Book and Conference | The Chesapeake House
The following conference takes place next month at Williamsburg:
The Chesapeake House
Colonial Williamsburg, 19-21 May 2013
To mark the publication of The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg by the University of North Carolina Press, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation will offer a three-day conference focusing on the methods used by architectural historians at Colonial Williamsburg to investigate buildings as well as review new discoveries in the field. The Chesapeake House is a major scholarly landmark that will set the standard for the analysis and history of early Virginia and Maryland architecture for the coming decades. The seventeen essays are based on the collective scholarship of nine authors who have been involved in research in this field for the past three decades. Participants in the conference will receive a copy of the book as part of their registration.
Through a series of lectures, conversations, and specialized tours of the Historic Area of Colonial Williamsburg, The Chesapeake House conference provides an insider’s view of how Colonial Williamsburg’s experts examine historic buildings. The program will appeal to teachers, students, preservationists, and other professionals in the field as well as friends of Colonial Williamsburg and members of the general public with interests in old houses, American history, restoration, and historic preservation. Presentations will explore the practice of architectural fieldwork, the nature of regionalism in building design, and the development of a distinctive framing system in the colonial period. Specialists will discuss the latest techniques of dendrochronoly and paint analysis.
There will be a special audience participation session entitled “How old is your house?” Often, it is one of the first questions homeowners ask and it is always essential for architectural historians to determine. Yet, such a basic query is often hard to answer. Assessing the age and alterations made to buildings is challenging since the process involves piecing together disparate kinds of evidence found in many different parts of a house, from the attic to the cellar. How was the frame constructed? What kind of bonding pattern does the chimney have? What sort of hinges are on the doors? Some details provide solid diagnostic clues while others are less helpful. However, when combined, they can provide plausible dates to within a few years or decades.
Curious about the age of your old house or one you know? Here is your chance to start the process of figuring it out. “Making Sense of the Evidence” will provide an interactive opportunity to review and analyze the material you submit with other participants. This session will demonstrate how the experts read the evidence from the field to make a reasonable estimate of the age of a house based on its form, construction, and style of various features.
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Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury, eds., The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 488 pages, ISBN: 978-0807835777, $60.
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S U N D A Y , 1 9 M A Y 20 1 3
4:00 Welcome, Colin G. Campbell, president and CEO, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation
4:15 “Publishing The Chesapeake House,” David Perry, editor-in-chief and assistant director, (retired), University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill
4:30 “Rendering The Chesapeake House,” Jeffrey Klee, architectural historian, Colonial Williamsburg
M O N D A Y , 2 0 M A Y 2 0 1 3
8:30 The Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg open for conference participants
9:00 “Why Architectural Fieldwork?,” Edward Chappell, director, architectural and archaeological research department, Colonial Williamsburg
9:45 Coffee
10:15 “What makes Chesapeake Architecture Regional?,” Carl Lounsbury, senior architectural historian, Colonial Williamsburg
11:00 “Timber Framing: The DNA of Chesapeake Architecture,” Willie Graham, curator, architecture, Colonial Williamsburg
1:15 Revolutionary City programming. Looking at Architectural Details. Participants will be divided into four groups and will rotate around in order to participate in all four sessions:
• Timber Framing, Willie Graham, Booker Tenement
• Brickwork, Carl Lounsbury, Wythe House, Cole House, and Courthouse
• Hardware, Edward Chappell, Ken Schwarz, Armoury
• Architectural Elements, Jeffrey Klee, Hennage Auditorium
4:30 “Making Sense of the Evidence, or Stump the Chumps,” Cary Carson, Edward Chappell, Willie Graham, Jeffrey Klee, Carl Lounsbury, and members of the audience. Review of images of buildings and details submitted by members of the audience
6:30 Reception at the home of Margaret Pritchard
T U E S D A Y , 2 1 M A Y 2 0 1 3
8:30 The Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg open for conference participants
9:00 “How Dendrochronology has Changed Architectural Research,” Michael Worthington, dendrochronologist, Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory, Baltimore
9:45 “Paint Analysis in Architectural Investigations,” Susan Buck, conservator and paint analyst, Williamsburg
10:15 Coffee
10:45 “Off the Wall: Textile and Paper Hangings in the Chesapeake House,” Margaret Pritchard, curator, prints, maps, and wallpaper, Colonial Williamsburg
11:30 “Furnished Lives,” Cary Carson, vice president of research (retired), Colonial Williamsburg
Call for Papers | Framings
Framings: Interdisciplinary Conference on Frames
University of Copenhagen, 29 November — 1 December 2013
Proposals due by 17 May 2013
The conference will bring together strands of international research on frames that took place over the past 5 years and extend the conceptual and material framework of interdisciplinary between the Humanities, Social- and Communication Sciences. Expected and welcomed are contributions from art and media history and theory, philosophy and cultural studies, dance and theater studies, film theory and film semiotics, literature and music, communication science, visual and textile studies, and computer science.
