of Vincent’s work at Montpellier, Tours, and Paris and two books: Jean-Pierre Cuzin, François-André Vincent, 1746–1816: Un Peintre entre Fragonard et David (Arthéna, 2013) and Elizabeth Mansfield, The Perfect Foil: François-André Vincent and the Revolution in French Painting (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), pp. 265–68.
• François Marandet, Review of Christian Michel, L’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Librairie Droz, 2012), p. 276.
• Julia Poole, Review of Joanna Gwilt, Vincennes and Early Sèvres Porcelain from the Belvedere Collection (V&A Publishing, 2014), pp. 276–77.
• Stephen Duffy, Review of France Nerlich and Alain Bonnet, eds., Apprendre à Peindre: Les ateliers Privés à Paris, 1780–1863 (Université Francois Rabelais, 2013), p. 277.
• Reinier Baarsen, Review of the exhibition Eighteenth Century, Birth of Design, Furniture Masterpieces, 1650–1789 / 18e, aux sources du design, chefs-d’œuvre du mobilier 1650 à 1790 (Château de Versailles, 2014–15), pp. 285–86.
• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Review of the exhibition With Body and Soul / Mit Leib und Seele (Munich: Kunsthalle, 2014–15), pp. 286–88. Available at The Burlington website for free.
• Xavier Salomon, Review of the exhibition Goya’s Tapestry Cartoons in the Context of Court Painting / Goya en Madrid: Cartones para Tapices (Madrid: Prado, 2014–15), pp. 290–91.
• Catherine Whistler, Review of the exhibition, The Poetry of Light: Venetian Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, Washington / La Poesia della Luce: Disegni Veneziani dalla National Gallery of Art di Washington (Venice: Museo Correr, 2014–15), pp. 293–94.
Colloquium | Charles de La Fosse and the Arts in France, ca. 1700
I posted notice of the exhibition last week; here’s the programme for the colloquium, with additional information available from the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles. –CH
Charles de La Fosse et les arts en France autour de 1700
Château de Versailles, 18–19 May 2015
En complément de l’exposition Charles de La Fosse, le triomphe de la couleur, le Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon et le Centre recherche du château de Versailles ont souhaité organiser un colloque international sur l’artiste. L’exposition, organisée en cinq grandes sections (les commandes pour les maisons royales ; La Fosse dessinateur ; la tradition académique ; le triomphe du coloris ; un précurseur du XVIIIe siècle) a été l’occasion de faire le point sur un artiste majeur de la seconde moitié du règne de Louis XIV. Le colloque doit permettre, quant à lui, de mieux situer Charles de La Fosse (1636–1716) dans les enjeux de la pratique artistique autour de 1700 dont l’étude a été profondément renouvelée depuis les travaux d’Antoine Schnapper.
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L U N D I , 1 8 M A I 2 0 1 5
9:00 Accueil
9:30 Introduction
• Les enjeux du colloque, Béatrice Sarrazin, conservateur général du patrimoine, chargé des peintures du xviie siècle, musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon; et Olivier Bonfait, professeur en histoire de l’art moderne, université de Bourgogne, Centre Georges Chevrier (CNRS)
• Charles de La Fosse, dix ans après, Clémentine Gustin-Gomez, docteur en histoire de l’art
10:30 L’art de Charles de La Fosse
Présidents de séance : Clémentine Gustin-Gomez et Nicolas Milovanovic, conservateur en chef, département des Peintures, musée du Louvre, Paris
• Charles de La Fosse et la peinture d’histoire autour de 1700, Karen Chastagnol, docteur en histoire de l’art
• Between ‘coloris’ and ‘dessein’, Hector Reyes, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
• La peinture religieuse de La Fosse et de Jouvenet, ou les vicissitudes de la grâce, Aaron M. Wile, Ph.D. candidate, Harvard University, Cambridge
13:00 Pause
14:30 Charles de La Fosse et le grand décor
Présidents de séance : Thomas Kirchner, directeur, Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art de Paris et Béatrice Sarrazin
• Le décor plafonnant à l’époque de Charles de La Fosse: vers une émancipation des influences italiennes? Moana Weil-Curiel, docteur en histoire de l’art
