the british art blog

Call for papers AAH Conference 2012

2011-10-02T18:09:00.000+01:00

Call for papers
AAH Annual Conference 2012
The Open University,
Milton Keynes 29-31 March 2012
‘Conflicting Art Histories: Dialogues of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century British Culture’. Session Convenors: Freya Gowrley and Viccy Coltman, University of Edinburgh, f.l.gowrley@gmail.com, viccy.coltman@ed.ac.uk
William Hogarth’s traditional position as the stalwart of English nationalism in the arts was drastically re-evaluated in 2007 with the publication of Robin Simon’s Hogarth, France & British Art. Published to coincide with the Tate’s major Hogarth exhibition of 2007, Simon’s text situates Hogarth, a renowned anglophile, within a firmly European context of artistic theory and practice. How does the idea that Hogarth gleefully propagated his anti-Gallic public image, but was in fact greatly indebted to French art and theory, affect our understanding of apparently critical 18th-century works of art such as his Marriage A-la-Mode (1743-5)? While historians Linda Colley and Gerald Newman prioritised national identity as an evaluative tool for the examination of aspects of eighteenth-century British culture, is it appropriate to apply this label to broad cultural manifestations, notably the consumptive behavioural patterns of the
aristocracy and the middling classes alike? This session will consider this intriguing dichotomy of 18th-century British art – the underwritten and unresolved conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism – and its relation to the artistic practice, material culture and intellectual history of the period.
Topics for discussion could include, but are not limited to: artistic response to the luxury debates; landscape and nation; the connoisseur and the Grand Tour; the usefulness of labels (exotic, chinoiserie, rococo); the reception of Italy; the creation of a British national school; consumption & the meaning of goods; the local and the global/the provincial and the metropolitan; the issue of Englishness, Britishness, Scottishness.

Copyright… and non-copyright

2011-08-30T18:21:00.001+01:00

Editorial in The British Art Journal, XII, 1

Setting scholarship – and shower-curtain design – free
http://britishart.yale.edu/collections/search

The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, has placed digital images of its collections online. So far, so familiar. What is extraordinary is that all the images have been made available for reproduction free of charge, in superb high-resolution format, with no restrictions over use. Indeed, this applies to all the collections of Yale University. Other institutions in the USA are now considering whether to follow. The British Museum is the major institution that had already taken the same step in the UK. Otherwise the outlook in Britain is depressingly outdated, with museums and galleries, as this journal has frequently pointed out, obstructing not only scholarship but also wider familiarity with their collections through the imposition of restrictive conditions on use and punitive fees. What makes it worse, much worse, are the outrageous claims to ‘copyright’ that are attached to the use of images, preposterously applied to the mechanical reproduction of original works of art long out of copyright. This loathsome practice must stop.
The Yale Center found that the cost of collecting the fees was greater than the ‘pitiful’ sums it managed to accumulate under the old system, and that must be the case with the many museums and galleries in the UK that still adhere to the restrictive practices of the past. The Royal Collection, which has probably more objects of desire than almost anywhere else, certainly found that to be the case. Alas, having closed down its own fee collection ‘service’, the Royal Collection has taken the fateful step of placing its reproduction arrangements in the hands of none other than the Bridgeman Art Library, an agency much given to the issuing of the most restrictive and tendentious terms and conditions, and the charging of high fees. Now that digital image-making of the highest quality can be achieved by a toddler with the right equipment, any continuing attempts to create a pseudo-copyright in the UK by ‘licensing’ the use of images of out-of copyright works of art is outrageous, but it is also foolish.
Come on, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum! Some of you (OK, not the Tate) have made a bit of an effort to make scholarly publication a little less expensive, although the whole process is still needlessly complicated, involving hordes of staff who could be better deployed on more frutiful exercises. But it is time to grow up, enter the twenty-first century, embrace the digital age, make it all free, and, like the Yale Center, discover the excitement of a host of new visitors across the globe poring over your collections. And by that we don’t mean attempting to decipher those mingy, mean, little, blurry, low-resolution, watermarked, restricted access, tantalising glimpses of great paintings you so reluctantly allow, and that merely drive people away. No. They must be like the Yale and BM images, available to be studied in the greatest detail on screen and – crucially – retained. So listen up, bring on the high-res download! Bring on the Leonardo shower-curtain and the Van Gogh bathmat! Free! That way people get to know the works of art you care for. After all, though it sometimes seems to be forgotten, that is your job.

