Enfilade

From Paris Musées:

Le Trait en liberté: Dessins de François-André Vincent, 1746–1816
Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris, 29 March — 29 June 2014

Curated by Benjamin Couilleaux

L’exposition présente l’étendue du talent de François-André Vincent, tout au long de sa carrière de dessinateur, à travers la variété de ses sujets et techniques.

Artiste aussi talentueux que protéiforme, et néanmoins méconnu, François-André Vincent (1746–1816) a marqué le paysage artistique français entre la fin du XVIIIe siècle et le début du XIXe. À partir d’une cinquantaine de feuilles issues de grandes collections publiques et privées de Paris, l’exposition présente l’étendue du talent de Vincent dessinateur, tout au long de sa carrière, à travers la variété de ses sujets et techniques. Débutant dans un style très esquissé, proche de Fragonard, Vincent s’est progressivement rallié à la majesté héroïque du néoclassicisme. Il s’est intéressé aussi bien au paysage qu’à la scène de genre, à la peinture d’histoire comme au genre animalier. Portraitiste génial, Vincent a produit toute une série de caricatures, comiques et fascinantes, mais aussi des portraits psychologiques d’une immense sensibilité. L’exposition permet ainsi de montrer des dessins rarement, voire jamais vus par le public, avec des regroupements inédits.

En parallèle, l’artiste fait l’objet d’un catalogue raisonné par Jean-Pierre Cuzin, ainsi que d’une grande rétrospective, d’abord présentée au musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours (du 18 octobre 2013 au 19 janvier 2014) puis au musée Fabre à Montpellier (du 8 février au 11 mai 2014). L’exposition du musée Cognacq-Jay s’intègre également dans l’actualité parisienne en s’associant à la Semaine du dessin 2014.

As recently posted on the ever-informative C18-L, from the new listserv, HEMPS, History of Early and Modern Plant Sciences (1450–1850) . . .

Nepal Natural History Drawings: Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, 1802–03
Embassy of Nepal, 12A Kensington Palace Gardens, London, 7–24 January 2014

The first natural history collections from Nepal were made by Dr Francis Buchanan (later known as Buchanan-Hamilton) in 1802–03, whilst surgeon-naturalist on the British Mission led by Captain Knox. During his year in the Kathmandu Valley he documented more than a thousand plant species, many of which are now rarely seen. This Scottish ‘father of Nepalese botany’ laid the foundation of botanical knowledge for this Himalayan country, and over 500 new species have been described using his collections.

Buchanan-Hamilton took with him to Nepal a Bengali artist from Calcutta who prepared exquisite coloured watercolour drawings of over a hundred species—27 of which have been selected for this exhibition. On his return to England in 1806, Buchanan-Hamilton gave these drawings, and his other scientific records, to his friend from University days, James Edward Smith, and they have lain virtually unknown in the archives of the Linnean Society of London (which Smith founded) ever since. This exhibition is the first public viewing outside Nepal of Buchanan-Hamilton’s drawings, made by a talented but sadly un-named
Indian artist. Current research is uncovering the scientific and cultural value of these early collections.

Buchanan-Hamilton placed great importance on local names people were using for plants and instructed his Indian pandit, Babu Ramajai Bhattacharji, to record these spoken names and translate them into English. Buchanan-Hamilton frequently used these common names for the new scientific names that he coined and wrote on the drawings—some of these are still in use today. Buchanan-Hamilton is now recognised as the pioneer of biodiversity research in Nepal, but he could not have done this by himself and he needed to collaborate with Nepalese and Indian people. As he was one of the first foreigners to spend any length of time in Nepal, he had an unsurpassed understanding of the people, their cultures and traditions, which later helped underpin the developing relationship between Britain and Nepal. Two centuries on, botanical research continues with British and Nepalese scientists working together on the Flora of Nepal—www.floraofnepal.org. This facsimile exhibition has been produced by the Linnean Society of London and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, with the support of the Embassy of Nepal and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Admission free: open to the public 7th to 24th January 2014, Monday to Friday, 10am–1pm, 2–4pm, Embassy of Nepal, 12A Kensington Palace Gardens, London, W8 4QU.

Sponsored by Nature & Herbs UK Ltd. Drawings online here»
Contact: Dr Mark Watson, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, m.watson@rbge.org.uk

From the exhibition press release (August 2013):

Unflinching Vision: Goya’s Rare Prints
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, 6 December 2013 — 3 March 2014

Curated by Leah Lehmbeck

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna, ca.1790s. Oil on canvas, 54 x 43 x 4 inches (137.8 x 109.2 x 10.2 cm). The Frick Collection; photo: Michael Bodycomb.

