Call for Papers | Sculpture between Britain and Italy, 1742–1854
From the Call for Papers:
Sculptural Models, Themes, and Genres between Britain and Italy, ca. 1742–1854
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 16–17 May 2025
Organized by Adriano Aymonino, Albertina Ciani, and Kira d’Alburquerque
Proposals due by 30 September 2024
The University of Buckingham and the Victoria and Albert Museum are organising a two-day interdisciplinary conference on the role played by British-Italian artistic exchanges in shaping sculptural models, themes, and genres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The conference adopts a longue durée approach, focusing on the century when these exchanges were most intense: from 1742, when Prince Hoare of Bath the Elder arrived in Rome—the first documented English sculptor to spend a period of study in the city—to the opening of the Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1854, whose sculptural decoration was directed by the Milanese Raffaele Monti. Throughout this period, the two traditions became interdependent, developing an artistic dialogue that influenced sculptural models and themes not only in Italy and Britain but also across Europe and the territories of the expanding British Empire, from the Indian subcontinent to the Americas.
This conference adopts a typological approach, investigating how academic frameworks and patronage networks influenced the diffusion of sculptural models, themes, and genres, and how market dynamics—along with the industrial production of new materials—either reinforced or challenged these aspects. We are interested in exploring the evolution of established genres such as busts, ideal sculptures, funerary and public monuments, copies, and adaptations after the Antique, as well as the diffusion of models and themes in decorative figurative sculpture, including reliefs, medallions, chimneypieces, and in smaller artworks such as gems, cameos, impressions, ivories, or in objects produced in porcelain, earthenware, and various new artificial ‘stones’. While concentrating on sculpture, the conference embraces an interdisciplinary approach to evaluate how the development of new models, themes, and genres reflected or shaped cultural and national identities, social values, evolving canons, and shifting audiences in the different contexts of Italy and the Anglophone world.
Recent years have witnessed a surge in monographic publications and PhD dissertations by art historians, social historians, and scholars focused on material culture, examining individual artists and themes connected to this trans-national movement. This two-day conference aims to assess the current state of research and explore future directions in the discipline.
We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on topics that could include, but are not limited to:
• The impact of the academy and academic aesthetic and pedagogical frameworks in shaping sculptural models, themes, and genres, and their diverse manifestations.
• The influence of patronage and collecting in shaping sculptural models, themes, and genres, and their diverse manifestations.
• Industry and the market’s role in the production and dissemination of ‘high art’ models, themes, and genres, as well as commercial, religious, garden, and decorative sculpture.
• The impact of casts, copies, and adaptations on reinforcing or challenging academic canons and establishing new models, themes, and genres.
• The role played by new materials (such as porcelain, biscuit, Wedgwood ‘basalt’ and Jasperware, Coade stone, Parian ware, electrotyping, etc.) in the diffusion and transformation of models, themes, and genres.
• The impact and adaptation of classical or early modern Italian models and themes in the Anglophone world and vice versa.
• The tension/dialogue between themes after the Antique and medieval or early modern themes from literature or history.
• The tension/dialogue between classical and Christian themes.
• The relationship between European and non-European models, themes, and genres.
• The relationship between painting and sculpture, and the links between making and viewing.
• The relationship between sculpture and prints in the diffusion and transformation of models, themes, and genres.
• The changing audiences of sculpture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the progressive ‘commercialisation’ of models, themes, and genres, exemplified by events such as the 1854 opening of the Crystal Palace (Sydenham).
Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 200 words, along with a short biography (about 100 words – please do not send CVs) to Albertina Ciani (2127054@buckingham.ac.uk) by noon (BST), 30 September 2024. The abstract and biography should be combined in a single Word document and submitted as an email attachment. Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Notification of the outcome will be communicated via email by 31 October 2024.
The conference is part of a series of events organised to celebrate the launch of a new edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique in October 2024.
Fellowship | PhD Position in Architectural History, Trinity College Dublin
From the Call for Applicants, with apologies for the short notice. –CH
PhD Position in Architectural History: Stone in 18th-Century Architecture
Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin, starting September 2024
Applications due by 17 July 2024
Applicants are sought for a funded four-year PhD at Trinity College Dublin, commencing in September 2024, on a topic relating to the ERC advanced grant research project STONE-WORK, led by Professor Christine Casey in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. The successful applicant will be based in the School of Histories and Humanities and enrolled in the Structured PhD Programme. The award comprises the student’s PhD tuition fees and an annual stipend of €25,000.