So farewell then, Lucian Freud ((born 8 December 1922, died 21 July 2011). The Tate had a good oil (a little portrait of Francis Bacon) but it was stolen. Prejudices there against figurative painting being what they are, it bought very few of his oils, and then prices went through the roof. Not that you can see most of the Tate’s holdings on its website owing to ‘copyright restrictions’: genuine, but stupid, and not the Tate’s fault.
And no, we made no attempt to negotiate the ‘right’ to illustrate one of them on the cover.
Life, as Freud may now be lamenting in that great studio in the sky, is too short.

Berger Prize Winner 2011

2011-08-01T09:29:00.000+01:00

William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2011

The annual prize for best book in the history of British art, worth £5000, was won by Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe for Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World published by British Museum Press. The prize was presented by A.N. Wilson at an evening reception held at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 16 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, London, on Tuesday 5 July 2011

Berger Prize 2011 Short List

2011-06-24T09:53:00.001+01:00

William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2011

[books published 1 January-31 December 2010]

Short List

Celina Fox

The Arts of Industry In the Age of Enlightenment

Yale University Press

ISBN 978 0 300 16042 0, £50, pp576, 200 bw, 60 col

Cherry Ann Knott

George Vernon 1636-1702 ‘Who built this House’. Sudbury Hall Derbyshire

Tun House Publishing

ISBN 978 0 9565240 0 3, £75 (signed limited edition of 500), pp782, illus bw & col

Cecilia Powell & Stephen Hebron

Savage Grandeur & Noblest Thoughts. Discovering the Lake District 1750-1820

Exhibition catalogue Wordsworth Trust

ISBN 978 1 905256 42 6, £19.95, many illus in colour

Charlotte Gere & Judy Rudoe

Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World

British Museum Press

ISBN 978-0714128191, £50, pp552, 100 bw, 400 col

Malcolm Jones

The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 978 0300136975, £45, pp352, 270 bw, 20 col

Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby

Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-century Rome

Yale University Press

ISBN 978-0300160437, £45, 2 vols, pp630, 200 bw, 50 col

The award of the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History worth £5000 to the winner will be made by A.N. Wilson at a ceremony in London UK on the evening of 5 July 2011

Assessors Timothy J. Standring, Gates Foundation Curator of Painting & Sculpture, Denver Art Museum; Robin Simon, Editor, The British Art Journal; Katharine Eustace, Editor, Sculpture Journal; Rosemary Hill, Fellow, All Souls’ College, Oxford; Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures; Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art

Berger Prize 2011

2011-05-27T16:44:00.000+01:00

Berger Prize 2011 Long List
[books published 1 January-31 December 2010]

The Short List of six will be announced in mid-June 2011 and the Award of the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History (worth £5000 to the winner) will be awarded by A.N. Wilson at a ceremony in London UK on the evening of 5 July 2011.
Assessors Timothy J. Standring, Gates Foundation Curator of Painting & Sculpture, Denver Art Museum; Robin Simon, Editor, The British Art Journal; Katharine Eustace, Editor, Sculpture Journal; Rosemary Hill, Fellow, All Souls’ College, Oxford; Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures; Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art

Adrian Clark, British and Irish Art 1945-1951. From War to Festival
2010 Hogarth Arts/Paul Holberton
ISBN 978 0 95554063 4 8, £30, pp272, 24 bw

David Nolan and Carolyn Starren, On Public View – A Journey around the Sculptures in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
NOTE published online. Please visit
www.rbkc.gov.uk/onpublicview
Chapters download as pdfs with a video introduction to watch on the site

