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…
Cheryl Finley, Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 320 pages You all know the image. As Cheryl Finley explains, “Refer to ‘that image of the slave ship’ in conversation with just about anyone, and they will know what you are talking…
L’étude des collections du 18e siècle aujourd’hui conservées dans les réserves des musées et des archives suisses montrent que de nombreuses images ont été produites en Amérique du nord et du Sud, en Chine, en Inde, ou aux Caraïbes, dans des contextes à la fois militaires, diplomatiques et commerciaux. Je…
The nawabs (governors) of Avadh ruled the Gangetic plain of northern India from 1724 to 1856, a period that saw the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British East India Company (EIC). The nawabs negotiated these rival imperial relationships by cultivating a courtly culture that was…
An album of découpage created by the artist, writer, and Bluestocking Mary Delany sometime before the winter of 1781 has been strangely ignored in the scholarly record (Fig. 1). Gifted to George III’s consort, Queen Charlotte, it comprises twenty pages decorated with 114 individual cut-paper designs on a blue ground.…
Meha Priyadarshini, Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 198 pages. The global life of porcelain has been the subject of important scholarship in recent decades. Chinese porcelain, the subject of Meha Priyadarshini’s new book, has been treated either as a…
The exhibition Michael Eden: Form & Transform is at Waddesdon Manor from May 25–Oct 21 2018. In November 2016, I visited Waddesdon Manor for the first time (Fig. 1). Coming up the long driveway, I noticed a series of decorative sculptures that were all wrapped to protect them from…
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch. Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2018), 336 pages. The Painter’s Touch. Dès son titre, ce beau livre introduit son lecteur à la riche polysémie d’un mot qui, en anglais, signifie à la fois la touche en peinture—construite au dix-huitième siècle comme un élément…
Dans le cadre du programme A Place at the Royal Table, Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset organisait le 22 juin une journée d’études au Château de Versailles intitulée « L’Ananas, le fruit roi », pour montrer comment sa culture avait préoccupé les botanistes et les jardiniers et ses formes nourries l’imaginaire des arts décoratifs à l’époque…