Sculpture Journal, November 2023

The latest issue of the Sculpture Journal is dedicated to the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:

Sculpture Journal 32.4 (November 2023)

• Samantha Lukic-Scott and Charlotte Davis, “Valuing Sculpture: Art, Craft, and Industry, 1660–1860,” pp. 409–16.
Responding to the many useful and intriguing discussions that arose over the two days of the Valuing Sculpture: Art, Craft and Industry, 1660–1860 conference held in July 2021, this special issue explores new directions for scholarly research. This introduction considers the usefulness of the classifications of art, craft, and industry, and in doing so presents this collection’s methodology of expanding dialogues by reaching across medial, dimensional, geographical, and categorical boundaries.

• M. G. Sullivan, “Valuing Sculpture in the Long Eighteenth Century: Materials and Technology,” pp. 417–32.
In 1712 the sale catalogue of John Nost’s studio defined the value of sculpture as lying in the intrinsic value of materials, the performance of the artist, and the costs and complexity of sculptural production. This article looks at how these values of materials and making shifted over the course of the following 150 years through specific examples of materials—lead and granite—that gained and then lost value; and how production processes that streamlined sculptural production, notably James Tulloch’s marble works, were first celebrated and then seen as anathema to sculptural value. The article argues for the malleability of sculptural value systems in the long eighteenth century, and the need to understand sculptural value in materials and production in relation to economic and technological history.

• Caroline Stanford, “‘Peculiarly Fit for Statues’: The Contribution of Coade’s Fired Artificial Stone to Sculpture in the Eighteenth Century,” pp. 433–50.
This article considers the enduring ‘value’ of Coade stone as artefact. Using insights from Alois Riegl’s The Modern Cult of Monuments, it examines the contribution of fired artificial stone as a key enabler of the eighteenth-century passion for sculpture in Britain, as replicated sculptural forms entered interiors, gardens, and architecture. This durable stoneware first crossed into statuary in the 1720s. From 1769, Eleanor Coade (1733–1821) became its figurehead, successfully positioning Coade stone as superior to natural stone. Formulation and production were collaborative processes dependent upon specialist, often overlooked fabricating skills. This article considers factors that led to the success of Coade stone, as well as its composition and production. It concludes with a brief case study of the Coade stone caryatids that Sir John Soane took as a personal motif.

• Rebecca Wade, “The Young Naturalist by Henry Weekes: Intermediality, Industry, and International Exhibitions,” pp. 451–68.
The Young Naturalist by Henry Weekes (1807–77) was first presented in plaster at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1854. Beginning as an object located firmly in the domain of the fine arts through its modes of production and sites of display, the sculpture encountered industry through a series of international exhibitions in Paris, London and Manchester during the 1850s and 1860s. Not only was the work in proximity to industrial objects, processes and collectors, it was fundamentally transformed by them, resulting in a collaboration between Weekes and the Birmingham-based manufacturer Elkington & Co. This article charts the changing status of sculpture and labour in the second half of the nineteenth century, with its increasing visibility and availability to new markets through both emerging and established technologies of reproduction.

• Liberty Paterson, ” ‘Wider than the Realm of England’: The Hosack Family Heritage, Atlantic Slavery, and Casting Mary, Queen of Scots for the Nation,” pp. 469–92.
In 1871 the Scottish-born magistrate John Hosack (1809–87) was described as ‘the chivalrous and most recent defender’ of Mary, Queen of Scots. After writing a popular historical account of her life, he had presented a plaster cast bust of her Westminster effigy to London’s National Portrait Gallery, which it then used to create an electrotype sculpture with the help of Elkington & Co. This article interrogates the ‘value’ of this sculpture as a cultural heritage object by retracing its history. It places Hosack’s desire to replicate and commemorate Scottish heritage alongside his family ties to Jamaica, including the parallel life of his half-brother William and the wealth John derived from his father’s sugar profits, which relied on African enslavement. It argues the importance of understanding how such legacies enabled individuals to participate in cultural philanthropy in the Victorian period, which simultaneously distanced them from their Atlantic pasts. It also considers how, in its transformation into an electrotype, Hosack’s cast became part of a wider effort by museums and galleries to replicate national heritage using manufacturing methods indebted to the industrial economy intertwined with the British Empire. Sculpture offered a powerful medium through which to fortify national history, but its commemorative capacity can, and should, be unpicked to better understand British legacies of enslavement and colonialism.

