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…
Gwendolyn Collaço Sumptuous holdings of the imperial treasury at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul have overwhelmingly shaped the history of Ottoman art collecting. There, among many objects, luxurious albums of sultans and their highest-ranking officials still reside today. Yet numerous and scattered compilations of works bought from the Ottoman bazaar or…
Freya Gowrley Between 1837 and 1852, an “Album” of poetry and personal sentiments was compiled for a woman named Helen Mar Robertson, who lived near Fort Edward, New York. Housed in a mass-produced volume, around quarto size, and labelled “Album” on its spine, the volume was published and sold by…
Marta Becherini Scattered across a variety of European museums and libraries are roughly 500 painted portraits which found their way to Europe from the Deccan region of South India towards the end of the seventeenth century. These paintings portray the kings, princes and grandees associated with four dynastic kingdoms of…
Louise Voll Box In 1922, the English writer George Somes Layard commented that: “A series of marks on a print is its diary: the fate and journey of many a masterpiece can be thereby traced until it finds at last its permanent home in the Museum.”[1] Layard succinctly foreshadowed what…