Submissions are solicited in, but not limited to, the following areas:
– frames in art and art history
– dialectical nature of frames
– framing strategies in medieval texts
– mediality of the frame
– parergon
– framing (with) textiles
– conceptual frameworks
– mirrors
– (video-)feedback
– ‘frame generators’
– self-reflexive practices
– frame as ‘metaphor generator’
– performativity of the frame
– interdisciplinary and methodological aspects of framings (more…)
Exhibition | La Tauromaquia: Carnicero, Goya, and Picasso
Press release for the current exhibition at Penn:
La Tauromaquia: Carnicero, Goya, and Picasso
Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 19 April — 28 July 2013
Antonio Carnicero, Colleción de las principals suertes de una corrida de toro, plate IV, 1790 (Arthur Ross Foundation)
In celebration of the Arthur Ross Gallery’s 30th anniversary, La Tauromaquia: Carnicero, Goya, and Picasso presents 70 master prints collected by the Arthur Ross Foundation. The prints explore the long-revered tradition of the Spanish bullfight by featuring the works of three extraordinary artists: Carnicero, Goya and Picasso, who interpreted this popular entertainment in very different ways. This is the first time all 70 prints are on display in a single exhibition, which runs from April 19 through July 28, 2013.
In the eighteenth century, the bullfight was both a sport and an entertainment in Spain, democratically beloved from royalty to the lower classes. A skilled matador often became a famed national hero, and his fighting in the corrida was considered a fully developed art form. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.” Antonio Carnicero’s (1748-1814) seven etchings and title sheet from Colleción de las principals suertes de una corrida de toros (Collection of the main actions in a bullfight), executed in 1790, illustrate the highly ritualized stages of the bullfight. In 1816, at the age of 70, Francisco Goya published the first edition of 33 prints on La Tauromaquia in Madrid. His daring compositions and dramatic chiaroscuro accentuate the drama that unfolds in the ring. A century later, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), turned to bullfighting for his subject matter. In a single afternoon in 1957 he completed 26 plates for La Tauromaquia, o arte de torear, Pepe Illo’s treatise, for the Ediciones La Cometa specialist collection.
La Tauromaquia: Carnicero, Goya and Picasso is the culmination of exhibitions celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Arthur Ross Gallery. The Gallery was the brainchild of Penn President Emeritus Mr. Martin Meyerson and Mr. Arthur Ross. In 1983, they established the Arthur Ross Gallery on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania for the benefit of the Philadelphia and University communities. It has since expanded to a much broader focus, embracing an eclectic program of changing exhibitions in all fields of the visual arts and cultural artifacts from around the world.
HECAA’s Pinterest Boards Unveiled
With two fabulous Clerks of the Pinterest Boards — Katrina London and Debs Wiles — taking the lead, I’m delighted to announce that HECAA and Enfilade now have a Pinterest presence! Having written about the site in the past (21 May 2012 and 17 January 2013), I’m now even more optimistic. Lots of you are already pinning. Some of you, on the other hand, are rolling your eyes at the very mention of it — not another new digital platform to make sense of! As one who signed up for a Pinterest account (yes, accounts are free) and then did nothing with it for months, I understand feelings of nagging annoyance and even disdain. But after a year of using Pinterest for personal interests and projects, I’ve been won over. It’s not nearly as good as it should (or could) be, but I think there is enormous potential for scholars to provide some leadership and make this new vehicle serve our own interests. It’s still an experiment, and six months from now, we’ll likely have a much better sense of the limits. On the front end, I offer the following suggestions; and don’t worry, we have no plans to change what happens here at the regular site for Enfilade. As always, feedback is welcome. -CH
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1) Plan. You’ll need to sign up for an account — but even before that — you need to consider how you want to use your account. As a social media platform, Pinterest will want to intertwine you with the people you ‘follow’ and the things you ‘pin’. It’s entirely common for people to use their real names, and if you’re using it to extend a professional presence, that’s probably advantageous. On the other hand, if you’re pinning cleaning tips, then maybe you’ll want something a bit more discreet (initials, pseudonyms, &c.).