• Justine Gain, “Valuing Ornament: Jean-Baptiste Plantar (1790–1879) between Art, Craft, and Industry,” pp. 493–511.
In the nineteenth century, as European countries reacted to industrialization, art, and burgeoning industries intertwined in a myriad of new ways. From this union, several major changes occurred in building construction, decorative arts, and sculpture. The career and oeuvre of Jean-Baptiste Plantar, French ornamentalist and sculptor des Bâtiments du Roi, illustrate the new relationships forged between traditional architectural patterns and industrial artistic production. Despite holding a central role in their establishment, Plantar has been largely unheeded both by his contemporaries and later writers. This article reasserts Plantar’s significance in the creation of a visual—essentially Parisian—landscape in the first half of the nineteenth century.

• Patricia Monteiro, “The Art of Stucco in Southern Portugal: Morphologies, Value Judgements, and the Prejudice of Conservation,” pp. 513–29.
The Portuguese artistic production of stucco is part of a long tradition of decorative techniques that form part of a shared visual and cultural legacy in southern Europe. However, little is understood of local idiosyncrasies within this legacy. By focusing on stucco artworks in the peripheral area of Alentejo, away from the cultural capitals of Europe, this article explores the emergence of an original and distinct formal and functional interplay over the course of several centuries. This article re-evaluates the morphologies of Alentejo’s stucco sculptures and assesses the degree to which such morphologies express common artistic practices and constitute a distinct art form. Finally, the article identifies the deleterious ramifications that have arisen from such considerations not being taken account of during the conservation of these works.

• David Mark Mitchell, “Fabricating Enchantment: Antoine Benoist’s Wax Courtiers in Louis XIV’s Paris,” pp. 531–44.
Antoine Benoist’s Cercle royal was an exhibition of life-size wax figures on display in Louis XIV’s Paris. In the absence of extant objects from the exhibition itself, this article focuses on the corpus of sources that attest to its reception. It concentrates on the Cercle royal’s initial recognition, beginning in the 1660s, when the exhibition centred on French royalty’s courtly entourage. Alternately celebrated as vivid miracles or derided as deceitful trivialities, Benoist’s wax figures provide an informatively problematic case for considering questions of sculptural craft and the decorum of its display in this era. In tracing the discord of wax portraiture’s reception, this article demonstrates that vexed questions of artisanal stature were embedded within aesthetic debates about illusionistic verisimilitude.

• Jennifer Dudley, Review of the exhibition If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960–2022 (Hepworth Wakefield, 2023), pp. 545–48.

 

New Book | American Latium: American Artists and Travelers

From the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca:

Christopher M.S. Johns, Tommaso Manfredi, and Karin Wolfe, eds., American Latium: American Artists and Travelers in and around Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour (Rome: Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, 2023), ISBN: 978-8897610373.

This volume brings together the proceedings of the international conference American Latium: American Artists and Travelers in and around Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour, sponsored by the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca and hosted by the Centro Studi Americani in Rome on the 7–8 June 2018, convened by Christopher M.S. Johns, Tommaso Manfredi, and Karin Wolfe. The conference examined the concept of cultural exchange between America and Rome and its surrounding territory not as a bilateral transfer of culture, but rather as an entangled and reciprocal history of cultural transmission, including the importance of London with its powerful art academies as an intermediate destination for Americans making their way to the continent. Travel to Rome engaged American artists, collectors, scientists, writers, and diplomats in dialogue with a network of European artists, intellectuals, and statesmen. The remarkable degree of cosmopolitanism found in Rome signalled its importance not simply as a cultural destination, but as a place of experiment and creativity for travelers of differing nationalities who gathered there—a place where ancient history and tradition was cross-pollinated with the experience of the modern. American Latium addresses the pioneering origins of the artistic relations between America, Rome, and its environs from the eighteenth century up until 1870. Interdisciplinary in nature, these proceedings present new, and at times unexpected, research on the experience of reciprocal cultural exchange.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction — Karin Wolfe

