A functional truism of eighteenth-century French cartography is that it enshrined a topographical way of understanding space—that it mapped with growing precision the features and dimensions of land surfaces.[1] The famous Cassini Map, under way for much of the century, was the first project to use triangulation to survey all…
Reinterpreting Porcelain Figures: A Review – by Noelle Yongwei Barr
In recent years, many American museums and their staff have staged revisionist interventions, urging general visitors and scholars to reframe, reimagine, and reinterpret European collections. In “Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process,” art historian Cristina Baldacci ruminates on the prefix “re-” as a hermeneutic tool strategically employed by curators to…
Contained Assertions: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s Paint Box – by David Pullins
Editor’s note: This essay by David Pullins is a pendant to Damiët Schneeweisz’s Laboring Likeness: Charlotte Daniel Martner’s Paint Box in Martinique (1803-1821). Together, Pullins and Schneeweisz unpack two paint boxes that belonged to Marie Victoire Lemoine (1754-1820) and Charlotte Daniel Martner (1781-1839), bringing out how these boxes tie the…
Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s “Mirate che bel visino” – by Marika Takanishi Knowles
In August 2022, while visiting the new permanent exhibition “Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle, le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage” at the Musée d’Aquitaine, I encountered a viscerally racist image (Fig. 1). I say that I “encountered” it because the print stages itself as a meeting between the subject and the viewer by…
The Dawn of Everything: A Roundtable Review – by Ashley L. Cohen
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). 704 pages. $35.00. ISBN: 9780374157357. When every day brings more bad news about the prospects for human life on our planet, readers will find a welcome reprieve in David…
Rococo Redux: On the Bloom of The White Lotus and the Return of the Rocaille – by Sasha Rossman
The distinct theme song of Mike White’s TV hit The White Lotus (WL) returned to screens around the world this past winter. This time, the opening credits paired Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s warbling sounds with a pastiche of rococo wallpaper: fountains gushed, putti and satyrs romped in a pastoral eighteenth-century…
Vivienne Westwood’s Eighteenth Century – by Robert Wellington
The recent death of Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022), Britain’s most influential fashion designer of the last fifty years, gives us cause to reflect on the eighteenth-century art and fashion that inspired her designs. Taking a closer look at her collections from the 1990s reveals a deep and abiding love for eighteenth-century…
A Revolution on Canvas: A Review – by Yasemin Altun
Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2022). 384 pp.; 157 color + b-w illus. Hardcover $55. (ISBN 9781913107291) Shortly after visiting the Paris Salon…
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience: A Review – by Kathryn Desplanque
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, Raleigh, NC, April 2022-2023. We are all by now aware of the immersive Vincent van Gogh exhibition phenomenon and have perhaps even encountered whispers of its many mysteries: Why do these immersive exhibitions differ so much in their quality? Exactly how many immersive van Gogh exhibition…