Celina Fox, The Arts of Industry In the Age of Enlightenment
[2009] 18 February 2010, YUP
ISBN 978 0 300 16042 0, £50, pp576, 200 bw, 60 col

Cherry Ann Knott, George Vernon 1636-1702 ‘Who built this House’. Sudbury Hall Derbyshire
1 June 2010 Tun House Publishing
ISBN 978 0 9565240 0 3, £75 (signed limited edition of 500), pp782, illus bw & col

Katharine Baetjer, British Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575-1875
30 March 2010 Metropolitan Museum/YUP
ISBN 978 1 58839 348 7 (Met Mus)
ISBN 978 0 300 15509 9 (YUP)
£55, pp308, 215 bw, 140 col

Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings & Commonwealth in England
4 May 2010 YUP
ISBN 9780300162004, £35, pp512, 90 bw

John Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery. Later Stuart Portraits 1685-1714
8 February 2010 National Portrait Gallery
ISBN 978-185514 410 1, £125, pp460, 358 bw, 305 col

John McAleer, Representing Africa. Landscape, exploration and empire in southern Africa, 1780-1870
1 March 2010 Manchester University Press
ISBN 978 0 7190 8104 0, £60pp, 241, 16 bw, 9 col

Cassandra Albinson, Peter Funnell & Lucy Peltz, eds, Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance
Exh cat. 21 October 10 YUP
ISBN 978 0 300 16718 4, £40, pp280, 20 bw, 160 col

Cecilia Powell & Stephen Hebron, Savage Grandeur & Noblest Thoughts. Discovering the Lake District 1750-1820
Exh cat. 2010 Wordsworth Trust
ISBN 978 1 905256 42 6, £19.95, many illus in colour

Mary Bryan H Curd, Flemish & Dutch Artists in Early Modern England. Collaboration and Competition, 1460-1680
1 May 2010 Ashgate Publishing
ISBN 9780754667124, £65, pp236, ills bw

Barbara Bryant, GF Watts In Kensington. Little Holland House and Gallery
[2009] March 2010 Watts Gallery
ISBN 9780956102232, £10, pp92, 81 bw

Mireille Galinou, Cottages & Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb
19 October 2010 YUP
ISBN 978 0 300 16726 9, £40, pp480, 55 bw, col 250

Christiana Payne, John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter
14 May 2010 YUP
ISBN 9780300165753, £40, pp256, 150 bw, 120 col

Charlotte Yeldham, Maria Spilsbury (1776-1820), Artist and Evangelical
1 February 2010 Ashgate
ISBN 978 0 7546 6991 3, £65, pp230, 73 bw,

Mark Bills, Watts Chapel: A Gude to the Symbols of Mary Watts’s Art and Crafts Masterpiece
1 July 2010 Philip Wilson
ISBN 978 0 85667 692 5, £18.99, pp80, 187 bw/col

Bernd W Krysmanski, Hogarth’s Hidden Parts
Georg Holms Verlag, Hildesheim
ISBN 978-3-487-14471-9, Euros 48, pp514, 304 bw

Elisabeth Soulier Detis, Guess at the Rest. Cracking the Hogarth Code
27 May 2010 James Clarke & Co Ltd
ISBN 139780718892159, £35, 183 bw, pp233

Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War. Allegiance and Autonomy
2010 University of Pennysylvannia Press
ISBN 9780812242430, £42.50, pp334, 87 bw

Tim Barringer, Before and After Modernism, Byam Shaw, Rex Vicat Cole, Yinka Shonibare, MBE
Exh cat. November 2010 Central St Martin’s
ISBN 978 0 946282 00 5, £15pp,132, 151 bw/col

Jason Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment
[2009] 28 January 2010 YUP
ISBN 978 0 300 15219 7, £40, pp366, 100 bw, 20 col

Julian Mitchell, The Wye Tour and its Artists
Exh cat. 2010 Logaston Press
ISBN 978 1906663 32 2, £12.95, pp168, illus bw & col

Max Browne, Theodor von Holst. His art and the Pre-Raphaelites
Exh cat. 2010 Holst Birthplace Museum, Cheltenham
ISBN 13 978 0 9563769 0 9, pp64, illus colour & bw