The American Grand Tour: From Old Masters to the New World
• Copying Old Masters for the New World: American Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome — Jonny Yarker
• James Bowdoin III and Ward Nicholas Boylston in Italy: American Collectors in the Later Eighteenth Century — Sarah Cantor
• John Singleton Copley in Rome: The Challenge of the Old Masters Accepted — Christopher M.S. Johns
• London Between America and Continental Europe: Art and Academies — Martin Postle
• The Prince and the President: Antonio Canova and Benjamin West at the Royal Academy in London — Francesco Moschini
• John Neal, the Old Masters, and the American Muse — Francesca Orestano
• ‘In the Beginning There Was the Word’: American Writings on Raphael from the Founding Fathers to the Gilded Age — Linda Wolk-Simon

American Latium: Sites and Itineraries in and around Rome
• American Itineraries in Rome and the Campagna — Fabrizio Di Marco
• A Grave in a Foreign Land: Early American Presence at the Protestant Burying-Ground in Rome — Nicholas Stanley-Price
• Thomas Cole and the Aqueducts: Plein Air Painting in the Roman Campagna — Lisa Beaven
• Thomas Cole, Desolation, and the Ruins of Rome — David R. Marshall
• Scenery Found: John Gadsby Chapman and Open- Air Oil Sketching in and around Rome, 1830–1882 — Mary K. McGuigan
• American and European Artists and Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Latium: The ‘School of the Castelli Romani’ and the Locanda Martorelli in Ariccia — Francesco Petrucci
• Living and Creating in Antiquity: Roman Residences and Studios of Thomas Gibson Crawford, William Wetmore Story, and Moses Jacob Ezekiel — Pier Paolo Racioppi

Americans and the Artistic Culture of Rome: Toward an American Art
• Americans on the Grand Tour and Angelica Kauffman in Rome — Wendy Wassyng Roworth
• Championing Liberty: The Roman Sculptor Giuseppe Ceracchi in Britain and in America — Karin Wolfe
• The Rome of Charles Bulfinch — Tommaso Manfredi
• Thomas Jefferson: Rome in America — Maria Cristina Loi
• A Painter and Diplomat: The Two Careers of James Edward Freeman and Their Correspondences — John F. McGuigan Jr
• Forgotten Fervor: Paul Akers in Rome — Arlene Palmer
• Undressing America: Nineteenth-Century Expatriate Sculptors in Rome and the Problem of Nudity — Kevin Salatino

Bibliography
In Memoriam and Acknowledgements

New Book | Piranesi@300

From Artemide Edizioni:

Mario Bevilacqua and Clare Hornsby, eds., Piranesi@300 (Rome: Artemide Edizioni, 2023), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-8875754327, €48.

A volume of essays celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778).

Piranesi: printmaker, architect, antiquarian, art theorist, art dealer, and polemicist, passionate in his praise of the greatness of Rome. He was a protagonist in 18th-century European arts and letters, a brilliant artistic innovator, and a controversial and exuberant personality, universally celebrated and admired. The 26 essays in this volume—from a wide range of authors writing in Italian, English, and French—include the contributions to the 2021 conference celebrating the 300th anniversary of his birth, a collaboration between architectural historian Mario Bevilacqua, director of the Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma, and art historian Clare Hornsby, Research Fellow at the British School at Rome; they are also the editors of this volume published by Artemide Edizioni. The essays represent new research on the artist, on the collecting of his work internationally, and on his profound and long lasting influence in Europe and beyond, from the age of the Grand Tour until now.

C O N T E N T S

Piranesi incisore, architetto, antiquario e teorico
• Ginevra Mariani — Progetto Piranesi: il catalogo generale delle matrici di Piranesi, 2010–2020. Riflessioni e nuovi dati
• Lucia Ghedin — Deduzioni e ipotesi sulla tecnica incisoria di Piranesi
• Giovanna Scaloni — Piranesi riflette su Montano: la genesi della pianta del Campo Marzio
• Maria Grazia D’Amelio, Fabrizio De Cesaris — Giovanni Battista Piranesi e l’architettura pratica
• Paolo Pastres — Fantasia al potere: Piranesi, Algarotti e la lezione di Antonio Conti
• Lola Kantor-Kazovsky — Piranesi’s Invenzioni capric di carceri and the Cartesian concept of dream
• Silvia Gavuzzo-Stewart — La dedica di Piranesi a Lord Charlemont nella tavola II delle Antichità Romane
• Adriàn Fernàndez Almoguera — Rêver le Nil depuis le Tibre: le regard de Piranèse sur la question égyptienne
• Eleonora Pistis — The thinkability of architecture: Piranesi without images
• Heather Hyde Minor — Piranesi’s Epistolic Art