• Les galeries de Charles de La Fosse, Bénédicte Gady, collaboratrice scientifique, département des
Arts graphiques, musée du Louvre, Paris
• Vendages de Malapeire, le décor de la chapelle du Mont-Carmel à Toulouse et sa description, Stéphanie Trouvé, docteur en histoire de l’art
M A R D I , 1 9 M A I 2 0 1 5
9:00 Accueil
9:30 Charles de La Fosse et la mythologie
Présidents de séance : Olivier Bonfait et Patrick Dandrey, professeur de littérature française du xviie siècle, université Paris-Sorbonne
• La tenture des Métamorphoses des Gobelins : émulation artistique et stratégies commerciales, Pascal-François Bertrand, professeur d’histoire de l’art, université Bordeaux Montaigne (EA 538)
• The Fall of Gods: Charles de La Fosse’s Allegory of Autumn as Theme and Variation, Tatiana Senkevitch, The Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Research Associate Rice University, Lecturer
• Le royaume des dieux : la représentation de l’Olympe dans les grands décors de Charles de La Fosse, Nicolas Milovanovic, conservateur en chef, département des Peintures, musée du Louvre, Paris
12:00 Pause
14:00 Charles de La Fosse et les capitales artistiques
Présidents de séance : Pierre Rosenberg, de l’Académie française, président-directeur honoraire, musée du Louvre, Paris et Margret Stuffmann, conservateur émérite, Städel Museum, Francfort-sur-le-Main
• Jacques Rousseau et Charles de La Fosse chez le duc de Montagu à Londres, Virginie Bergeret, diplômée de master II, École du Louvre
• Nouvelles hypothèses sur le décor peint de la salle à manger de Pierre Crozat, François Marandet, enseignant, Institut Supérieur des Arts (IESA), Warwick
• Charles de La Fosse et Venise : regards croisés au xviiie siècle, Valentine Toutain-Quittelier, docteur en histoire de l’art, chargée de cours, université de Poitiers
16:30 Conclusion et synthèse
• Olivier Bonfait et Béatrice Sarrazin avec Pierre Rosenberg
Edouard Kopp Appointed Curator of Drawings, Harvard Art Museums
Press Release (21 April 2015) from the Harvard Art Museums:
The Harvard Art Museums are pleased to announce the appointment of Edouard Kopp as the Maida and George Abrams Associate Curator of Drawings in the museums’ Division of European and American Art. Kopp comes to the museums from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he was associate curator of drawings and was responsible for French and later Germanic drawings. At the Getty, Kopp organized exhibitions devoted to French landscape, Germanic drawings, the artist Gustav Klimt, and 18th-century French drawings from Los Angeles collections. He has recently co-curated two international loan shows: The Work of Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau, which will be displayed at the Getty and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, in 2016–17; and an exhibition focused on the sculptor and draftsman Edme Bouchardon, which will be on view at the Musée du Louvre and the Getty in 2016–17.
Kopp has published widely on the drawings of French sculptor Edme Bouchardon, and on the 18th- century French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette, in journals such as Master Drawings and The Burlington Magazine. He has contributed to exhibition catalogues on French prints from the age of Louis XIV, Edgar Degas and his method, and French landscapes, and he is co-author of the forthcoming catalogues for the Théodore Rousseau and Edme Bouchardon exhibitions described above. He is currently revising his doctoral dissertation for publication by Getty Publications in 2016.
In his role at the Harvard Art Museums, Kopp will oversee the museums’ collection of drawings dating from before the 20th century. This collection is considered to be the finest and most comprehensive of any university art museum in the United States, and ranks among the most important public collections in the country. He will be actively engaged in the development of exhibitions, public lectures, and other programming, and will play an integral role in the regular rotation of works on paper within many of the museums’ galleries. He is also responsible for the stewardship of the drawings collection, including identifying key works for acquisition.