Leonée Ormond, Linley Sambourne: Illustrator and Punch Cartoonist
2010 Paul Holberton
ISBN 978-1907372032, £30, pp312, 120 bw

Jennifer Scott, The Royal Portrait. Image and Impact
2010 Royal Collection Enterprises
ISBN 978 1 905686 13 1, £19.95, pp200, 157 col

Philip Brookman, Eadweard Muybridge
Exh cat. 2010 Tate Publishing
ISBN 9781854378378, £29.99, illus bw & col

Charlotte Gere & Judy Rudoe, British Museum – Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria
1 April 2010 British Museum Press
ISBN 978-0714128191, £50, pp552, 100 bw, 400 col

David Fraser Jenkins
Paul Nash. The Elements
Exh cat. February 2010 Dulwich Picture Gallery (Scala)
ISBN 978 1 85759 619 9 £25, illus in colour

Jessica Feather, British Watercolour & Drawings. Lord Leverhulme’s Collection in the Lady Lever Art Gallery
1 October 2010 Liverpool University Press
ISBN 978-1846311550 £35, pp400, 370 bw/col

Mary Bennett, Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné
10 September 10 YUP
ISBN 978-0300165913, £125, 2 vols, pp686, 522 bw, 458 col

Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-century Rome
25 February 2010 YUP
ISBN 978-0300160437, £45, 2 vols, pp630, 200 bw, 50 col

Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice
14 January 2010 YUP
ISBN 978-0300121780, £45, pp500, 105 bw, 25 col

Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight
8 June 2010 YUP for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
ISBN 978 0300136975, £45, pp352, 270 bw, 20 col

Richard Ormond & Elain Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures & Landscapes 1883-1899
The Complete Paintings Vol 5
7 September 2010 YUP
ISBN 978-0300161113, £50, pp392, B&W 127 bw, 311 col

Grace Brockington, Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain
1 October 2010 YUP
ISBN 9780300151954, £35, pp244, 100 bw, 40 col

Morna O’Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts & Crafts, Paintings & Politics 1875-1890
30 November 2010 YUP
ISBN 978-0300167689, £35, pp320, 100 bw, 20 col

Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household. Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain
25 November 2010 YUP for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art
ISBN 978-0300162820, £45, pp256, 80 bw, 40 col

Anthony Vidler, James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive
15 October 2010 YUP
ISBN 978-0300167238, £35, pp300, 330 col

Find that missing portrait!

2010-12-10T17:48:00.003Z

Colin Cohen was frustrated that so many portraits of his family have gone walkabout. He knows they are out there, but where? And so he has created a site to hunt down 'orphaned' portraits:
http://www.missingportraits.info/
Colin introduces his website:

'MissingPortraits.info is a site devoted to so-called ‘orphan’ portraits. Starting with my own family, of whom a surprising number of portraits have been painted which then vanished from sight, my aim is to open the site to all who have lost touch with, or found, portraits.'

Portraiture is peculiar. At the time a portrait is made, the most important thing, at least to sitter, family and friends, is how good a likeness it is. In no time at all, however, Colonel Blimp of the Bluffshires has been demoted to the ranks of 'A gentleman in a red coat'. Then it is all a matter merely of how good the painting is, even supposing that the name of the artist had been retained. And so let's hope that Colin's initiative will develop, with contributions and links, so that hidden knowledge can be shared, names returned to gentlemen in red coats, and artists reunited with their sitters.

Talking of which…

A major Hogarth discovery will feature in the next British Art Journal, in Gwen Yarker's introduction to her exhibition 'Georgian Faces: portrait of a County' at the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, 15 January-30 April 2011

Patrick Heron? Which Patrick Heron?

2010-09-20T16:44:00.005+01:00

The Patrick Heron written about by Adrian Clark in his new book (British and Irish Art 1945-1951: From War to Festival, Hogarth Arts, 2010) was the highly regarded British artist who lived 1920-99. He looked like this, in a 1954 photograph by Ida Kar in possession of his daughters Katharine and Susanna Heron.

