Category: Research

John Chu, National Trust Senior Curator for Paintings and Sculpture explains: “We don’t know why Sir Richard Myddelton specifically gave John Wilton a home at the castle and why his cousin commissioned such a large portrait of him. The rarity of examples of full-length portraits of servants means we don’t know for sure how they were regarded at the time.

“While John Wilton is being celebrated as an individual, the gold inscription describing him as the ‘glory’ or ‘pride’ of the kitchen is in Latin. If there's a play on high and low forms of art and stations in life here, how fully could he have been in on the joke in this learned language?

"However, historic portraits typically record a relationship between at least three people; the artist, the sitter and the person who commissioned it. While this picture was painted for Robert Myddelton, a man of very high status, this is also an artistic document of one working man's encounter with another. We're seeing Wilton through Whitmore's eyes: and in that respect it provides an incredibly rare if not unique insight."

In Caravaggio’s Martha and Mary (Detroit Institute of Arts, ca.1598), Mary’s vice-filled life is represented by a comb and cosmetic jar, set out on the table in front of her, as her sister Martha attempts to convert her to the virtuous path. The painting serves as a metaphor of the period’s starkly opposing attitudes to adornment of the female face and body. In 1575, the women of Cesena argued that if they were forbidden to beautify themselves, they might be forced to “wave goodbye to [their] families and break the chains of female servitude”. Other texts condemn women for their perceived love of clothing, cosmetics and jewellery – written both by early feminists such as Laura Cereta and by misogynistic churchmen who saw vanity as a particularly feminine sin. Men who used cosmetics were even more a focus for social disapprobation, decried for unaccountably behaving “like women”, the sex believed by many to be inferior in both physicality and intellect.

The relationship between cosmetic adornment and gender, between artifice and nature, is culturally and historically contingent. Focusing particularly on sources written and made by Italian Renaissance women, this talk will consider how this period was a flashpoint for discussions about gender and bodily ornamentation. Encompassing a wide range of objects, images and texts from “ladies at their toilet” paintings to witch trial narratives, it will also explore why this may be, showing how even seemingly intimate choices – body hair removal, skin treatments, hair dye – were bound up with larger social and cultural forces in an age of burgeoning colonialism, scientific experimentation, religious division and social turmoil.

A ‘crucifixion complex’: two newly discovered sketches attributed to Francis Bacon - BY REBECCA DANIELS

A rediscovered ‘Pietà’ by Andrea del Sarto - BY DAVID FRANKLIN

The permanence of ephemera: a rediscovered fragment by Frans Floris - BY MARIA CLELIA GALASSI

Johannes Lutma the Elder: goldsmith, designer, draughtsman - BY REINIER BAARSEN

Giuseppe Antonio Ghedini’s drawings for ‘Il Ricciardetto’ - BY CECILIA VICENTINI

Jean-Charles Cazin, 1881–83: naturalism and networking, regionalism and republicanism - BY RICHARD THOMSON

Ter Brugghen in Italy - BY JOHN GASH

Applicants interested in the PhD position are asked to submit a project proposal that aims at new readings of and/or new insights to Norway’s history of art broadly defined. The proposed project may thus focus on artworks of all media, time periods, and geographies, and seek to explore the chosen topic from art historical, artistic, conservation, museological and/or educational perspectives. We welcome proposals that critically consider the mobility of objects and actors and place the histories of art and visual culture of Norway in dialogue with global concerns and/or phenomena. Moreover, the proposed project needs to prove beneficial for the National Museum by furthering and diversifying the museum’s recognized practices regarding collecting, exhibiting, educating and/or preserving art.

Carel de Moor (1655–1738). His Life and Work, a monograph and œuvre catalogue, is the first scholarly study of one of the most important Dutch portrait painters of his time. The book includes a comprehensive biography, which explores Carel de Moor’s life and multi-faceted career within the context of the economic, political, and social history of the Dutch Republic.

As a result of the authors’ thorough investigation of De Moor’s client networks, several hitherto unknown sitters have now been identified; other sitters have been provided with new identities.

The Catalogue Raisonné, arranged chronologically within the categories of portraits, history, pastoral scenes, genre and still life, allows us to view De Moor’s œuvre in its totality, to compare his work with that of his predecessors and contemporaries, and to evaluate the development of his artistic style.

We invite applications from candidates whose research and teaching profile can deepen and extend the Department’s existing strengths, and who can offer a specialism in European modern art in the period 1850-1920. We are open to hearing from applicants with expertise in the art of any geographical region of continental Europe or in its global dimensions.

The role unusually sits between publishing and academia, liaising between the external publishers of the two journals and their academic editors, authors and colleagues at the Warburg Institute and the Institute of Classical Studies. The role reports to the Head of Publishing at the University of London Press, with the journals published by external publishers (currently Oxford University Press for the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, and Chicago University Press for the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes). The post holder will also contribute towards the wider strategic development of UoL Press, particularly in relation to changes in open access journal publishing and new innovative digital formats.

J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) seldom left home without a sketchbook. Over the course of his lifetime, he filled more than three hundred, most of them small enough to carry in his pocket. This facsimile represents Turner’s last known intact sketchbook, now in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Turner used it on the coast of the English Channel in Kent, in and around Margate, from June to September 1845.

The volume is accompanied by a poem in which Tracey Emin (b. 1963) expresses her personal connection with Turner’s work. Emin grew up in Margate, the seaside town that Turner returned to time and again to draw.

This presentation of Turner’s sketchbook includes generous margins and blank pages to encourage further sketches, in the spirit of the artist.