“We are thrilled to welcome such an accomplished scholar and art historian to the Harvard Art Museums,” said Ethan Lasser, interim head of the Division of European and American Art, and the Margaret S. Winthrop Associate Curator of American Art. “Edouard brings a fresh perspective and rigorous eye to the storied collection of drawings, and his enthusiasm will engage audiences across the University and visitors from around the world.”
“I am thrilled to have the invaluable opportunity to work with one of the finest drawings collections in the United States—and especially to do so within the unique and stimulating context of a university art museum,” said Kopp. “This is a living collection at a major institution with a strong tradition of encouraging firsthand, up-close study of original works of art. I look forward to interacting with students, faculty, and the wider community of scholars, collectors, and art lovers.”
Before his time at the Getty, Kopp worked as a researcher for the Weiss Gallery in London, and also for Waddeson Manor, a National Trust estate in Buckinghamshire, England. He served as a teaching assistant while a graduate student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where he received his Ph.D. with a dissertation entitled “Edme Bouchardon: Learned Draughtsman of the Eighteenth Century (1698–1762).” He has a master’s degree in modern art, also from the Courtauld, and wrote his thesis on the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin (1877–1959). He also holds a master of science in management from the Grenoble Graduate School of Business.
The Harvard Art Museums’ collection of approximately 12,000 drawings (from before the year 1900) includes major masterpieces from American and principal European schools. Among the strengths are 17th- and early 19th-century French works, including the most extensive holding of drawings by Ingres, Géricault, and David outside of France. The collection also excels in Italian Renaissance works by Carpaccio, Perugino, and Michelangelo, among others. Works by German and Netherlandish masters such as Dürer, Holbein, Bruegel, and Rembrandt are well represented, as are 19th-century British works by Blake, Beardsley, and the Pre-Raphaelites. In the American school, the collection includes more than 20 Homer watercolors, drawings and pastels by Whistler, and an incomparable grouping of more than 500 drawings and sketches by Sargent.
New Book | Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change
From Penn State UP:
Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0271065885, $70.
Although pets existed in Europe long before the eighteenth century, the dominant belief was that pet keeping was at best frivolous and at worst downright dangerous. In Animal Companions, Ingrid Tague explores the eighteenth-century conversation about the presence of pets in British society and the ways in which that conversation both reflected and shaped broader cultural debates. Tague argues that pets, as neither human nor fully part of the natural world, offered a unique way for Britons of the eighteenth century to articulate what it meant to be human and what their society ought to look like.
Having emerged from the Malthusian cycle of dearth and famine at the end of the seventeenth century, England became the wealthiest nation in Europe, with unprecedented access to consumer goods of all kinds. And closely connected with these material changes was the Enlightenment, with its implications for contemporary understanding of religion, science, and non-European cultures. All these transformations generated both excitement and anxiety, and they were reflected in debates over the rights and wrongs of human-animal relationships. Looking at a wide variety of texts, Tague shows how pets became both increasingly visible indicators of spreading prosperity and catalysts for debates about the morality of the radically different society emerging in this period.
Ingrid H. Tague is Associate Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at the University of Denver.
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C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Material Conditions of Pet Keeping
2 Domesticating the Exotic
3 Fashioning the Pet
4 A Privilege or a Right?
5 Pets and Their People
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Basile Baudez on Architectural Drawings
Coming up at MIT’s HTC Forum, the main lecture series of the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program:
Basile Baudez | Drawing for the Prize: Architectural
Competition Drawings from Europe to America
School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 5 May 2015
This talk will adopt the premise that architectural training as it was conceived in France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was aimed more directly at producing drawings than buildings. The relatively limited existing scholarship on architectural drawings in a pedagogical context has been dominated, however, almost exclusively by concern for the subjects assigned—which is to say the final, built result. This approach has failed to address the question of the drawings as objects rather than illustrations and more particularly their status as the product of a complex institutional apparatus that taught and rewarded a codified system of architectural representation. This talk considers not only the questions of why and how a French Beaux-Arts model became dominant in dialogue with shifts in institutional structures but also the story of its discontents when alternate means of representation that the Beaux-Arts system had suppressed were revived and explored by those outside the academic establishment.