STONE-WORK challenges the perception of architecture as a primarily conceptual activity by shifting focus from individual to collective achievement. Despite the emphatic materiality of architecture, its history remains dominated by a sequential model which privileges the agency of individuals and ideas. STONE-WORK’s fundamental premise is that architecture results from a cumulative sequence of actions involving an array of actors, great and small. Revealing stone’s hidden trajectory from quarry to wall, floor, column, and chimneypiece will probe the nexus of skills, techniques, and support mechanisms developed by communities in its sourcing, supplying, and fashioning, and the impact of these processes upon building activity. This cross-disciplinary research, combining the history of architecture and craft with geology aims to produce a holistic analysis of architecture and stone production.
The project pursues four main objectives:
• Transform knowledge of interdependence in architectural production.
• Develop a cross-disciplinary interface between geology, craft, and architectural history for the analysis of building stone.
• Reconstruct the trade and labour networks of Anglo-Irish stone production to determine how quarrying and stone-working affected the use of stone in eighteenth-century architecture.
• Discover the qualitative standards in materials and techniques which underpinned the handling of stone in eighteenth-century architectural production.
The PhD dissertation will explore the agency of the consumer and maker in the eighteenth-century stone industry by focusing on the chimney-piece industry in Britain and Ireland. This is an under-studied topic rich in surviving data both material and archival.
We are seeking applicants with the following qualifications:
Essential
• A first-class (or equivalent) undergraduate degree or a master’s degree with distinction in the History of Art or History of Architecture
• Excellent communicative competence in English
• Excellent research and organisational skills
• Knowledge of classical architecture in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland
Desirable
• Demonstrable experience of using archives and working knowledge of eighteenth-century architecture
• Willingness to contribute to the activities of the STONE-WORK research project
Applications for the award must include
• A personal statement (max. 2 pages), including your motivation for applying for this PhD student position
• A curriculum vitae with educational history, including two academic references
• Transcripts of degree results
Prospective students should send these documents to Melanie Hayes at pghishum@tcd.ie by the deadline on the 17th July 2024. The successful candidate will then make a formal application to TCD via the my.tcd.ie portal and be issued with a formal offer in the same manner as other incoming PhD students. Applications will not be considered complete without academic references. Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their application by early August. If the successful candidate does not have English as a first language, s/he will also be required to submit evidence of English language competence at this stage.
Trinity College Dublin is committed to policies, procedures, and practices which do not discriminate on grounds such as gender, civil status, family status, age, disability, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, or membership of the travelling community. On that basis we encourage and welcome talented people from all backgrounds to join our staff and student body. Trinity’s Diversity Statement can be viewed in full here.
Dr Melanie Hayes, Trinity College Dublin, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland, HAYESM7@tcd.ie.
U of Buckingham | MA in French and British Decorative Arts
From the University of Buckingham:
MA in French and British Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors
University of Buckingham (study based in London), starting September 2024
Bursary applications due by 19 July 2024
Applications are invited for a bursary on the University of Buckingham’s MA in Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors starting September 2024. Generously funded by the Leche Trust, the bursary, worth £8,500, will cover just under 78% of the full-time course fees for UK students and just over 50% of the fees for international students. The deadline for bursary applications is Friday, 19 July, 10am GMT. To be eligible for the bursary, students will need to have applied for and been offered a place on the course.
This unique MA in French and British Decorative Arts and Interiors, taught in collaboration with the curatorial and conservation teams at the Wallace Collection, focuses on the development of interiors and decorative arts in England and France in the ‘long’ eighteenth century (c.1660–c.1830) and their subsequent rediscovery and reinterpretation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A key element of the course is the emphasis on the first-hand study of furniture, silver, and ceramics, where possible in the context of historic interiors. Based in central London, it draws upon the outstanding collections of the nearby Wallace Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as the expertise of leading specialists who participate in the teaching.
Bursary priority will be given to applicants
• with excellent academic qualifications, seeking, or currently pursuing careers in museums, the built heritage or conservation,
• in need of financial assistance,
• have a strong interest in the decorative arts and historic buildings,
• or, for those wishing to go on to pursue academic research in the decorative arts and historic interiors.
