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…
Catherine Girard In the burgeoning field of the “global” eighteenth-century, extensive work remains to be done on the experience of contact from Indigenous perspectives.[1] Because the repression of such voices has been used as a colonial strategy, it is crucial that scholars of cultural contact and circulation attend to this…
Daniel M. Greenberg The Compendium of Birds (鳥譜, niaopu)[1] is an important encyclopedia of bird species produced for the eighteenth-century Chinese court that has received little scholarly attention. Built upon a rich tradition of Chinese flower and bird painting and bestiaries but also in dialogue with early modern European natural…
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…