Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800: Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788) website, 2021 edition, http://www.pastellists.com/LaTour.htm. French pastellist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788), whose sitters included Madame de Pompadour, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and Voltaire, is often and justifiably lauded as a “tour de force.”[1] Neil Jeffares, the author of…
Marika Takanishi Knowles Josiah Wedgwood’s anti-slavery medallion, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” (1787), is widely known as an example of the fraught representation of enslaved persons during the eighteenth century. In its effort to promote the abolition of slavery through the design of a fashionable accessory, the…
Alicia Caticha Among the many enduring myths surrounding Marie Antoinette is the bucolic fantasy of the extravagant queen dressing up as a milkmaid at her Hameau, a model village and farm on the grounds of the Château de Versailles. Central to this fiction was Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s scandalous 1783…
Christelle Lozère During the eighteenth century, two seemingly contradictory models of sociability emerged in France and Britain. Libertinage, whose sensual and philosophical stakes were perhaps most memorably explored in the writings of the Marquis de Sade, thrived in some aristocratic circles. By contrast, Jean-François Marmontel’s “Moral Tales” of 1761 reflected…
Íris Kantor Milena Natividade da Cruz In April 1754, the French literary gazette Mercure de France announced the publication of five large mural maps made by the geographers Jean Janvier and Sébastien-G. Longchamps, comprising a mappa mundi and additional large maps dedicated to the four continents: America, Asia, Africa, and…
J. Cabelle Ahn From whatever country moral lessons should come to us, it is always welcome; but should we have to turn to the Savages to seek lessons in paternal and maternal tenderness?—Anonymous, Galimatias: anti-critique des tableaux du Salon (1781) [1] At first glance, the Salon of 1781 of the…
Katherine Calvin While describing Senegal in his 1797 illustrated book, Tableaux des principaux peuples de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, de l’Amérique, et les découvertes des capitaines Cook, La Pérouse, etc., the white, Montreal-born author, artist, and former diplomat Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1757-1810) explicitly condemns Europeans’ brutal treatment of…
Les Animaux du Roi, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France, October 12, 2021 – February 13, 2022. Curated by Alexandre Maral and Nicolas Milovanovic. Scenography: Guicciardini & Magni Architetti. Lighting: Lionel Coutou. You are allowed to enjoy this exhibition. Cast off your critical baggage and just relax. It’s okay. Forget your…
Exhibition: In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, May 22, 2021 – January 2, 2022. In Sparkling Company, a ground-breaking exhibition curated by Christopher Maxwell at the Corning Museum of Glass, invites us into the…
Sussan Babaie This essay focuses on the representations of architecture from the lands of Islam in two picture-rich narratives of the history of architecture and on their historiographic significance. One is a picture book, first published in 1721 in Vienna, by Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723), Entwurf einer historischen Architektur in…