Collezionare Piranesi
• Ebe Antetomaso — Materiali piranesiani nella collezione Corsini: appunti dai bibliotecari
• Georg Schelbert, Charleen Rethmeyer — Piranesi in Prussia: spotlights on a variable relationship
• Gudula Metze — 1720–1778: Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the Kupferstich-Kabinett Dresden
• Delfin Rodríguez Ruiz — Piranesi e la Spagna: rapporti culturali, artistici e architettonici durante l’illuminismo spagnolo

L’influenza di Piranesi: Europa e oltre
• Clare Hornsby — Piranesi’s Ichnographiam Campi Martii Antiquae Urbis: an investigation into its sources and innovations and its influences on the work of Robert Adam
• Valeria Mirra — Dalla fortuna di Giovanni Battista Piranesi in Francia allo stabilimento dei Piranesi frères a Parigi
• Olga Medvedkova — La Dévideuse italienne ou habiter la Ruine
• Aleksander Musiał — Beyond capriccio: Piranesi’s transgressive classicism and its Eastern European receptions
• Mario Bevilacqua — Piranesi in eighteenth-century America
• Angela Rosch Rodrigues — Piranesi at the Brazilian National Library: a trajectory of the ruine parlanti from Rome to Rio de Janeiro
• Helena Perez Gallardo — Sotto il cielo di Parigi: Piranesi negli incisori e fotografi francesi nel 1850
• Hiromasa Kanayama — Piranesi nel Giappone dell’Ottocento: le vicende della collezione Kamei

Piranesi XX–XXI secolo
• Victor Plahte Tschudi — Carceri and Cubism
• Giacomo Pala — Architetto postumo, o il postmoderno e ‘Piranesi’
• Angelo Marletta — Forma Urbis forma Architecturae: Piranesi, Kahn e i frammenti di Roma
• Jeanne Britton, Michael Gavin, Zoe Langer, Jason Porter — The Digital Piranesi

Thematic Route | Women as Art Promoters and Patrons at the Prado

This thematic route is one tangible result of a symposium held in March of this year, which focused on the period 1451 to 1633; a second symposium addressing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is scheduled for 6–7 March 2023 (see the note at the end of this posting and a separate posting).

El Prado en femenino
The Female Perspective: The Role of Women as Promoters and Patrons of the Arts at the Prado
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 14 December 2022 — 9 April 2023

Developed with Noelia García Pérez

In collaboration with the Ministry of Culture’s Institute for Women, from today (14 December 2022) until 9 April 2023 the Museo Nacional del Prado is offering a new perspective on its permanent collection through a thematic route devised with the academic supervision of Noelia García Pérez, associate professor of art history at the University of Murcia. The result is a fresh viewpoint and one that encourages us to focus on the role of women as promoters and patrons of the arts.

Among all European museums, the Prado is probably the one in which women have played the most decisive role with regard to its configuration, either as collectors and promoters or through their key contribution to its foundation and existence. Works such as Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, Titian’s Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg, the superb bronze sculptures of Philip II and Mary of Hungary commissioned from Pompeo and Leone Leoni, and The Holy Family with Saints by Rubens would not be present in the Prado’s collection without women’s involvement.

The works included in this thematic route are associated with women who were not only notable for their activities as patrons but also in the promotion of the artists who worked in their service. One particularly notable example is that of Isabel Clara Eugenia (1566–1633). The Prado houses dozens of works directly resulting from her patronage, in addition to the fact that the Museum’s close connections with Rubens is particularly allied to the promotion and dissemination of his career on the part of the Archduchess, who was governor of the Southern Netherlands. This explains why the Prado houses the largest collection of works by Rubens in the world.

The Female Perspective reflects the first edition of the symposium Key Women in the Creation of the Prado’s Collections: From Isabella I of Castile to Isabel Clara Eugenia (Protagonistas femeninas en la formación de las colecciones del Prado: De Isabel I de Castilla a Isabel Clara Eugenia), which took place in March this year and will be followed by Key Women in the Creation of the Prado’s Collections, Part II: From Elisabeth of France to Mariana of Neuburg (Protagonistas femeninas en la formación de las colecciones del Museo del Prado II: De Isabel de Borbón a Mariana de Neoburgo), to be held on 6 and 7 March 2023.