Architects trained with Legeay and deeply influenced by Piranesi, legitimated a separation between the representation and the actual project itself and taught students to draw ‘des tableaux d’architecture’. Students of the Académie de France à Rome in particular began to make use of expressive techniques that were until then considered exclusively the domain of the pictorial or plastic arts. Variations in ornamentation or distribution were conveyed through affective juxtapositions of color and daring application of pigment that held little to no relationship with the realities of the projected building. The proximity between architects and painters in the second half of the eighteenth century became institutionalized after the Revolution at the École des Beaux-Arts, where architects were trained in the same building as painters, sculptors, and engravers and where draftsmen across media shared life and perspective drawing classes.
During the first years of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the Napoleonic Empire, a reaction against such dramatic pictorial effects encouraged students to restrain their chromatic palette, to refine their lines and to lay stress on the precision with which they represented ornaments and sculpture. Monochromes were prized, resulting in a new value placed on mastering shading and wash, which was to become one of the defining characteristics of the Beaux-Arts style. Over the course of the century wash would provide an arena for experimenting with conventional uses of color and the production of abstract forms that tread carefully between providing a satisfying degree of detail without distracting the viewer or compromising a harmonious whole. In the ateliers of Vaudoyer, Percier and Lebas, students were taught how to animate the surroundings (notably natural elements, such as water, lawns, isolated trees, etc.) in order to produce the most affective architectural renderings of the century. While their most dominant features had little to do with the structures depicted they would emerge as the key models of academic architectural training at the end of the nineteenth century throughout Europe and the United States.
Basile Baudez received his PhD from the Ecole pratique des hautes études in Paris in 2006 and published his dissertation at the Presses universitaires de Rennes under the title Architecture et tradition académique au siècle des Lumières. He is currently associate professor in art and architectural history at the Paris-Sorbonne University. His current book project addresses the rise and dominance of the Beaux-Arts style in architectural drawing in Europe and America from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries.
Exhibition | Consuming Passions: Luxury Shopping in Georgian Britain
From Fairfax House:
Consuming Passions: Luxury Shopping in Georgian Britain
Fairfax House, York, 28 May — 31 December 2015
Meissen Chocolate pot, ca 1735 (National Trust, #1245591.1)
The Georgian age, an era of wealth, industry and empire, saw consumerism—the appetite to acquire, to possess, and to display—becoming an increasingly important social and economic phenomenon. Greater numbers of the aspiring middle classes saw their disposable income increase and shopping for luxury items became a way of displaying one’s status in society. The selection and purchase of goods was transformed into a pleasurable pursuit in its own right and shopping became a fashionable leisure and social activity for both sexes.
Consuming Passions: Luxury Shopping in Georgian Britain seeks to explore the world of luxury consumption and Georgian polite shopping in the eighteenth century. Focusing on luxury objects and commodities—such as those required to furnish, fill and decorate homes in the latest taste, to clothe and accessorise, to entertain or simply satisfy the desire for the novel, a significant component of the exhibition will look at the retail experiences and shopping practices of wealthy Georgian Society. Taking its cue from the Fairfaxes, who were discerning customers and from whose household we are fortunate to have a rich archival depository to draw upon, the exhibition will examine the broader retail landscape of Georgian Britain as well as that of burgeoning provincial centres of polite society.
Call for Essays | The Mediality of Sugar
From H-ArtHist:
The Mediality of Sugar
Edited by Nadja Gernalzick, and Joseph Imorde
Proposals due by 1 June 2015; completed essays due by 30 November 2015
“Sugar is not a vegetable.” Other than as a natural substance, sugar—the food—may be conceptualized as a medium, or so the quotation from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) suggests. This call for contributions proposes a conceptualization of food as medium and takes the mediality of food by the example of sugar as a point of departure. Cane sugar has certainly mediatized and modified many peoples, cultures, and political or economic systems, in colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and in today’s world of a global food industry. In literature or works of the visual arts, sugar has a distinct iconography and is found in manifold metaphorical and figural uses. Examples are James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar-Cane of 1764, Phillis Wheatley’s brief “On Being Brought from Africa to America” of 1773, Jean Toomer’s modernist prose Cane of 1923, Edwidge Danticat’s historical novel The Farming of Bones of 1998, or Kara Walker’s sculpture with social intervention A Subtlety; or, The Marvelous Sugar Baby of 2014.