The bursary is also open to part-time students commencing their studies in 2024 and for whom the funding would be spread over two years. Find out more here. You also may contact Dr Lindsay Macnaughton lindsay.macnaughton@buckingham.ac.uk and the Admissions Office admissions@buckingham.ac.uk.
Andalusia Acquires Portrait of Adèle Sigoigne by Bass Otis
From the press release from Andalusia Historic House, Gardens & Arboretum:
Bass Otis, Portrait of Miss Adèle Sigoine, 1815, oil on canvas (Bensalem, Pennsylvania: The Andalusia Foundation).
An oil painting by Philadelphia artist Bass Otis (1784–1861), Portrait of Miss Adèle Sigoigne (1815)—which has been on view at Andalusia Historic House, Gardens & Arboretum (Andalusia) in Bensalem, Pennsylvania since 2014 as a long-term loan from the Independence Seaport Museum (ISM) in Philadelphia—now joins Andalusia’s permanent collection in an act of collegial partnership. Adèle Sigoigne was a good friend of Jane Craig Biddle (1793–1856) who lived at Andalusia with her husband, Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844). ISM has deaccessioned the painting and transferred its ownership to Andalusia.
“We are overjoyed to have Adèle’s portrait now part of our permanent collection,” said Andalusia’s executive director John Vick. “Every piece of art in the historic house has a unique story to tell about the property and the people who lived here or visited. Adèle was practically family to the Biddles, making this a fitting home for her portrait. We are grateful to our partners at Independence Seaport Museum for recognizing what the painting means to Andalusia and for making this momentous transfer possible.”
“Our staff and Board were unanimous in wanting to transfer this painting permanently to Andalusia,” said Peter Seibert, ISM’s president and chief executive officer. “Its history and associations with the Biddle family are significant, and thus the painting is imminently relevant to their mission. For us, the transfer is a visible reminder of how two museums can come together to ensure that the history and heritage of our community is preserved in public trust for future generations.”
Although it is unclear how or when Jane and Adèle met, their lasting friendship is certain. Close in age and of similar social standing, the two women came from very different backgrounds, however. Jane was a Philadelphian by birth, the only daughter of John and Margaret Craig, the couple who first established Andalusia as a country estate in 1795. Adèle, by contrast, was French-born and had lived in Haiti. After the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, she moved to Philadelphia with her mother, Aimée Sigoigne, who started a school for young women at 128 Pine Street. Adele was one of a few guests who attended Jane’s wedding to Nicholas Biddle, held at Andalusia on 3 October 1811. The Biddles’ three daughters would later attend Madame Sigoigne’s school, including Adèle who was named for her mother’s dear friend. (The name Adèle remained popular for several generations of Biddle descendants.)
Although the portrait is unsigned, its attribution is firm; it is nearly certain that the Biddles commissioned Bass Otis to paint Adèle’s portrait as he also painted Jane’s portrait around 1815. (This painting is in the collection of the Second Bank of the United States Portrait Gallery in Philadelphia.) Both women are shown in fashionable, Empire-style dresses with luxurious fabrics draped over their shoulders: Jane’s is white and sheer while Adèle’s is a vibrant red. Their hair is also similarly styled in an updo with ringlets framing their faces. Nicholas Biddle conveyed his appreciation of Adèle’s portrait to Otis in a letter, which remains with and will be transferred with the painting from ISM.
With its oldest portions dating to the 1790s, the house at Andalusia was expanded by Benjamin Latrobe in 1806 and then again in the 1830s, when an addition with a Doric columned porch was constructed according to designs by Thomas Ustick Walter (Walter had trained under William Strickland).
Since the portrait of Sigoigne has been on loan at Andalusia, it has been on view in the historic house’s library, which was part of the 1830s addition designed by architect Thomas Walter. Now in Andalusia’s permanent collection, it will be moved to what is known as the Painted Floor Bedroom. This room is part of the original 1797 construction and could have been where Adèle stayed when she visited Jane around the time that the portrait was made.
The Biddles’ patronage of Bass Otis continued for many years. In 1827, Nicholas Biddle commissioned the artist to paint a copy of Jacques-Louis David’s famous scene Napolean Crossing the Alps (1801). The oil on canvas copy, also on view at Andalusia, was owned by Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, who knew the Biddles, lived near them in Philadelphia, and owned a country estate (Point Breeze) near Andalusia. By the 1820s, however, the Biddles began to favor another Philadelphia artist, Thomas Sully, who painted the couple’s portraits in 1826, both of which are on view at Andalusia. In 1829 the Biddles commissioned him to paint another portrait of Adèle Sigoigne, which is in the collection of The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.