Patrick Heron was also a very well-known critic who wrote regularly for such journals as the New Statesman.
It turns out there is another Patrick Heron, also a writer, but never an artist. Unfortunately, his photograph crept into Clark's book (page 117) in place of the painter's. This Patrick Heron writes about the imminent ending of the world and the return of the Antichrist. Hey! it's not that bad, Patrick, just a mistake with a photograph…

The William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2009

2010-07-08T19:30:00.002+01:00

The William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2009 of £5000 was awarded to Diana Donald and Jane Munro for Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts at a reception at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London on Wednesday 7 July 2010, and was presented by The Hon Lady Roberts, Royal Librarian.

SHORT LIST

Mark Girouard Elizabethan Architecture

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300093865 £50 pp 280 150 col

Paul O’Keeffe A Genius for Failure. The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon

Bodley Head

ISBN number 9780224062473 £25 568 pp 13 col 20 bw

Patrick Noon Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300134216 £85 450 illustrations 360 pp

Diana Donald and Jane Munro, ed, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge/Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press

ISBN 9780300148268 £40 288 pp 100 bw 150 col

David Solkin Turner and the Masters

Tate Publishing

hb ISBN 978 1 85437 865 1 £35 pb ISBN 978 1 85437 798 2 £25 240 pp 170 col

Edward Impey, ed., The White Tower

Yale University Press in association with Historic Royal Palaces

ISBN 9780300112931 £45 256 pp 120 bw 40 col

Assessors
Dr Timothy Standring, Denver Art Museum; Dr Robin Simon, Editor, The British Art Journal; Dr Ann Bermingham, University of California at Santa Barbara; Katharine Eustace, Editor, The Sculpture Journal; Rosemary Hill, All Souls College, Oxford; Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Survey of The Queen's Pictures; Angus Trumble, Yale Center for British Art

LONG LIST

Mikael Ahlund, ed, including an essay by Martin Barnes, The Pre-Raphaelites

Nationalmuseum Stockholm

ISBN 978917100 809 1

Sam Smiles Richard Stephens, et al. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius

Sansom & Co. with The University of Plymouth and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 2009

ISBN 9781906593407 £24.99 200 pp 43 bw 105 col

Roger Baynton-Williams Art of the Printmaker 1500-1860

A&C Black

ISBN 9781408112663 £30 192 pp 140 illus

Cinzia Maria Sicca, ed, John Talman: An Early Eighteenth Century Connoisseur

YaleUniversity Press/Yale Center for British Art/The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Studies in British Art 19)

ISBN 9780300123357 £45 304 pp 108 col

David Boyd Haycok A Crisis of Brilliance. Five Young British Artists and the Great War

Old Street Publishing

ISBN 978-1905847846 £20 320 pp ill

John Ingamells, Dulwich Picture Gallery – British Catalogue

Unicorn Press

9781906509019 £24.95 287 pp ill

Katharine Lochnan and Carol Jacobi, ed, Holman Hunt and The Pre-Raphaelite Vision

Art Gallery of Ontario in association with Manchester Art Gallery

ISBN 978 0 300 14832 9

James Knox, Cartoons & Coronets. The Genius of Osbert Lancaster

ISBN 9780711229389 £15 pb 224 pp over 200 col

Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan The Intimate Portrait. Drawings, Miniatures and Pastels from Ramsay to Lawrence

National Galleries of Scotland

ISBN number 978 1 906270 14 8 £25 272 pp 225 col

Peter Trippi, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Robert Usptone, Patty Wageman, J.W. Waterhouse, The Modern Pre-Raphaelite

Royal Academy of Arts London

ISBN 978 1 905711 36 9 (hb) 978-90-8586-489-9 (pb) hb £35 pb £18.95 242 pp 180 ills

Susan E James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art 1485-1603. Women as Consumers, Patrons and Painters

