J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is now, indisputably, a titan in the United States of America. A series of exhibitions in major institutions has catapulted him to the heights where he belongs in the canon—the greatest British Artist, the greatest painter of the first half of the nineteenth century, the greatest landscape…
Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2016. Rarely does a book offer a truly new approach to the eighteenth century, yet Zara Anishanslin’s Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic…
While I have held a life-long fascination with natural history, the particular concerns and developing visual aesthetic of eighteenth-century anatomical illustration are central to my own artistic practice. From Robert Hooke, to William Cheselden, William Hunter, and George Stubbs, the clinical presentation of isolated specimens, drawn with unequivocal outlines while…
It’s an interesting moment to be a scholar of eighteenth-century art. A neglected field in English-language art history for most of the twentieth century, it is currently enjoying a boom. One can no longer rightly say that it is an understudied subject, the purview of a tiny community of specialists.…
L’étude et la représentation des musées disparus sont devenues un vrai sujet de recherche en muséologie et en histoire des musées. Il y a pour cela de bonnes raisons, puisque l’actualité muséographique a été marquée depuis plusieurs décennies par la multiplication des rénovations et des réaménagements de musées, mais…
William Blake explores crucial questions of time and historical transmission in the illustrations and text of his poem Milton, written at the turn of the nineteenth century (1804-1810). This work and a large number of Blake’s other original illuminated books, designs, engravings, and letters are now electronically available via…
Séverine Sofio, Artistes femmes. La parenthèse enchantée, XVIIIe – XIXe siècles (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2016), ISBN : 978-2-271-09191-8. Loin de négliger les obstacles, stigmatisations et autres marginalisations dont les femmes ont pu souffrir, Séverine Sofio prend le contrepied d’une historiographie qui a souvent insisté sur l’éviction des femmes du monde…
Darkened by aged varnish, with cracked paint peeling off like the bark of a plane tree, the small wooden panel stands out amongst the boldly-toned Ethiopian Orthodox paintings in Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (Fig. 1). Its softly shaded faces and unusually draped textiles suggest the court art…
Lately, numerous nation states have either advocated for or erected fortified borders to keep out refugees and migrants. In Europe, some states have even opted to leave the international negotiation table altogether in protest over the prospect of multilateral, cooperative solutions to border issues. As conflicts over Europe’s limits continue…
Anne Perrin Khelissa, ed., Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des Lumières, Études sur le XVIIIe siècle 43 (Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015), ISBN: 978-2-8004-1585-7 In Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Norman Bryson examines still life—that much-maligned form of painting that art…