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Andalusia Historic House, Gardens & Arboretum is a non-profit organization and a scenic 50-acre property overlooking the Delaware River in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. Established more than 225 years ago, the site is a natural paradise of preserved native woodlands and spectacular gardens, as well as museum with an exceptional collection of paintings, sculptures, decorative art, and rare books and manuscripts.
The Kimbell Acquires Stubbs’s Mares and Foals
George Stubbs, Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, ca. 1761–62, oil on canvas, 99 × 187 cm
(Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, acquired in memory of Ben J. Fortson)
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From the press release (28 June 2024), as noted at Art History News:
The Kimbell Art Museum today announced the acquisition of George Stubbs’s Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, painted between about 1761 and 1762. Widely regarded as the finest painter of animals in the history of European art, Stubbs is best known for his paintings of horses, which transcend historical genres to achieve rare pictorial refinement and emotional resonance. The painting entering the Kimbell’s collection is one of the principal, and likely earliest, in a celebrated, innovative series that has been called the artist’s crowning achievement: paintings depicting friezes of brood mares and their offspring. The acquisition, along with that of Thomas Gainsborough’s painting Going to Market, Early Morning (ca. 1773), purchased by the Kimbell in 2023, significantly elevates the Kimbell’s holdings of eighteenth-century British paintings, which Velma and Kay Kimbell favored when initially building their collection. The painting will be on view in the Kimbell’s Louis I. Kahn Building beginning 28 June 2024.
“With a mandate to collect only works of major historical and aesthetic importance, the Kimbell is the natural home for this masterpiece,” said Eric Lee, director of the Kimbell Art Museum. “I am sure that it will become an audience favorite. Visitors to the museum will relish the multidimensional depiction of mares and foals—alive with subtle drama, imbued with tenderness, and fascinating in its expression of the individual personalities of each horse.”
In this picture, which is slightly more than six feet long by three feet tall, a mature bay mare commands the center of a group of two other mares and three foals, who nuzzle close to their mothers. The composition is set within a springtime landscape at what is probably the viscount’s family estate of Lydiard Tregoze, Wiltshire, now Borough of Swindon, with verdant green parkland, cloudy sky, and a broad, dark gray stretch of water providing spatial interest beyond the long, slender legs of the horses. Highly naturalistic, the horses are lifelike in their anatomical forms and poses. While the overall mood is tranquil and domestic as the horses gently commune with each other, the cloudy sky and the wide, sparkling eyes of the mares add an element of drama and nobility to the composition.
The titular 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, Frederick St. John (1732–1787), was one of Stubbs’s most important early patrons. The Kimbell painting seems to be the earliest commission of this virtually unprecedented subject; it is probably the work that Stubbs exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1762. Soon, other members of Bolingbroke’s circle of aristocratic horse enthusiasts and fellow statesmen of the Whig political party commissioned similar compositions on the theme of brood mares and their offspring, many doubtless depicting the patrons’ own horses. Stubbs’s equestrian paintings—along with his portrayals of rural life and of other animals—were an especially delightful and sophisticated expression of the pastimes of the British nobility and landed gentry. Patrons could hang such works alongside fashionable portraits and Old Master paintings in their town or country houses, where vast fields, parklands, stables, and studs reflected their love of hunting and sporting life.
Stubbs was then, and is today, recognized for his unrivaled understanding of equine anatomy and unsurpassed ability to record not only the appearance of individual animals but also their temperaments. His genius in understanding the horse arose from anatomical study and from his apparent empathy for the character of each horse and his ability to express its exquisite beauty. His skill extended to landscapes that enhanced the mood, composition, and legibility of the animal subjects.
Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke remained in the family collection at Lydiard Tregoze until it was sold at auction in 1943 and shortly thereafter entered the collection of Mrs. John Arthur Dewar, of the whisky distillery family, who also owned Henry Raeburn’s Allen Brothers (Portrait of James and John Lee Allen), which entered the Kimbell collection in 2002. The Kimbell acquired Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke from a private collection through London-based art dealers Simon C. Dickinson Ltd. At the museum, the painting joins Stubbs’s Lord Grosvenor’s Arabian Stallion with a Groom, a work acquired by the Kimbell in 1981. Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke was previously on view at the Kimbell in 2004–05, when it was on loan to the exhibition Stubbs and the Horse.