Whether a manifestation of political power, expression of intimate feelings, an embellishing masquerade or a faithful likeness, the art of portraiture in the Age of Enlightenment was marked by exceptional diversity throughout Europe. Between the apogee of absolutism and the political, social and intellectual upheavals of the revolutionary era, it became a mirror of a society in full mutation. The aim of the symposium is to study portraiture from a multifaceted perspective, tracing its social, theoretical, artistic and material conditions. Focusing on its development during the Enlightenment in the French context, we also wish to open the discussions up to a European perspective.

The decoration of the Luxembourg Palace galleries was the largest commission Rubens ever received. On Saturday 26 February 1622, the artist signed two contracts at the Louvre with the agreement ‘to make and paint with his own hand each and every one of the figures’ of the paintings which would decorate the two parallel galleries of the palace that the Queen Mother, Maria de’ Medici (1573–1642), had begun to have built on the left bank of the Seine. According to the first contract, the western gallery was now ready and Rubens ‘will be bound and obliged to design and to paint with his own hand twenty-four paintings depicting the history of the very illustrious life and heroic exploits’ of the Queen Mother, conforming to an incomplete memoir, of which he had received a copy. Rubens arrived in Paris to put the final touches to the finished canvases celebrating the life of Maria de’ Medici at the beginning of February 1625. But at this time the eastern gallery, planned to display the ‘battles… and triumphs’ of King Henri IV (1553–1610), Maria’s late husband, was still under construction. The Henri IV Gallery was to be an unfinished masterpiece: after a temporary suspension of the work in 1630, the project was definitively abandoned in 1631.

Alexis Merle du Bourg’s in-depth study of the Henri IV Series was published as Part XIV.2 of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard in 2017. The present volume charts the earlier part of the Medici commission, which happily survives, splendidly completed. It presents Maria in her relationship with Henri, her public role after her husband’s death and, not least, her difficulties and then reconciliation with Louis XIII, her son. Here Rubens invoked the gods of ancient myth and a whole company of personified abstractions to help mask problematic episodes, dignify banal events and create a glorious commemoration of the life and aims of the Queen Mother.

Edited by Linda S. Ferber, Margaret R. Laster, and Samantha Deutch (series editor), the volume explores the dynamic landscape of American art collecting in the United States from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The geographic range of collecting histories presented in this publication spans the country, from the Eastern Seaboard to the Old South, the Midwest, and the West Coast.

Contributing scholars investigate individual collectors and collectives whose missions to create regional and national collecting communities in the United States encouraged civic philanthropy in the fine arts. Key themes—such as the creation of an “American” school distinct from, yet rooted in, European tradition, as well as the trials of forming publicly supported museums—reverberate throughout the book. Essays examine early patrons, collectors, and museum founders; the impact of sectionalism, the Civil War, and reform on American collecting efforts; and the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of artists, collectors, and dealers at the turn of the century and beyond. Each section foregrounds different issues, underscoring the complexity of the historical, cultural, and political environments in which collections of American art were formed.

Born in Paris in 1749, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard rose from shopkeeper's daughter to an official portraitist of the royal court-only to have her achievements reduced to ash by the French Revolution. While she defied societal barriers to become a member of the exclusive Académie Royale and a mentor for other ambitious women painters, she left behind few writings, and her legacy was long overshadowed by celebrated portraitist and memoirist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun. But Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's story lives on. In this engaging biography, Bridget Quinn applies her insightful interpretation of art history to Labille-Guiard's life. She offers a fascinating new perspective on the artist's feminism, her sexuality, and her.

The painter Jan Massys (c. 1510-1573) trained under his father Quinten, succeeding him after his death (1530) at the head of Antwerp's most famous workshop. However, his career, destined for certain success, was abruptly cut short in 1544. Condemned for joining the Loysts sect, he had to flee Antwerp, finding refuge perhaps initially in France and at one point in Italy. Only in 1555 was he able to return to his homeland, regaining his artistic leadership within a few years. His oeuvre consists exclusively of works for private use and is characterized, in particular, by the depiction of elegant and seductive nude or half-naked female figures, protagonists of biblical or mythological subjects.  The identification of the patron of the 1561 Venus with the view of Genoa (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum) in the person of the noble Genoese banker Ambrogio di Negro, offered the possibility of reconstructing the social context of the artist's clientele and his relations with those intellectuals – both Genoese and Flemish-who gave life to the lively humanist academies of Antwerp. The figure emerges of a cultivated and particularly refined painter, who shared with his patrons the ideals of neo-Petrarchan poetry and executed paintings of great preciousness, characterized by a meticulous and skillful painting technique.

This book fills a significant gap in the literature on eighteenth-century art in Britain. Although immigrant Italian artists played a crucial role in the development of Britain’s expanding art world over the course of that century, they have been largely overlooked in books on both British and Italian art. When mentioned in works on eighteenth-century British art, Italian artists are regarded as bit players who were tangential to the art world. Ingenious Italians seeks to correct this view, demonstrating the critical role played by immigrants who brought their skills and talents to a new country. In Britain, they established networks of Italian and British colleagues, cultivated new patrons and created innovative works for a growing market. In doing so, they influenced the development of art in British society. This little-explored facet of art history in Britain presents readers with a new perspective from which to consider the art of the era, highlighting the important work contributed by Italian artists in Britain.

In the first half of 2024, both paintings will be technically examined under the direction of Jørgen Wadum and additional provenance research will be carried out by RKD curator Angela Jager to test the hypothesis that the works are pendants. This research will be conducted in the context of the project Dutch and Flemish paintings at The Nivaagaard Collection, a collaboration between The Nivaagaard Collection and the RKD resulting in a collection catalogue (autumn/winter 2024).