Review of Portrayals from a Brush Divine – A Special Exhibition on the Tricentennial of Giuseppe Castiglione’s Arrival in China (October 6, 2015 – January 4, 2016) On October 10, 1925, the Forbidden City in Beijing officially ceased to be the residence of the former imperial family and became…
Can a period room be brought back to life? In the spring of 2015, twelve Barnard and Columbia undergraduates and I made the attempt, in a seminar called “A Virtual Enlightenment.” We had the support of the Mellon Foundation, the collaboration of Metropolitan Museum of Art curators Jeffrey Munger and…
This has of course been quite the year for Louis XIV, with a number of events and exhibitions staged across many months to mark the tercentenary of the close of “the great” monarch’s reign. On the 5th of December the V&A held a symposium – Lambrequins and Luxury: Ornament in…
When he advertised “a Collection of Pictures to be seen in Great Marlborough Street, facing Blenheim Street, at Mr. Liotard’s” in 1773, Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–1789) can hardly have imagined that it would be over 240 years before a substantial number of his works were brought together again in Britain.[1]…
Melissa Percival writes about her experience of preparing a new exhibition of fantasy figures with the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse. Exeter, Thursday 5th November Next week it all becomes real. I’ve received a spreadsheet with a detailed delivery schedule of 78 old master paintings borrowed from all corners…
In the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery of the China Through the Looking Glass show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a flat, uncut semiformal robe for the Jiaqing Emperor (r. 1796-1820) was suspended next to a Dries Van Noten Autumn/Winter 2012-13 ensemble, comprised of a jacket cinched at the…
“The Oddity of her Atchievement [sic] is striking!—The Marble Statues from a Female Hand!—But so it is, and at least in the Work of the Two Dogs, with so much Merit in them, that Bacon himself, or at any Rate the best Pupil of Bacon need not have blushed…
Vigée Le Brun, the most famous female French painter before the Revolution, has finally been recognized by a retrospective in her native country. The Parisian exhibition, to be followed by stops in New York and Ottawa, represents a landmark occasion to appreciate Vigée’s career from the late Ancien Régime…