The full press release is available here»

The Female Perspective: Women Art Patrons of the Museo del Prado (Madrid: Prado, 2022), 160 pages, €10.

Call for Papers | G.L.F. Laves and Colleagues, 1770–1860

From the Call for Papers:

G.L.F. Laves and Colleagues: Architects as Designers of Interiors and Furniture, 1770–1860
Museum August Kestner, Hanover, 17–18 March 2023

Proposals due by 12 September 2022

Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves (1788–1864), among the most important representatives of classicism in Germany, decisively shaped the image of the city of Hanover with his urban-planning designs and structures. Numerous secular buildings, including the Leineschloss in the city centre—the residence of the kings of Hanover from 1837 to 1866 and today the seat of the Landtag of Lower Saxony—as well as the reconstructed Schloss Herrenhausen and private palace, are reminders of this court architect of the Kingdom of Hanover. Building alterations and new constructions based on his designs have survived in various places in what is now Lower Saxony, including Schloss Derneburg and the Schloss Celle. As part of these projects, Laves also designed the corresponding interiors, which put him in line with his famous contemporaries Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Berlin), Leo von Klenze and Jean-Baptiste Métivier (Munich), and Johann Conrad Bromeis (Kassel). A majority of the interiors designed by Laves were destroyed in World War II—such as the representative halls of the Leineschloss (1834–36) and the living quarters of the royal family in the Palais an der Leinstrasse (ca. 1818 and later)—and the furniture scattered. Based on the research project of Thomas Dann, who has a comprehensive view of designs for furniture and interiors thanks to his many years of archival work and research around surviving furniture, the Museum August Kestner is showing the exhibition G. L. F. Laves—ein Hofarchitekt entwirft Möbel from 6 November 2022 to 26 March 2023. For the first time in Hanover, a selection of Laves’s drawings for furniture and interiors will be on view, together with examples of furniture created according to his designs.

Parallel to the exhibition, mobile – Gesellschaft der Freunde von Möbel- und Raumkunst e.V., the Museum August Kestner, and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris are organizing an international conference that seeks to place Laves’s furniture and interior designs in a larger historical and cultural context. Among the well-known architects who were frequently encountered in the 19th century and who—like Laves in Hanover—designed interiors as well as furniture were the English architects Jeffry Wyatville, John Nash, and Thomas Hope, along with Charles Percier, Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, and Jakob-Ignatz Hittorff in France, and Pelagio Palagi in Italy. It is this special aspect of his work that is the focus of the conference Georg Ludwig Friedrich Laves and Colleagues: Architects as Designers of Interiors and Furniture, 1770–1860, with particular emphasis on the furniture designs. From an expanded European perspective, the question of the defining characteristics of architects’ furniture will be taken up.

Further themes and questions might include:
• What sources of inspiration/role models are called upon and what materials are preferred for the execution?
• What role do surrogate materials play, such as decoration in stucco or sheet iron and zinc?
• How did the transfer of knowledge transnationally between the architects and craftsmen work?
• What is the relationship between architect and client when it comes to the design of interior spaces?
• What sources are there on the collaboration between designers and the executing tradesmen?

The conference will take place on 17–18 March 2023 in the Museum August Kestner in Hanover and is geared towards junior and early career scholars. Proposals for a 20-minute presentation (abstract of 300 words maximum; the conference languages are German and English) together with a short biography (including email and physical address as well as institutional affiliation) should be emailed to the following address by 12 September 2022: laves@dfk-paris.org. You will be informed of the outcome of your submission by the beginning of October 2022 at the latest.

Conference Organizers
Mirjam Brandt (Museum August Kestner, Hanover), Andreas Büttner (Städtisches Museum Braunschweig), Jörg Ebeling (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris), Martin Glinzer (art historian, Berlin), Henriette Graf (Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg), Petra Krutisch (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg), and Sally Schöne (Museum August Kestner, Hanover)

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Note (added 27 March 2023)— A summary of the conference (in German) by Meinrad von Engelberg can be found at ArtHist.net.