In celebration of the rare loan of The Frick Collection’s Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna by Spanish master Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), the Norton Simon Museum presents the exhibition Unflinching Vision: Goya’s Rare Prints. While the majority of the artist’s prints were published posthumously, this exhibition presents a selection of works that Goya himself worked on during his lifetime. More than 30 working proofs, trial proofs and published prints made under his supervision are on view, as well as a small selection of posthumous examples from his later numbered editions. With exceptional examples from his series Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War, La Tauromaquia, and Los Proverbios, these artworks demonstrate Goya’s mastery of printmaking and, most significantly, his care in meaningfully capturing the spirit of his time.

From royal portraiture to scenes in a bullring, Goya infused his keen vision of the observed world with his own creative impulses. This delicate dance is visible throughout the artist’s incredible output of prints. Goya began to experiment with printmaking well after he had established himself as a successful painter to the royal court in Madrid. He started, tentatively, etching a few religious subjects, yet rather quickly he began his first ambitious series of etchings: 11 copies after masterpieces by the father of Spanish painting, Diego Velázquez. Goya’s skill as a draftsman is pronounced in these prints, as is his facility with working on a copper plate, for it is in this series that he first experiments with aquatint, a technique that allows the artist to create subtle tonal areas in the image rather than just scratched lines. “Un Infante de España,” on view in this exhibition, not only presents the formality of Velázquez’s composition but also exhibits Goya’s growing skill with intaglio techniques. Though aquatint is used here primarily in the background, Goya came to master its use, harnessing its subtlety to create depth and even to draw entire compositions.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Copies After Velázquez: Un Infante de España, Infante Don Fernando, ca. 1778–79, etching with burnished aquatint and drypoint
(Norton Simon Art Foundation)

By the mid-1790s, Goya began to work on Los Caprichos, the first of four major print series that came to define his career as a printmaker. Images of people, witches and imagined creatures identifying specific social and cultural problems, with titles carefully narrating the scenes, make up this series. An early working proof of plate 6, “Nobody Knows Himself,” presents Goya’s concerns with deception and artifice, and it shows the print before numbering and with the title handwritten in ink. In plate 20, “There They Go Plucked (i.e. Fleeced),” prostitutes sweep out their customers, cowering and pathetic, as the women prepare for the next group of clients who hover above. The drama of the scene is enhanced by the contrast between completely uninked areas and the various gradations of aquatint that define recessional space, but as the edition was printed, this contrast was lost as the aquatint faded nearly completely. Exhibiting the working proof alongside the first, second and eighth editions of the same plate highlights this degradation.

While Los Caprichos describes a time before the turn of the century, when the French monarchy fell and Napoleon rose to power, Goya’s next series tells of the grueling six-year war between France and Spain that began in 1808. In addition to its cruel, disorganized and prolonged combat (the term ‘guerilla’ warfare was coined from this war), it caused a disastrous famine. Many of its battles and events, including torture and starvation, are depicted brutally in the 82 plates of Goya’s print series The Disasters of War. “One Can’t Look,” plate 26, is a triumph of Goya’s compositional acumen. Men and women cower, plead and surrender in desperation within a web of dramatic shadows, and only the tips of the executioners’ bayonets reveal the reason for their suffering.

Perhaps due to the sensitivity of the subject, Goya decided not to publish an edition of The Disasters during his lifetime. Turning instead to a public project that was more benign, Goya prepared a series of bullfighting scenes, equally brilliantly executed and known ultimately as La Tauromaquia. This group of 33 prints traces the history of bullfighting in the country and can be read as being both respectful and critical of the pastime. In plate 20, the theatrical physical feats accomplished by a torero are on display. Yet, in the following plate, Goya reminds us of the deadly nature of the sport. His interest in the popular subject matter and its connection to his national identity were further illuminated when Goya was living in exile in Bordeaux, France. There, in 1825, he used lithography for the first time. The technique is very similar to drawing, and Goya was immediately able to create lively compositions with greater ease than aquatint, in a series of four prints with the same theme, known as The Bulls of Bordeaux.

Whereas the two intaglio series—La Tauromaquia and The Disasters—depict real-life events, Goya continued to create wildly imaginative scenes that comment on contemporary behavior as in Los Caprichos. In the group of 18 prints gathered together and sold as Los Proverbios upon their first publication in 1864, Goya magnificently illustrates a number of human follies. Two-headed women, animals, giants and monsters are all situated in a world with no setting, no real context. The scenes are executed with brilliant technical facility: etched lines creating dynamic scenarios set off against the rich darkness of a field of aquatint, as in “A Way of Flying,” a fantastical illustration of the idea that “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Unflinching Vision: Goya’s Rare Prints is organized by Curator Leah Lehmbeck. It is presented in conjunction with The Frick Collection’s loan of Goya’s Don Pedro, Duque de Osuna, and in anticipation of the scholarly catalogue Goya in the Norton Simon Museum, to be published in 2014.