The Kimbell Art Foundation acquired Mares and Foals Belonging to the 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke in memory of Ben J. Fortson (1932–2024), who passed away in May and whose leadership was instrumental in the Kimbell’s growth. Mr. Fortson served on the Board of Directors of the Kimbell Art Foundation from 1964 until his death and was the Foundation’s longtime Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. He will be forever remembered for stewarding the Kimbell’s investments and finances and for being the driving force behind the building of the museum’s Renzo Piano Pavilion, which opened in 2013 and houses the museum’s temporary exhibitions and permanent collections of Asian, African, and ancient American art.
Symposium | Anna Dorothea Therbusch in Context
From the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and noted at ArtHist.net:
Anna Dorothea Therbusch in Context: 18th-Century (Women) Artists in Berlin and Europe
Anna Dorothea Therbusch im Kontext: Künstlerinnen und Künstler des 18. Jahrhunderts in Berlin und Europa
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Kulturforum, 26–27 September 2024
Registration due by 4 August 2024
The Berlin painter Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) enjoyed a remarkable international career in the eighteenth century, travelling to Stuttgart, Mannheim, and Paris. Here, she was accepted into the Académie royale and she exhibited at the Salon. Back in her native city in 1769, Therbusch became a sought-after portraitist of Berlin society and worked for the Russian Tsar’s court and the Prussian royal family. The symposium marks the conclusion of a two-year art-historical and art-technological research and publication project by the Berlin Gemäldegalerie on Therbusch’s works in the public collections in Berlin and Brandenburg. It serves to bring researchers together, share the results obtained, and highlight further research perspectives.
Registration is possible until 4 August 2024. Please send an email with your contact details to a.groeger@smb.spk-berlin.de. You will receive a registration confirmation. The number of participants is limited for organisational reasons; early registration is recommended.
t h u r s d a y , 2 6 s e p t e m b e r
18.00 Begrüßung | Welcome
• Dagmar Hirschfelder (Direktorin der Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
18.15 Buchvorstellung | Book Presentation
• Anna Dorothea Therbusch in Berlin und Brandenburg: Werke, Technik, Kontext, Nuria Jetter, Sarah Salomon, Anja Wolf (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
18.45 Abendvortrag | Evening Lecture
• Ein ,Meteor‘ am süddeutschen Himmel: Anna Dorothea Therbuschs Netzwerke und Karrierestrategie —Katharina Küster (Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart)
f r i d a y , 2 7 s e p t e m b e r
9.00 Registrierung | Registration
9.15 Begrüßung | Welcome
Dagmar Hirschfelder (Direktorin der Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
9.30 Morning Session 1
• Anna Dorothea Therbusch und der ,weibliche Pinsel‘: Karrierestrategien einer Malerin im Europa des 18. Jahrhunderts — Gernot Mayer (Universität Wien)
• Therbuschs Künstlerporträts: Künstlerische Weiterentwicklung und kollegiale Anerkennung — Léonie Paula Kortmann (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg)
• ,Mit einer Rembrandt’schen Kraft und van Dyck’schen Wahrheit‘: Anna Dorothea Therbuschs Stuttgarter Selbstporträt (1761) — Sanja Hilscher (Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart)
11.00 Kaffeepause | Coffee Break
11.30 Morning Session 2
• Gemalte Leben: Selbstbildnisse der Lisiewska-Schwestern — Sarah Salomon (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
• Therbusch unter der Lupe: Ergebnisse der maltechnischen Untersuchungen — Anja Wolf (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) und Jens Bartoll (Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg)
• Beobachtungen zur Maltechnik Christoph Friedrich Reinhold Lisiewskys im Spiegel der Arbeitsweise seiner Schwester Anna Dorothea Therbusch — Maria Zielke (Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz)
13.00 Mittagspause | Lunch Break
14.30 Afternoon Session 1
• Diderot’s ‚Mystification‘: Anna Dorothea Therbusch and Prince Dmitry Alexandrovich Golitsyn in Paris and Brussels — Catherine Phillips (Norwich)
• Schadow vs. Therbusch? Porträts der Henriette Herz als Seismografen für die Wandlungen des (jüdischen) Frauenbildes um 1800 — Claudia Czok und Hannah Lotte Lund (Berlin)
15.30 Kaffeepause | Coffee Break
16:00 Afternoon Session 2
• How Dare She: Fleshing Out Therbusch’s Female Nudes — Christina Lindeman (University of South Alabama)
• Therbuschs Historien — Nuria Jetter (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)
Image: The conference programme reproduces Anna Dorothea Therbusch’s Self-Portrait with Monocle, 1776 (Berlin: Gemäldegalerie).