2) Press on. When you sign up for an account, you’ll list several sites you want to ‘follow’. Over time, that list will grow as you hone your preferences and likes. For most people, Pinterest is only as satisfying as the things they’re following. Warning: here’s there’s a small learning curve. After you first sign up, you’ll likely be bombarded by lots of images (‘pins’) that have little to do how you want to use the site. Don’t fret. In a day or two, you’ll gradually begin to make sense of how it works, the visual clutter will dissipate, and it’s easy enough to ‘unfollow’ things you want to go away.
3) Follow HECAA! We currently have several ‘boards’. Whenever we post a new pin, it will automatically be pinned to your homepage, too. People who follow you will see it only if you ‘repin’ it yourself.
4) Explore. There are lots of museums, academic presses, and other scholarly institutions to ‘follow’ (Yale UP is one example). There are also lots of images of amazing eighteenth-century artifacts — often posted by historical novelists. At the level of strategy, Enfilade is not aiming to assemble large collections of interesting objects — paintings by Chardin or Kauffman, for instance. We have all kinds of resources for such collections: books, databases, &c. Instead, we’re interested in exploring what kinds of information would be a good fit with Pinterest and how we would take advantage of Pinterest as a venue for distributing visual information. Ultimately, we’ll be exploring how we might marshal collective efforts to maximize a critical mass of interest in eighteenth-century studies.
5) Think about organization. You’ll be able to create your own boards, assigning each pin to one of these. Generally, the more precise a board, the more useful it will be — to yourself and to others who may follow you. If you’re unsettled by the social media component, users are allowed three ‘secret boards’.
6) Think about who might see what you’re pinning. If you’re wondering how Pinterest could possibly be useful, consider this. Say you’re working on a paper on eighteenth-century picture frames. Through web searches, you find 10-20 sites and images you’d like to keep in mind. In a matter of seconds, it’s easy to pin each of those examples to a board you call ‘Frames’. With a system much easier than bookmarking or printing hard copies, you’re able to make a visual record, with brief captions and links. But also bear in mind: if those examples turn out to be crucial to your paper, anyone following you can, now, in effect, peer over your shoulder as you’re working. Perhaps that’s fine. Or perhaps you should use one of your ‘secret boards’ for that material. It’s easy enough to turn a ‘secret board’ into a public one later on, but you can’t go the other way.
HECAA’s Pinterest boards are available here»
Introducing: Clerks of the Pinterest Boards
I’m delighted to introduce two new Enfilade interns: Katrina London and Debs Wiles. For the next six months they’ll be exploring the scholarly potential of Pinterest. As Clerks of the Pinterest Boards, they’ll not only be pinning themselves but also helping us think through issue of organization and anticipating pitfalls. In fact, they’ve been working on all of this already for several weeks now. I’m thrilled at their interest and enthusiasm. Welcome aboard!
For an introduction and invitation to HECAA’s Pinterest boards, please see this posting.
-Craig Hanson
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Katrina London
I am delighted to join Enfilade as a Clerk of the Pinterest Boards. I recently earned my master’s degree in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center, where I specialized in the decorative arts of eighteenth-century France. Also at the Bard Graduate Center, I was a contributor to the exhibition and catalogue Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opened earlier this month. I currently work in the Academic Programs department at the Bard Graduate Center as a program assistant for an NEH Summer Institute directed by Professor David Jaffee, and I am considering doctoral programs in art history.
Deborah (Debs) Wiles
I came to horticulture as a career change. The more I learned about gardening and gardens, the more interested I became in the history of gardening. This led me to complete an MA in garden history at the University of Greenwich in London where I studied the history of Kensington Gardens and the evolution of the country house garden from the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries. I’ve since continued to research the biography of seventeenth-century traveler Celia Fiennes. I look forward to exploring ways to use social media as a scholarly tool!
