Pictures in Motion: Portraiture around the World during the Long Eighteenth Century14th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies: Opening Markets, Trade and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century.
Rotterdam, 26-31 July 2015.
Proposals due by 12 January 2014 (earlier submissions are encouraged) Continue reading
Automaton clock representing François-Dominique Toussaint (L’Ouverture). Melbourne, Johnston Collection.
The Haitian revolution was the only successful slave revolution in history, transforming the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the independent republic of Haiti. To what extent can we see the Johnston House Museum’s automaton clock and other ‘portraits’ of Toussaint L’Ouverture as part of the West’s disavowal of the Haitian revolution’s political goals of racial equality and racial liberation? Continue reading
Amy Freund, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0-271-06194-8.
A new book by Amy Freund, Assistant Professor of Art at Texas Christian University, explores the political and cultural role of the portrait in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Continue reading
Anton Raphael Mengs, ‘Portrait of Don Luis de Borbon’ (c. 1774-77.). National Gallery of Victoria.
The National Gallery of Victoria has recently acquired a superb portrait by Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-79), one of the eighteenth century’s greatest portrait painters. The sitter is the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1727-85), brother of the Spanish king, Carlos III. Don Luis was a major patron of the arts, employing the cellist and composer Luigi Boccherini, as well as being an early supporter of the young Goya. Continue reading
Johann Zoffany, ‘Elizabeth Farren as Hermione in The Winter’s Tale'(c. 1780). National Gallery of Victoria, Everard Studley Miller Bequest.
Johan Zoffany’s portrait of Elizabeth Farren as Hermione in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale represents one of the most striking, controversial and memorable scenes in all of Shakespeare’s plays. It is also a portrait of an actress whose private and public lives were equally intriguing, one of a few highly successful women whose celebrity status enabled their radical upward mobility. Continue reading
The Guardian reports on the recent discovery of a portrait by Scottish artist Allan Ramsay of the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The portrait was painted in Edinburgh in 1745, the year of the unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion that was ruthlessly crushed the following year at the Battle of Culloden. The discovery was made by Bendor Grosvenor, a director of the Philip Mould Gallery in London and well known from the BBC’s Fake or Fortune? and from his own blog Art History News. Continue reading
Filippo Lippi: Portrait of a woman with a Man at a Casement, c. 1440. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
In an important new article in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Katalin Prajda (Central European University, Budapest) makes a convincing case for re-identifying the sitters in Filippo Lippi’s well-known double-portrait, the so-called Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement. They have traditionally been identified as Agnola di Bernardo Sapiti and her husband, Lorenzo di Rinieri Scolari, based on the coat of arms under the male sitter’s hands, which is that of the Scolari family. Prajda questions this identification, particularly as there was a considerable age difference between the couple, somewhere between twelve and twenty-four years (Agnola was born c. 1422; Lorenzo’s exact birth-date is not known but he was born between 1398 and 1410). Moreover, the pictorial elements of the portrait are all subordinate to the female sitter; she is the focus of the painting and the dominant figure within it. Prajda therefore suggests that it is she who is the member of the Scolari family rather than her companion. Continue reading
Melbourne Portrait Group 