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…
Artists & Robots is at the Grand Palais in Paris from April 5 to July 19, 2018. It is accompanied by the catalogue Artistes & Robots, ed. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac et Jérôme Neutres (Paris : Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2018) Artists & Robots, an exhibition currently on view at the…
Mechthild Fend, Fleshing out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 352 pages. Understanding and depicting the anatomy and physiology of the human body was of great importance to both visual artists and medical men in the early modern period. In her new book,…
Editors’ Note: Mary D. Sheriff, one of the most brilliant and beloved scholars of eighteenth-century European art, died on October 19, 2016. Among her last essays was a playful and erudite encounter with Casanova’s memoirs, seen through the prism of eighteenth-century European painting. She originally wrote it for the catalogue…
Jacqueline Riding, Basic Instincts: Love, Passion, and Violence in the Art of Joseph Highmore (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2017), 128 pages. At every turn, contingencies pervaded London’s Foundling Hospital. Dedicated to “the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children,” the institution was, after years of debates, granted a…
Wolf Burchard, The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016), 287pp. This impressive new study of Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) argues that the artist was not only responsible for the elaboration of the image of Louis XIV as the absolute monarch,…