If sugar is read as a medium, the appearance of sugar in a novel, for instance, is a case of intermedial reference. Walker’s sculpture may be media combination, in the media-theoretical differentiations argued by Irina Rajewsky, among others. It may be that it has only become possible to recognize sugar and other foods as media since the technology and design that is part of any agri’culture’ and food production has today become obvious, or, readily observable to the consumer. In a communication studies model of mediality, food may be conceptualized as a message from the producer to the consumer. Sugar, as food, carries manifold significations regarding class, gender, race, sexuality, and other categories of identification. (more…)
Colin Bailey Named as New Director of the Morgan
Press release (16 April 2015) from the Morgan:
The Board of Trustees of the Morgan Library & Museum today announced the appointment of Colin B. Bailey, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, as the Morgan’s new director. He succeeds William M. Griswold who left last year to head the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Colin B. Bailey, Photography by Randy Dodson, © FAMSF
“We are delighted that Colin Bailey has agreed to become the new director of the Morgan,” said Lawrence Ricciardi, president of the museum’s board. “He is a scholar of the highest order with an impressive record of leadership at a number of outstanding museums. Moreover, he has extensive knowledge of New York cultural institutions and of the philanthropic world, and also brings to the Morgan valuable international experience.”
Bailey is a highly regarded specialist on 18th-century French art and a recognized authority on the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in Art History from the University of Oxford. Prior to joining the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Bailey held a variety of positions over thirteen years at New York’s Frick Collection, including serving as deputy director and the Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator.
“To direct the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has been an extraordinary privilege,” Bailey said, in accepting the position at the Morgan. “But the opportunity to return to New York and lead an institution with the reputation of the Morgan was irresistible. Its collections are not only among the most recognized internationally, but also among the most diverse, touching on so many forms of creative expression, from drawing and literature to music, photography, and the arts of the ancient and medieval worlds. There is no place quite like it in the United States, and I look forward to working with its staff, trustees, and supporters to maintain and deepen the Morgan’s preeminent role as a cultural institution—one with the highest standards and a commitment to making its holdings widely accessible.”
Bailey has previously been deputy director and chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, senior curator at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas, and held curatorial posts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles earlier in his career.
He has been responsible for many celebrated exhibitions. These include Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting (2012); Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection (2009); and Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780) (2007), all mounted at the Frick Collection in New York; Renoir Landscapes, 1865–1883 (2007), The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of 18th-century French Genre Painting (2003), and Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age (1997), at the National Gallery of Canada; and The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting from Watteau to David (1992), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His book, Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, was awarded the Mitchell Prize for the best art history book of 2002–2003, and in 2011 he authored the well-received Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection.
Bailey has taught graduate seminars in 18th-century French art at Bryn Mawr College, Columbia University, and the City University of New York Graduate Center, and has acted as a spokesperson in video, podcast, and broadcast media nationally and internationally. An Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres since 2010, Bailey has been recognized by the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture with its 2013 FIAC Excellency Award. He is also a board member of the Burlington Magazine Foundation and the Scientific Committee of Arthéna.
The Morgan Library & Museum’s holdings, which number well over a half million objects, are principally in the western European and American traditions. Its collections of drawings and prints, books and bindings, and illuminated manuscripts are preeminent among U.S. institutions. Literary, historical, and music manuscripts holdings, as well as other specialized collections, are also considered among the world’s greatest. The museum’s critically acclaimed 2006 addition by award-winning architect Renzo Piano deftly connected three historic buildings dating to the 19th and early 20th centuries around a central, glass-enclosed court. The expansion also doubled the museum’s gallery space, allowing the institution to mount over a dozen special exhibitions a year. In 2010, the Morgan restored for the first time its landmark 1906 McKim building, which was the personal library of the museum’s founder, financier and philanthropist Pierpont Morgan.