Conference | The Louvre Before The Louvre: Artisans, Artists, Academies
From the conference website:
The Louvre Before The Louvre: Artisans, Artists, Academies
Wallace Collection, London, 5 July 2013
Organized by Mia Jackson and Hannah Williams
Antoine Coysevox, Charles Le Brun, terracotta, 1676 (The Wallace Collection)
Now one of the world’s most famous museums, the Louvre was once a vast artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. This one-day conference addresses the fascinating but little-known period of the Louvre’s history throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exploring the role this space, its objects, and its inhabitants played in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early modern Paris.
Eminent and emerging scholars including two guest speakers from the Musée du Louvre will together provide an intimate understanding of the artistic and intellectual neighbourhood of the Louvre and its effect on art and design in the period. Papers on the day will investigate the collective spaces and sociable practices of the Louvre (from the royal academies to artists’ studios), the intersections between personal and professional spaces for the artists and artisans who both lived and worked in the Louvre, and the wider significance of the Louvre in artistic social networks both locally and internationally.
Taking place in the Wallace Collection, which houses one of the United Kingdom’s finest collections of art from this period, this conference offers attendees the opportunity to experience the results of these artistic collaborations.
Generously supported by the Wallace Collection and the Faculty of History of the University of Oxford.
To book: www.louvrebeforelouvre.eventbrite.co.uk
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P R O G R A M M E
Welcome by Christoph Vogtherr (Wallace Collection)
Introduction by Mia Jackson (QMUL) and Hannah Williams (University of Oxford)
I. Reception Pieces at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture: New Research
Geneviève Bresc-Bautier (Musée du Louvre) Integration of Works into the Collections of the Académie during the Ancien Régime
Guilhem Scherf (Musée du Louvre) Reception and Diffusion of the Morceaux de Réception during the Ancien Régime
II. Collective Spaces and Sociable Practices
Drew Armstrong (University of Pittsburgh) Life and Loss in the Académie Royale d’Architecture
Esther Bell (Cincinnati Art Museum) Coypel the Curator: Studio as Sociable Space
Pierre-Édouard Latouche (Université de Québec à Montréal) Des Recueils des Maisons Royales en Petit (1745) à L’Architecture Française (1756) de Blondel: Le remploi d’un Plan de la Cour Carré
Anne Higonnet (Barnard College, Columbia University) Studios, Sociability, and Unexpected Consequences in the Old Louvre
III. Living and Working in the Louvre
Susan Wager (Columbia University) Un-occupying the Louvre: The Royal Gem-Engraver Jacques Guay
David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington) Louis Tocqué (1696-1772): A Portrait Painter at the Louvre
Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art) Parade’s End: On Charles Coypel’s Bed
IV. Neighbourhoods and Networks
Dena Goodman (University of Michigan) 4 rue des Orties: the Louvre of the Silvestres, 1675-1805
Bärbel Küster (State Academy for Art and Design, Stuttgart) Britons in the Louvre in the 18th Century
Laura Auricchio (The New School) Beyond the Louvre: Re-mapping the Paris Art World in the Age of Louis XVI
Call for Papers | New Scholars Session at CAA, 2014
In addition to the session organized by Kevin Chua ‘After the Secular: Art and Religion in the Eighteenth Century’, HECAA will be represented at next year’s CAA conference with a ‘New Scholars Session’ chaired by Kristel Smentek. Information on additional panels related to the eighteenth century is available here» -CH
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102nd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Chicago, 12-15 February 2014
Proposals due by 13 May 2013 (extended from 6 May)
Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
New Scholars Session
Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, smentek@mit.edu
The Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) invite paper proposals from advanced doctoral students and recent PhDs that present innovative approaches to the interpretation of the art, architecture, and material culture of the global eighteenth century. Presenters selected for this session are expected to become members of HECAA before the conference.
Call for Papers | NEASECS 2013, New Haven
From the conference website:
Northeast American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference | The Ends of War
Yale University, New Haven, 3-6 October 2013
Proposals due by 3 May 2013
Joseph Wright of Derby, The Dead Soldier, ca. 1789
(Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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Yale University is pleased to host the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Northeast American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, an event it last hosted in 1993. Home to Sterling Memorial Library, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Lewis Walpole Library (in nearby Farmington), the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery, and host institution for The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell, and the Yale Indian Papers Project, Yale has longstanding traditions in eighteenth-century studies across the disciplines. The Beinecke, which in 2013 is celebrating its 50th anniversary, will host the conference’s welcome reception.
