Susan M. Wager Madame de Pompadour died in 1764. The following year, Diderot measured the royal mistress’s artistic legacy against the political and economic havoc she wreaked on France: So, what remains of this woman, who drained us of men and money, deprived us of honor and energy, and devastated…
Paris A. Spies-Gans Mary Moser’s career has long been circumscribed by portraiture—a hemming in that dates almost exactly to her elevation as a founding member of London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. A celebrated flower painter, Moser, later Lloyd (1744-1819), was one of only two women Academicians elected before…
Yuriko Jackall This is a case of an alleged artistic crime, the rights and wrongs of which were fought out in the public arena of eighteenth-century Paris as a pitched battle between two painters: the up-and-coming Pierre-Alexandre Wille (1748–1821) and the older, more established Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805). The latter claimed…
Andrea Morgan Between 1688 and 1716, John Smith (1652-1743) and Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723) executed a collaborative series of four self/portraits. Smith was a mezzotint artist who produced over 100 copies after Kneller’s paintings, and this portrait series documents the decades-long partnership between the two artists that would prove valuable…
Katie Scott, Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780300222791 In Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, Katie Scott examines the relationship between intellectual property and the visual arts in France from the sixteenth…
Caroline Vout, Classical Art, A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780691177038 The title given to the review of Vout’s book in the TLS (January 4, 2019), “Crafting a Canon,” is somewhat misleading. The author, in fact, does not discuss precisely what has…
“The atmosphere of this cabinet is one of order, neatness and beauty.” That is how Johann Christian Fabricius described the museum of the Scottish physician and obstetrician William Hunter (1718-1783) when he visited it in 1784.[1] The same words might apply to the exhibition of Hunter’s collection, William Hunter and…
The Smell of Success: Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, Painters of Flowers in Paris is at Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands from 26 April to 25 August 2019. It is accompanied by Paul Huys Janssen, De geur van succes. Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, bloemenschilders in Parijs (Zwolle:…
LEFT: Juliette Trey and Hélène Grollemund, Inventaire général des dessins du musée du Louvre. Edmé Bouchardon (1698-1762), Paris : Musée du Louvre, 2016, ISBN 9782350315515 RIGHT: Édouard Kopp, The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017, ISBN 978-1-60606-504-4 The exhibition dedicated to the eighteenth-century French sculptor Edmé Bouchardon (at the…
Amy Freund and Michael Yonan Painted cats are strange. Such a blanket statement may strike the reader as an obvious exaggeration, but a quick survey of cats in art lends conviction to the claim. Let us take a famous example, one from a canonical eighteenth-century painting, Jean Siméon Chardin’s The…