New Book | Anna Dorothea Therbusch in Berlin und Brandenburg
From Michael Imhof Verlag:
Anna Dorothea Therbusch in Berlin und Brandenburg: Werke, Technik, Kontext (Berlin: Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2024), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-3731913788, €40.
Anna Dorothea Therbusch (1721–1782) war eine der bedeutendsten Künstlerinnen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Schon als junge Frau arbeitete sie für Adlige im Umfeld des preußischen Königshauses. Später reüssierte sie in Paris, wo ihr als einer der wenigen Frauen überhaupt im Jahr 1767 die Aufnahme in die wichtigste europäische Kunstakademie der Zeit, die Pariser Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, gelang. Zurück in ihrer Heimatstadt wurde sie eine gefragte Porträtmalerin der Berliner Gesellschaft und fertigte auch mythologische Historien für die Schlösser Friedrichs II. an. Das Buch macht erstmals die in Berlin und Brandenburg aufbewahrten Gemälde der außergewöhnlichen Preußin systematisch in einem Buch greifbar. Darüber hinaus vermittelt es neue Erkenntnisse zu Therbuschs Arbeitsweise und den von ihr verwendeten Materialien. Die thematischen Essays verfolgen übergreifende Fragen zum Leben und künstlerischen Schaffen der Malerin und dienen so zugleich als aktuelle Einführung in ihr Gesamtwerk.
New Book | The Gallery at Cleveland House
From Bloomsbury:
Anne Nellis Richter, The Gallery at Cleveland House: Displaying Art and Society in Late Georgian London (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1350372757, $120.
In 1806, the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford opened a gallery at Cleveland House, London, to display their internationally-renowned collection of Old Master paintings to the public. A ticket to the gallery’s Wednesday afternoon openings was a sought-after prize, granting access to the collection and the house’s dazzling interior in the company of artists, celebrities, and Britain’s elite. This book explores the gallery’s interior through the lens of its abundant material culture, including paintings in gilded frames, furniture, silver oil lamps, flower arrangements, and the numerous printed catalogues and guidebooks that made the gallery visible to those who might never cross its threshold.
Through detailed analysis of these objects and a wide range of other visual, material, textual, and archival sources, the book presents the gallery at Cleveland House as a methodological case study on how the display of art in the 19th century was shaped by notions about public and private space, domesticity, and the role art galleries played in the formation of national culture. In doing so, the book also explains how and why magnificent private galleries and the artworks and objects they contained gripped the public imagination during a critical period of political and cultural transformation during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Combining historical, cultural, and material analysis, the book will make essential reading for researchers in British art in the Regency period, museum studies, collecting studies, social history, and the histories of interior decoration and design in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Anne Nellis Richter is an independent scholar and adjunct faculty, Smithsonian Internship Semester program, at Smith College.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Introduction: ‘The Finest in England’
1 ‘A Very Complete Business’: Designing and Building the Gallery
2 ‘The High Attraction of the Spectacle’: Displaying Sociability
3 ‘The Superb Furniture within’: Materiality and the Domestic Interior
4 ‘We Have Lately Been Much Attacked’: Exhibiting Morality
5 ‘To Private Collections Alone’: The Apotheosis of the Private Gallery
Conclusion: The ‘Home’ of Art
Call for Papers | Private Collections Open to the Public
From ArtHist.net:
Emergence, Transformation, Maintenance: Private Collections Open to the Public from the 18th Century to the Present Day
Rogalin Palace Museum / Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 29–31 May 2025
Proposals due by 6 September 2024
The relationship between private collecting and public museums formation has a long trajectory in the history of museums. Over the last three centuries, private collecting has developed swiftly around the world. Although initially it was an activity reserved for privileged groups, reflecting acquisitive interests of a wealthy individuals and their advisers, over the time it covered almost all circles of society.
