Frédérique Baumgartner The identity of the aging man in profile, wrapped in a long grey coat, in the drawing entitled The Artist in His Cell (Fig. 1) cannot be mistaken.[1] The man’s receding forehead, advanced baldness, tuft of grey hair at the nape of his neck, and thick black eyebrow…
Séverine Sofio An insignificant self-portrait in a glorious studio scene? At the Salon of 1808, Gabrielle Capet exhibited a small painting originally entitled Portrait of the Late Madame Vincent (Fig. 1).[1] It is this title, more than the work’s densely populated fifteen-figure composition, which indicates that the painting’s real subject…
Susan Taylor-Leduc In 2014, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Joséphine Bonaparte’s death, an exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg summarized her compelling life story: She was not born a princess, nor even with the name of Joséphine, and still less was she destined to reign one day, but…
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…