Ashgate

ISBN 978-0-7546-6381-2 £65 pp 376 ills 52 bw January 2009

Magdalen Evans Utmost Fidelity: The Painting Lives of Marianne and Adrian Stokes

Sansom & Co

hb ISBN 978-1-904537-01-8 pb ISBN 978-1-904537-85-4 hb £35 pb £24.95 pp 72 bw 17 col 98

Iain Mackintosh and Marcus Risdell The Face & Figure of Shakespeare

ISBN number ISBN 1 902643 10 0 £7 64 pp 67 col

Rachel Stewart The Town House in Georgian London

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300152777 £30 pp 272 ill

Sarah Cash and Richard Ormond Sargent and the Sea

Yale University Press/Yale Center for British Art

ISBN 9780300143607 £30 pp 192 30 bw 100 col

Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts Mrs Delany and Her Circle

Yale University Press/Yale Center for British Art

ISBN 9780300142792 £40 10 pp 416 ills 10 bw 300 col

Michael Snodin Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill

Yale University Press/Yale Center for British Art

ISBN 9780300125740 £40 356 pp 300 col

Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne Jones: Interlacings

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 978-0300140934 £40 260 pp

Diana Donald and Jane Munro, ed, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge/Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press

ISBN 9780300148268 £40 288 pp 100 bw 150 col

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray John Singer Sargent Venetian Figures and Landscapes, 1898-1913

[vol 6 in catalogue raisonné]

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300141405 £50 18 bw 256 col 272 pp

Shena Mason Matthew Boulton. Selling What All the World Desires

Yale University Press 9780300143584 £40 304 pp 50 bw 300 col

Mark Girouard Elizabethan Architecture

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300093865 £50 pp 280 150 col

Edward Impey, ed., The White Tower

Yale University Press in association with Historic Royal Palaces

ISBN 9780300112931 £45 256 pp 120 bw 40 col

Anthony Gerbino and Stephen Johnston Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England 1500-1750

Yale University Press/Yale Center for British Art ISBN 9780300150933 £30 192pp 120 col

Scott Wilcox Sun, Wind and Rain: The Art of David Cox

Yale University Press/Yale Center for British Art in association with Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery ISBN 9780300117448 £40 272 pp 220 col

Susan Bennett, ed, Cultivating the Human Faculties James Barry (1741-1806) and the Society of Arts

Lehigh University Press 162 pp HB

Tessa Murdoch The French Hospital in England: Its Huguenot History and Collections

Adamson

ISBN 978-0-09524322-7-2 £30 pp 128 42 col 8 bw

Brian Keeble Cecil Collins

Golgonooza Press

Christopher Newall et al, Frederic, Lord Leighton

Prestel

ISBN: 978 3 7913 43839 £25 192 pp 130 col

Christopher Baker, David Howarth and Paul Stirton The Discovery of Spain: British arttists and Collectors Goya to Picasso

National Galleries of Scotland

ISBN number 978 1 906270 18 6 £14.95 160 pp 135 col 5 bw

Silvano Levy and Tanja Pirsig Marshall, ed British Surrealism in Context, A Collector’s Eye

Leeds Museums & Galleries

ISBN 9780901981820 £34.99 pp 224 227 ills 9July 2009

Peter Lord, The Meaning of Pictures. Images of personal, social and political identity

University of Wales Press

ISBN 978-0708322215 £40 256 pp illus

Veronica Franklin Gould Tennyson at Farringford

Tennyson House Publications ISBN 978 0 9563223 0 2 £15.50 96 pp; ills 69

Patrick Noon Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300134216 £85 450 illustrations 360 pp

Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant G.F. Watts: Victorian Visionary

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300142570 £40 224 pp 220 col

Helen Pierce Unseemly Pictures. Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300142549 £35 224 pp 100 bw

David Hill Turner and Leeds

Jeremy Mills Publishing

ISBN 9781906600310 £34.99 208 pp 145 ill

Judith A. Neiswander The Cosmopolitan Interior. Liberalism and the British Home, 1870-1914

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 9780300124903 £35 256 pp 70 bw

Paul O’Keeffe A Genius for Failure. The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon

