In his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polype d’eau douce, or Memoirs Concerning the Natural History of a Type of Freshwater Polyp (Leiden, 1744), the Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley (1710–1784) included a startling figure, one that is not immediately legible (Fig. 1). Plate 9 of his…
Resemblance and Apophenia: Carambolages at the Grand Palais – by Robert Wellington
Resemblance—things that look like other things—has played a near universal role in global art and material culture. Gods have been conjured into the temporal realm by their likenesses; portraits of rulers have been revered in the absence of their physical presence. In those two examples, the power of semblance is…
Lemonade’s Enlightenment – by Zirwat Chowdhury
In April this year, HBO debuted the film accompanying Beyoncé’s sixth album, Lemonade. The film and the album’s twelve tracks were released on Tidal and iTunes a few days later. Viewers immediately asked if the album’s exploration of infidelity attested to longstanding rumors about Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z. But they also…
Curating Watteau’s Soldiers – by Aaron Wile
The scene is prosaic enough. Seven soldiers are arrayed in the foreground. A crumbling archway stretches above them; there are ramparts in the distance, and more soldiers on the bridge leading there. Just off to the center, two men stand side by side, facing away from each other—the soldier on…
Objects of Orientalism – by Siddhartha V. Shah
Videos of the ‘Objects of Orientalism’ symposium are available on the Clark Art Institute’s YouTube Channel. On April 29th and 30th 2016, a symposium at the Clark entitled “Objects of Orientalism” – convened by Marc Gotlieb and Mary Roberts, and supported in part by the Williams Graduate Program in the…
Asia in Amsterdam – by Marsely Kehoe
Curated by Karina H. Corrigan, Jan van Campen, and Femke Diercks, on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts from February 27th-June 5th, 2016 (and previously at the Rijksmuseum), Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age displays 200 paintings and objects demonstrating the…
Stubbs, Vernet & Boucher Share a Canvas: Workshops, Authorship & the Status of Painting
David Pullins
A horse stands in profile against a bucolic landscape populated by two pastoral figures, a flock of sheep and a dog (Fig. 1). Visual analysis confirms the content of an eighteenth-century label once affixed to the painting’s stretcher: “The horse was recently painted by [George] Stubbs in London, the background of the picture by [Claude-Joseph] Vernet, the celebrated marine painter, and the two figures, the dog and the sheep, by [François] Boucher, Principal Painter to the King of France.”[1] The tightly knit strokes of the horse contrast with the looser blending of tones in the landscape and sky that come just short of meeting the animal’s outline, resulting in a halo that heightens the sense of this central element as a kind of cut-out affixed somewhat unconvincingly to the canvas. The most rapidly applied brushstrokes have been used to represent the human figures, sheep and dog, all cleverly folded into the landscape at a break between foreground and background, a line that is sutured further through lightly applied lichen-green paint along the crest of the hill and blades of grass that sprout between the horse’s legs.
Scratched Surfaces: Artists’ Graffiti in Eighteenth-Century Rome
Charlotte Guichard “Leave my cane! Leave my cane! Then how do you expect me to poke holes through the oil paintings?” [1] — Mark Twain In the Villa Farnese at Caprarola outside of Rome, Renaissance frescoes are covered with examples of centuries-old graffiti. Among these disruptive additions, scrawled in…
China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in Eighteenth-Century France
Kristel Smentek One of the more remarkable aspects of eighteenth-century European art is the proliferation of vases, both as physical objects and design ideas. From the illustrated volume dedicated to them in Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s historical survey of architecture, Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (1721), to the near…
Marginal, Mobile, Multilayered: Painted Invitation Letters as Bazaar Objects in Early Modern India
Dipti Khera In 1830, the king of Mewar and a group of local merchants residing in the regional court’s capital city of Udaipur jointly sent a signed painted scroll, 72 feet long and 11 inches wide, as an invitation letter (vijnaptipatra) to an eminent monk of the Jain religious…