Since the 18th century private collectors have been opening their collections to the public. Apart from the princely and aristocratic collections, in the 19th century also bankers, industrialists, art dealers and connoisseurs, as well as doctors, artists and representatives of the intelligentsia more and more often made their collections available. The existence of collections opened to the public frequently ended with the death of collectors and the subsequent sale of their property. Sometimes, however, private collection turned into a private museum, which material existence was ensured by funds left by collectors and managed by their family, heirs or a special foundation. Established in this way centuries ago, private museums often function to this day in private hands, as a part of foundations formed by the collectors themselves, or transformed into a state institution. Private collections and museums currently owned by the state and managed by public museums are often arranged with respect for the private history of the collections and the original concept of the founder. Usually, the latter are located within the collectors’ residences as to some extent, it was almost a rule that private collections were made available within collectors’ homes—in apartments, city palaces or country residences. Less often, collectors founded special buildings dedicated to gather, display and make their collections available to the public.
The conference will be dedicated to private collections open to the public. Although there are many important aspects related to the functioning of private collections, we are not interested in the history of private collections, their establishment and content, nor in the shaping of collections on the art market. Investigating the relationship between private collections and public sphere we are interested in different types of private museums, from art and science collections open to the public, to houses of famous personalities (e.g. artists’ ateliers, writers’ houses). We aim to reflect mostly on such problems as:
1 Accessibility of collections (On what terms collections were accessible and available for the public? What was the legal and organizational framework and principles of visiting the collections? How museums facilitate access to the collection and how the idea of accessibility has change over time base, since the moment of foundation of collection to the present day?).
2 Display of collections (How individual concepts of collectors are visible in a display? What was the impact of exhibitions in public museums on the arrangement of private collections? What are the methods of displaying private collections after transformation into public institution – preserving the arrangement proposed by the collector or rethinking the old concept, and opening to new exhibition trends?).
3 Collectors and their vision (How collectors’ original intentions manifested themselves in their museums and how is it maintained present day? How the original concept or a will of the collector may impact the current appearance of the collection?).
4 Work of museologists with private collections (How to research private collections in public display or transformed into public institution? How these collections evolved over time, and how have museums reinterpreted these collections to remain relevant to contemporary and diverse audiences? How museum cooperate with collector’s descendants? What is the legal situation of the collections, especially in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, where the collections were plundered and dispersed during World War II, and then nationalized during communism?).
Applicants are kindly asked to submit a brief abstract (250 words) and a short biographical note (100 words) by Friday, 6 September 2024. Please email your proposals to m.lukasiewicz@amu.edu.pl and kamila.kludkiewicz@amu.edu.pl.
New Book | Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family
Forthcoming from Penn Press:
Gloria McCahon Whiting, Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-1512824490, $40.
Explores how Black New Englanders maintained a sense of belonging among their kin in the face of slavery
As winter turned to spring in the year 1699, Sebastian and Jane embarked on a campaign of persuasion. The two wished to marry, and they sought the backing of their community in Boston. Nothing, however, could induce Jane’s enslaver to consent. Only after her death did Sebastian and Jane manage to wed, forming a long-lasting union even though husband and wife were not always able to live in the same household.
New England is often considered a cradle of liberty in American history, but this snippet of Jane and Sebastian’s story reminds us that it was also a cradle of slavery. From the earliest years of colonization, New Englanders bought and sold people, most of whom were of African descent. In Belonging, Gloria McCahon Whiting tells the region’s early history from the perspective of the people, like Jane and Sebastian, who belonged to others and who struggled to maintain a sense of belonging among their kin. Through a series of meticulously reconstructed family narratives, Whiting traces the contours of enslaved people’s intimate lives in early New England, where they often lived with those who bound them but apart from kin. Enslaved spouses rarely were able to cohabit; fathers and their offspring routinely were separated by inheritance practices; children could be removed from their mothers at an enslaver’s whim; and people in bondage had only partial control of their movement through the region, which made more difficult the task of maintaining distant relationships. But Belonging does more than lay bare the obstacles to family stability for those in bondage. Whiting also charts Afro-New Englanders’ persistent demands for intimacy throughout the century and a half stretching from New England’s founding to the American Revolution. And she shows how the work of making and maintaining relationships influenced the region’s law, religion, society, and politics. Ultimately, the actions taken by people in bondage to fortify their families played a pivotal role in bringing about the collapse of slavery in New England’s most populous state, Massachusetts.
Gloria McCahon Whiting is E. Gordon Fox Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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