Bodley Head ISBN number 9780224062473 £25 568 pp 13 col 20 bw

The Duchess of Rutland with Jane Pruden Belvoir Castle

Frances Lincoln

ISBN 9780711230521 £30 224 pp 200 col

Karen Hearn, ed, Van Dyck and Britain

Tate Publishing ISBN 978-1854377951 £40 240 pp ill

Malcolm Millais Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture

Frances Lincoln

ISBN 9780711229747 £18.99 296 pp 405 bw

Emma Rutherford Silhouette

Rizzoli 9780847830770 £40.00 256 pp 300 ills

David Solkin Turner and the Masters

Tate Publishing

hb ISBN 978 1 85437 865 1 £35 pb ISBN 978 1 85437 798 2 £25 240 pp 170 col

William Feaver Frank Auerbach

Rizzoli

ISBN 9780847830589 £100 360 pp 900 col 200 bw

Christopher Frayling Horace Walpole’s Cat

ISBN 9780500514917 14.95 80pp 15 col 7 bw

The British Art Journal Ten Glorious Years

2010-05-02T15:23:00.000+01:00

Ten years of The British Art Journal
[Editorial]
This special double issue of The British Art Journal [Vol. X, NO. 3, Winter 2009/2010] celebrates ten years of the journal’s existence. Our first numbers were supported by a few private individuals but also by advertisers, most of whom have remained with us ever since. One of those with us from the start is the Mark Weiss Gallery, which itself celebrates twenty-five years in 2010. The intriguing and in some ways still mysterious portrtait on the cover has been researched in depth by the Weiss Gallery, the fruits of which have been published in a book (available from the gallery) with contributions from art historians (including Sir Roy Strong, Michael Wilson, Jeremy Wood, Duncan Thomson and Tim Wilks) but also music historians (including Benjamin Hebbert) and the conservators who restored it. The painting was the subject of an absorbing one-day seminar at the gallery on 25 February 2010. It is an appropriate image for our cover because it exemplifies the theme of this special issue, which is British art in an international context. The artist was probably Flemish; the sitter was of French Huguenot stock, active in the court of the Scottish Stuart on the throne of England; the small oval painting on the back wall is signed (and dated 1613) by its own painter, Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger (c1580-1649), either Dutch or, more probably, Flemish, who was resident in London from 1617. On the table beside the sitter is a statuette of Antinous and a piece of paper bearing a Latin epigram which contrives to include the notes of the six-note scale (precursor of ‘do, re, mi’) devised or discovered by Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century: ‘VT RElevet MIserum FAtum SOLitosque LAbores.’
All in all, the painting is a fine international puzzle, and it provided ample material for a remarkably fruitful and amiable discussion among experts assembled from Britain and abroad, from museums, academe, the dealing world, and the musical word (both academic and performing). The seminar is also significant because it draws attention to the ways in which scholarship and the commercial art world, far from being mutually incompatible, can benefit from co-operation. Many suspect, indeed, that the possession of expertise in the examination of paintings is no longer the norm in the academic world. Rather, it is to be found within museums (in some, alas, to a decreasing extent) and with dealers. It would be a great thing if this remarkable seminar was the precursor of many more such collaborations, always provided, of course, that they are conducted in the same refreshing spirit of mutual respect and enjoyment as this was. An exquisite recital of Lanier’s music was shrewdly scheduled to occupy the period immediately following – another international note – an outstanding lunch of Italian food and French wine.

The William MB Berger Prize for British Art History
New arrangements for the 2009 award are in place in order to simplify the procedure. The qualifying period has been changed. Books for the 2009 award would have been considered if published in the period 1 September 2008-31 August 2009. Books will now be considered if published during the period 1 September 2008-31 December 2009, for this occasion only. In future, however, the qualifiying period will be the calendar year 1 January-31 December, the first time that applies being 2010.