2013 marks the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in April 1713, formally ending the War of the Spanish Succession, and the 250th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years War, known in its colonial North American theater as the French and Indian War. What are The Ends of War? The phrase here reflects the elusive Johnsonian sense in the quotation on the home page, above, implying both cessation, but also paradoxically what lives on after formal cessation, as well as the deeper, more troubling sense of “ends” as aims, purposes, intentions, and perhaps unintended consequences. Do wars end, or end anything? Beyond the massive geo-cultural realignments that followed especially from the global conflicts of 1757–1763, what are the social, literary, aesthetic, and artistic consequences of war and its ends? And what did and do these ends look like at the other ends of the earth, non European, non North American? We welcome papers on any aspect of these and other related questions. In keeping with NEASECS traditions, panels and papers addressing elements of the long eighteenth century not directly related to the conference theme are also welcome.
Proposals for panels should be submitted to the Program Committee at neasecs2013@yale.edu by May 3, 2013. Panel proposals will be listed on this website on a rolling basis, as received and approved, through the Spring. Paper proposals should be sent directly to the panel organizers at the addresses they provide. The conference welcomes traditional panels of three 20-minute papers (with chair, and respondent if desired), as well as roundtables, sessions on Teaching Approaches, State-of-the-Field debates, or other sessions with variously innovative formats. Individual papers on topics not addressed in the proposed panels may be sent directly to the Program Committee, which will try to accommodate them in thematically grouped sessions. Please submit them by June 30, 2013.
For a current list of panel proposals, click here. It will download as a separate word file.
Panel organizers should notify panelists of acceptance or otherwise by June 30, 2013, and submit completed panels, noting AV or any other special requirements, to the Program Committee, at neasecs2013@yale.edu, by July 15, 2013. The conference program will be posted on the conference website in August.
New Book | Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art
Due out in June from Ashgate:
Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 260 pages, ISBN: 978-0754664925, $105.
In a moving intervention into Romantic-era depictions of the dead and wounded, Philip Shaw’s timely study directs our gaze to the neglected figure of the common soldier. How suffering and sentiment were portrayed in a variety of visual and verbal media is Shaw’s particular concern, as he examines a wide range of print and visual media, from paintings to sketches to political prose and anti-war poetry, and from writings on culture and aesthetics to graphic satires and early photographs.
Whilst classical portraiture and history painting certainly conspired with official ideologies to deflect attention from the true costs of war, other works of art, literary as well as visual, proffered representations that countered the view that suffering on and off the battlefield is noble or heroic. Shaw uncovers a history of changing attitudes towards suffering, from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral sentiment. Thus, Shaw’s story is one of how images of death and wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and national unanimity. Informed by readings of the letters and journals of serving soldiers, surgeons’ notebooks and sketches, and the writings of peace and war agitators, Shaw’s study shows how an attention to the depiction of suffering and the development of ‘liberal’ sentiment enables a reconfiguring of historical and theoretical notions of the body as a site of pain and as a locus of violent national imaginings.
Contents: Introduction; Seeing through tears I; Seeing through tears II; ‘Complicated woe’: British military art of the 1790s; All the news that’s fit to paint; Disgusting objects; images of wounding in the aftermath of war; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies in the School of English at the University of Leicester, UK. His publications include Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002) and, as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793-1822 (2000).
Forthcoming Book | Roman Fever
Schedule for June release from Yale UP:
Richard Wrigley, Roman Fever: Influence, Infection, and the Image of Rome, 1700-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 330 pages, ISBN: 978-0300190212, $75.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, artists and travellers were lured to Rome, the home of civilized values and artistic beauty. But the history of visiting Rome had a pathological side—not only crisis and disorientation but repulsion at its filth and stink. Rome’s air was considered to contain a chronic source of disease. This book argues that “bad air” (mal’aria) is a neglected aspect of thinking about the city’s history and as a destination for artists, visitors, and Romans both ancient and modern. These problems interfered with exploring Rome, its art and architecture, and representing its landscape. Atmospheric contamination made plein air painting and investigating antique ruins challenging activities.
Roman Fever invites an original and alternative perspective on the city and its countryside, revisiting the history of Rome in terms of ideas about climate and the role of the environment. Beautifully illustrated with unfamiliar images, it focuses on the interplay between enthusiasm and inspiration, and debilitation and mortality, all an integral part of discovering and engaging with the Eternal City’s landscape.
Richard Wrigley is professor of art history at the University of Nottingham.
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