Online | Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade

Presented by the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, and Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture:

Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures
Online conference in four parts: 9–23 April 2021

Organized by Sarah Mallory, Kéla Jackson, and Rachel Burke, together with Joanna Sheers Seidenstein

Registration is now open for the conference Art Museums and the Legacies of the Dutch Slave Trade: Curating Histories, Envisioning Futures, presented by the Center for Netherlandish Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Harvard Art Museums, and Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture. This four-partprogram explores efforts by art museums to deploy their spaces and their collections—which are often enmeshed with colonialism and exploitation—to present more complete narratives of and perspectives on slavery and its legacies. This conference is organized by Sarah Mallory, Kéla Jackson, and Rachel Burke, all doctoral students in Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Curatorial Fellow in the Division of European and American Art, at the Harvard Art Museums. We hope you will attend!

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Part 1 | Exhibiting Slavery and Representing Black Lives
Friday, 9 April 2021, 1–3pm EST

Curators will discuss their work on groundbreaking projects in the Netherlands and the United States, namely the Rijksmuseum’s current Slavery exhibition, the Rembrandthuis Museum’s exhibition Here: Black in Rembrandt’s Time, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s reinstallation of its permanent collection, and the Museums Are Not Neutral initiative. They will reflect on the broader call for museums to recognize the relationship of their collections to slavery and to present-day racial injustice. Speakers include Maria Holtrop (Curator of History, Rijksmuseum), Stephanie Archangel (Junior Curator, History Department, Rijksmuseum), Diva Zumaya (Assistant Curator, European Painting and Sculpture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and La Tanya S. Autry (cultural organizer, co-producer of Museums Are Not Neutral, founder of the Black Liberation Center, and independent curator).

For more information and to register, please click here»

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Part 2 | De-centering/Re-centering: Forging New Museological and Historical Narratives
Friday, 16 April 2021, 1–3 pm EST

This session brings together historians and art historians whose work has, on the one hand, been grounded in art museum collections and, on the other, challenged traditional museological narratives of slavery’s legacies in the Netherlands and the Americas. Speakers include Vincent Brown (Charles Warren Professor of American History, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Founding Director of the History Design Studio, Harvard University), Pepijn Brandon (Assistant Professor of Economic and Social History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Senior Researcher, International Institute of Social History), Elmer Kolfin (Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam), and Claudia Swan (Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History & Archaeology, Washington University in St. Louis).

For more information and to register, please click here»

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Part 3 | History, Memory, and Legacy: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosana Paulino, and Cheryl Finley in Conversation
Friday, 23 April 2021, 11am–noon EST

Renowned writer Jamaica Kincaid and groundbreaking visual artist Rosana Paulino will discuss their explorations of the legacies of slavery in their work. They will be joined in conversation by eminent art historian Cheryl Finley.

For more information and to register, please click here»

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Part 4 | The Work of Objects: Interpretation within and beyond Museum Walls
Friday, 23 April 2021, 1– 2:30pm EST

This session includes brief talks, followed by a roundtable discussion, by academics and museum professionals who focus on Dutch and American art and history. Speakers will discuss specific objects—ranging from the 17th to the 21st century—that have posed interpretive and museological challenges. They will also present new possibilities for considering the relationship between slavery’s past and present-day racial injustice. Speakers include Justin Brown (Ph.D. candidate, Department of the History of Art, Yale University), Ana Lucia Araujo (Full Professor and Associate Chair, Department of History, Howard University), Makeda Best (Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Harvard Art Museums), Nancy Jouwe (Chairwoman, BAK [basis voor actuele kunst] Supervisory Board, Utrecht; co-founder, Framer Framed; and co-founder, Mapping Slavery), Imara Limon (Curator, Amsterdam Museum), Adam Tessier (Barbara and Theodore Alfond Director of Interpretation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Lea van der Vinde (Curator, Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis).

For more information and to register, please click here»

Journal18, #9 Field Notes (Spring 2020)

The ninth issue of J18 is now available (and be sure to check out the latest offerings in J18’s Notes & Queries). . .

Journal18, Issue #9: Field Notes (Spring 2020)
Issue Editor: Amy Freund

How do we understand the field of eighteenth-century art today? What are its objects of study, and how do we think, write, and teach about them? Where, and when, do we locate ‘the eighteenth century’? This issue of Journal18, emerging from a conference organized by the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) in Dallas, TX (November 2018), maps out the questions and approaches driving the field today, and proposes new directions for its future.