Bailey becomes the Morgan’s sixth director. Belle da Costa Greene became the first director of the newly public institution in 1924, having presided over the private Morgan library since 1906. She was succeeded by Frederick B. Adams, Jr. in 1948, Charles Ryskamp in 1969, Charles E. Pierce, Jr. in 1987, and William M. Griswold in 2008.
The Landmark Trust Turns 50
The Landmark Trust turns fifty in May:
The Landmark Trust’s Golden Weekend
50 Landmark Open Days in the UK, 16–17 May 2015
The Dining Room at 13 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, London, built ca. 1718–19. The Landmark Trust is featured in House & Garden (May 2015), pp. 134–39. Photo by Ben Quinton.
The Landmark Trust is a charity that rescues important buildings that would otherwise be lost. We take on historic places in danger and carefully and sensitively restore them. By making them available for holidays, we make sure they can be enjoyed by all, both today and for future generations. We have in our care nearly 200 buildings in Britain and several in Italy and France. Though they range from the sober to the spectacular, all our buildings are rich in history and atmosphere. They include picturesque pavilions and medieval long-houses, artillery forts and Gothick follies, clan chiefs’ castles and cotton weavers’ cottages, the homes of great writers and the creations of great architects, from Browning to Boswell, from Pugin to Palladio.
In the month we were founded, we will open 25 Landmarks for a special, celebratory open weekend across England Scotland and Wales, many never before or only rarely open to the public. The buildings have been carefully picked so that 95% of the British population will be within 50 miles of an open Landmark.
At 3pm on 16 May 2015 local groups, community choirs, bands, bell ringers and musicians of all sorts will simultaneously perform a specially commissioned Anthem for Landmark by acclaimed young composer Kerry Andrew. We hope this will unite Landmarkers and local communities across the country in a wonderful shared celebration.
More information about the weekend is available here»
Richard Samuel Coade, Belmont (Lyme Regis, Dorset), built before 1784, at which point it became the home of Eleanor Coade; appropriately the house showcases the eponymous artificial stone she pioneered.
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One of The Landmark Trust’s latest project, Belmont is scheduled to open later this year:
Belmont (Lyme Regis, Dorset) is a fine, early example of a maritime villa, a new building type that sprang up in the second half of the 18th century with the rising popularity of sea bathing and holidays by the seaside. Our research has shown that the house was built before 1784 by Samuel Coade. This is the date he transferred the house to his niece, Mistress Eleanor Coade (1733–1821), one of the most intriguing figures in 18th-century architecture.
Our project will rescue Belmont from decay and restore it to its late-Georgian glory, creating a Landmark which will sleep 8 people. As it was once Mrs Coade’s holiday villa, so it will be used for holidays again, with its original features repaired and reinstated.
Thanks to a hugely generous financial bequest to Landmark by the late Mrs Shelagh Preston, the fundraising appeal for Belmont has now reached its target. We are so grateful to everyone who supported Belmont, helping us to raise a total of £1.8m.
Romantic Illustration Network
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From RIN:
The Romantic Illustration Network (RIN) restores to view the importance of book illustration and visual culture in the Romantic period, but also across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. RIN brings together scholars working on poetry, prose, the printed book, visual culture, and painting from roughly 1750–1850 to share research and to develop new models for understanding the relationship between word and image in the period, between large and small scale work, and between painting, print and illustration.
We are collaborating with Tate Britain to enhance the Tate’s collection of literary prints and paintings. RIN will foreground artists who have been unduly ignored, and return attention to well-known artists in unfamiliar roles. We aim to recapture lost cultures of looking and of reading, restoring the link between word and image not only in book illustration but in the wider literary and visual culture. Our programme of events will take as starting point in turn the artist, the author, the gallery and the economics of print. We will produce an edited collection of essays and it is hoped that this network will form the basis for a longer research project.
The RIN blog is available here»
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