Patricia Simons Isabelle Pinson’s Fly Catcher (L’attrapeur des mouches) seems at first glance a charming genre scene of a child at play (Fig. 1), a safe, inconsequential picture of innocence, and thus a suitable subject for a female artist to paint in 1808. But there is more than meets the…
Stephanie Triplett The Tieranatomisches Theater (animal dissection theater) in Berlin designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732-1808) and built in 1790 as part of the newly founded Prussian veterinary school features an elaborate decorative program of trompe l’oeilgrisaille friezes encircling the central dome (Fig. 1). In these frescoes, the commonplace activities…
Alex Weintraub The best art critics tend to write with an unmistakable assuredness. Rarely do their essays betray the doubts and uncertainties of an original encounter with a work of art. Yet this certainty, as any student of art history will attest, is not exactly how aesthetic feelings are always…
Empresses of China’s Forbidden City is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum from August 18, 2018 to February 10, 2019 Halfway through the spectacular exhibition Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644-1912 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, a tiny metal object sits in a transparent box next…
Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place is at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery from September 14 to January 6. It is accompanied by the catalogue Agents of Faith, ed. Ittai Weinryb (New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 2018) Specialists and enthusiasts of eighteenth-century art and culture are…
Cheryl Finley, Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 320 pages You all know the image. As Cheryl Finley explains, “Refer to ‘that image of the slave ship’ in conversation with just about anyone, and they will know what you are talking…
L’étude des collections du 18e siècle aujourd’hui conservées dans les réserves des musées et des archives suisses montrent que de nombreuses images ont été produites en Amérique du nord et du Sud, en Chine, en Inde, ou aux Caraïbes, dans des contextes à la fois militaires, diplomatiques et commerciaux. Je…
The nawabs (governors) of Avadh ruled the Gangetic plain of northern India from 1724 to 1856, a period that saw the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British East India Company (EIC). The nawabs negotiated these rival imperial relationships by cultivating a courtly culture that was…
An album of découpage created by the artist, writer, and Bluestocking Mary Delany sometime before the winter of 1781 has been strangely ignored in the scholarly record (Fig. 1). Gifted to George III’s consort, Queen Charlotte, it comprises twenty pages decorated with 114 individual cut-paper designs on a blue ground.…
Kee Il Choi Jr Though widely celebrated during his lifetime and in the nineteenth century for the intellectual scope of his Chinese collection, Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (1720-1792), a minister of state to both Louis XV (r. 1715-1774) and Louis XVI (r. 1774-1792) of France, has until recently received scant attention by…