HECAA was established in 1993 at a vibrant moment in the evolution of the ‘new’ art history in the United States, in an effort to carve a place for the study of eighteenth-century art in a discipline that had only just begun to acknowledge it. A quarter of a century later, buoyed by a membership that had increased ten-fold and an utterly transformed publishing landscape (including the founding of Journal18), an anniversary conference was convened at an exciting but also challenging moment in the field. Hosted by the Department of Art History at Southern Methodist University, the HECAA at 25 conference convened 160 scholars of eighteenth-century art to survey its history, present current research and pedagogical initiatives, and consider possible trajectories for its future.

These Field Notes take two different forms. Four research essays by emerging scholars who presented their work at the conference—on French typefaces, Korean folding screens, British ceiling painting, and American veneer furniture—showcase new scholarly directions. A parallel roundtable discussion by conference participants brings to light the most pressing issues facing, and defining, the present and future of the field—among them the importance of place and the possibilities of a ‘global eighteenth century’, the turn toward materiality and material culture, the centrality of the work of female artists, and the impact of the digital humanities on teaching and scholarship.

–Amy Freund, Southern Methodist University

A R T I C L E S

The Bignon Commission’s Measured Bodies: Inventing Typeface and Describing the Mechanical Arts under Louis XIV
Sarah Grandin

Tactile Vision in Eighteenth-Century Korean Still-Life, or Ch’aekkŏri
Irene Choi

A New Golden Age: Politics and Mural Painting at Chatsworth
Laurel O. Peterson

The Nature of American Veneer Furniture, circa 1790–1810
Jennifer Y. Chuong

R O U N D T A B L E

Reflections on HECAA at 25: A Roundtable Discussion
Jeffrey Collins, Elisabeth Fraser, Elizabeth Mansfield, Amelia Rauser, Kristel Smentek & Wendy Bellion, Paris Spies-Gans, Nancy Um, and Amy Freund

Cover image: Steel type punches of the romain du roi, Cabinet des poinçons de l’Imprimerie nationale, Douai. © Photo by Sarah Grandin.

New Book | A Passion for Porcelain

Published by the Gardiner Museum in association with Arnoldsche and distributed by ACC Art Books:

Karine Tsoumis and Vanessa Sigalas, eds., A Passion for Porcelain: Essays in Honour of Meredith Chilton (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2020), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-3897905849, $50.

A Passion for Porcelain brings together papers delivered at an international symposium held in 2018 at Toronto’s Gardiner Museum in honour of Meredith Chilton, C.M., one of the foremost scholars and curators of eighteenth-century European porcelain. Authored by leading scholars in the field, the essays take us on a journey from France (Sèvres), to Japan via Boston, where we encounter both revered artists and anonymous makers, together with passionate collectors past and present. The contributions also explore the medium of porcelain in the context of artistic rivalry and gift exchange, as an object of fashion and scientific curiosity and as a symbol of status and power. Together, the essays reveal the versatility of the medium, changing perceptions, and endless possibilities for porcelain scholarship.

With contributions by Daniel Chen, Katharina Hantschmann, Peter Kaellgren, Sebastian Kuhn, Claudia Lehner-Jobst, Thomas Michie, Jeffrey Munger, Linda Roth, Rosalind Savill, Vanessa Sigalas, and Karine Tsoumis.

Conference Papers | Académies d’art et mondes sociaux, 1740–1805

Conference papers from the study day on ‘Académies d’art et mondes sociaux, 1740–1805’, held last November in Rouen, are now available from the ACA-RES website. Also please note that the research programme’s next conference will be held in Paris 26–28 March 2020. Proposals for papers related to ‘Art Academies and Their Networks in the Age of Enlightenment’ are being accepted until 6 September 2019.

Journées d’étude III: Académies d’art et mondes sociaux, 1740–1805
Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes, Rouen, 29–30 November 2018

Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Études de l’œil (detail), 1798.

Nouer des liens entre arts, belles-lettres et sciences: entre interaction et distanciation
En partenariat Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès ; Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, Paris ; Les musées de Rouen

Les troisièmes journées d’étude du programme ACA-RES se sont tenues les 29 et 30 novembre 2018 à Rouen, en voici le compte rendu synthétique et les différents articles auxquels il renvoie :

• Anne Perrin Khelissa and Émilie Roffidal, « Nouer des liens entre arts, belles-lettres et sciences : entre interaction et distanciation », Les papiers d’ACA-RES, Actes des journées d’étude, 29–30 novembre 2018, Rouen, Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes, mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : perrin khelissa-roffidal-2019)

1. Architecture, peinture, sculpture, des sœurs jumelles ?

• Émilie d’Orgeix, « L’ingénieur, les écoles du génie et les arts », à venir
• Dominique Massounie, « La place de l’architecture et de l’École des arts de Jacques-François Blondel dans l’histoire des académies artistiques provinciales du XVIII^e siècle », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : massounie-2019)
• Théodore Guuinic, « L’École des arts, ponts et chaussées de Montpellier sous la Révolution, 1787–1796 : un enseignement conjoint des sciences et des arts », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : guuinic-2019)

2. L’art est-il utile à l’économie ?

• Aude Gobet, « Jean-Baptiste Descamps, les négociants et les manufactures à Rouen au XVIII^e siècle, 1741–1791 », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : gobet-2019)
• Moïra Dato, « État des lieux sur la question des rapports entre l’école de dessin et la Grande Fabrique à Lyon : les dessinateurs et marchands fabricants en étoffes d’or, d’argent et de soie », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : dato-2019)
• Céline Paul, « La Société d’agriculture, des arts et des sciences de la Haute-Vienne et la mise en place progressive d’un enseignement du dessin », à venir

3. Arts et lettres, quelles rencontres possibles ?

• Émilie Roffidal, « Marseille, contacts et relations inter-académiques : les liens entre l’Académie des sciences et belles-lettres et l’Académie de peinture et de sculpture », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : roffidal-2019)
• Véronique Krings, « Anne-Marie d’Aignan, marquis d’Orbessan, un curieux toulousain, entre arts, littérature et antiquarisme », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : krings-2019)
• Julie Lablanche, « Échos de la vie artistique et des progrès techniques dans les éloges, discours et mémoires de l’académie de Besançon », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : lablanche-2019)

4. Quelles sciences pour les arts ?

• Nelly Vi-Tong, « Entre les sciences et les arts : les ambitions pédagogiques de l’Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : vi-tong-2019)
• Flore César, « Des arts dans une ville de sciences, des sciences dans une école d’art : la Société des beaux-arts de Montpellier, 1777–1784 », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : cesar-2019)
• Jérôme Lamy, « Sciences, arts et belles-lettres, les académies entre ‘travail aux frontières’ et ‘objets frontières’ à l’époque moderne », mis en ligne juin 2019 (PDF à télécharger : lamy-2019)

Exhibition | Madame de Maintenon

Now on view at Versailles:

Madame de Maintenon: In the Corridors of Power
Château de Versailles, 16 April — 21 July 2019

Curated by Alexandre Maral and Mathieu da Vinha

The first exhibition entirely devoted to the Marquise of Maintenon, on the tercentenary of her death on 15 April 1719, recounts the extraordinary life of Françoise d’Aubigné (1635–1719). She was born in a prison yet went on to become the Sun King’s wife in 1683.

The different stages of her life are shown in around 60 works from the collections of Versailles and other museums, including paintings, drawings, engravings, books, sculptures, medals, and so on. The visit passes through the four adjoining rooms of the apartment she lived in from 1682 until 1715, on the first floor of the Palace’s central section.

The scenography returns the walls to their original colours at the time. They are richly draped in alternating silk panels as described in the Furniture Store-House inventories from 1708: red damask, crimson damask, and red taffeta for the second antechamber; green and gold damask for the bedroom; and crimson and gold flower damask for the Chambers. This installation was made possible thanks to the restoration of these wall hangings by Tassinari et Chatel, the nation’s oldest silk manufacturer, founded in Lyon by Louis XIV.

The exhibition is curated by Alexandre Maral (Head Curator for Heritage and Director of the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles) and Mathieu da Vinha (Scientific Director of the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles), with scenography by Jérôme Dumoux.

Alexandre Maral and Mathieu da Vinha, Madame de Maintenon: Dans les allées du pouvoir (Paris: Hazan, 2019), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-2754110723, 35€.

The exhibition brochure (in French and English) is available as PDF file here

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Symposium | Madame de Maintenon, 1719–2019
Château de Versailles, 21–23 March 2019

This international symposium offered a fresh look at this multifaceted historical figure, reviewing the biographical aspects of the Marquise, as well as her correspondence and the literary and iconographic legend surrounding her.

Details along with audio recordings are available here.