For much of its existence the BAJ has also been aided by the support of the Berger Collection Educational Trust, of Denver, which together with the BAJ instituted the Berger Prize. This special issue, with its international theme, has also been supported by a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, for which we are grateful. And finally, we offer out heartfelt thanks to our subscribers and readers all over the world, without whom…

How former Director Charles Saumarez Smith left the National Gallery, London, with something to remember

2010-01-08T15:54:00.001Z

Robin Simon's review in the current BAJ of Charles Saumarez Smith's short history of the National Gallery, which is interesting not least for what it does not make explicit: the uncomfortable circumstances of Smith's own relationship with his chairman of trustees. Nor does he mention how the National Gallery attempted to prevent his publishing the book…

The National Gallery: A Short History
by Charles Saumarez Smith
Frances Lincoln 2009 £14.99 isbn 978 0711230439

Revenge may be a dish best eaten cold, but the dust had hardly settled on Charles Saumarez Smith’s controversial departure from the directorship of the National Gallery than this elegant Parthian shot appeared. The National Gallery did its best to prevent the book’s appearance, fortunately without success, and readers will delight in the suavity and poise of this beautifully judged account. Dr Smith fingers the often poisonous trustees who have interfered with the running of the institution throughout its history. The snobbery and obstructiveness of Alfred de Rothschild especially (Manet’s paintings were ‘unnecessary rubbish’) prevented Charles Holroyd from a perceptive and inspired attempt at buying modern French paintings as early as 1906. The episode and many others offer a nightmare insight into the ways in which trustees could make a director’s job impossible. This is a situation that Dr Smith understands at first-hand, in his case, through having to put up with his chairman, someone called Peter Scott. Not that you will find Dr Smith saying such things: the reader is left to infer as much from the author’s ingenious prose. Dr Smith does not spare the shortcomings of some of his predecessors, although these, such as they were, were usually failings of timidity or dullness. Given the slightly unpleasant side, inevitably so, to much of the story, the history is perhaps mercifully brief, but it is none the less both authoritative and, best of all, delightful to read.

Bonnie Prince… Henry?

2009-12-14T14:39:00.011Z

Bonnie Prince… Henry?
Treasured Scottish portrait is definitely not of Bonnie Prince Charlie, expert on Jacobite portraiture decides in the new issue of The British Art Journal. Read the report in the Scotsman
Now the Scottish National Portrait Gallery agrees: see the BBC website. More reports in Daily Telegraph, Independent,

Daily Mail, and watch on STV

Last year (2008) the Scottish National Portrait Gallery’s best-known and treasured portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie was claimed instead to be a portrait of his younger brother, Henry Stuart, Duke of York, who later became a Cardinal and wished to be known as ‘King Henry IX’ of Britain.

The pastel by Maurice Quentin de La Tour was acquired by the Gallery in 1994 for £22,000 and has been celebrated as such ever since. But then in 2008 Bendor Grosvenor, a director of the London portrait dealers Philip Mould Ltd, made his startling claim in The British Art Journal that the portrait does not show Charles but rather his brother, Henry Stuart, when he was Duke of York and before he was made a Cardinal.

At the time, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery dismissed the claim, partly because the expert on Jacobite portraiture, Dr Edward Corp of the University of Toulouse, France, had published the portrait as an authentic image of Bonnie Prince Charlie, in the standard work on the subject, The King over the Water: Portraits of the Stuarts in Exile after 1689, published by the National Galleries of Scotland in 2001.

Now Dr Corp has reversed his opinion in an article in The British Art Journal (Vol X, No. 3). The portrait is definitely not of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he has concluded, but indeed of Cardinal Henry Stuart.
‘Whether the portrait does or does not show Prince Charles really does matter,’ says Dr Corp.
‘It is not merely the catalogue of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery which needs to be corrected. The impression which an entire nation has derived of this important historical figure should also be changed. Before its acquisition by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 1994, the most widely circulated image of Prince Charles Stuart (or Bonnie Prince Charlie as he is popularly called) was an early portrait painted in 1729, when the prince was only eight years old, which showed him wearing Italian court dress. Since then this pastel by La Tour has replaced it as the “official” portrait of the prince, apparently showing as a mature armour-clad 27-year-old, the victor of Prestonpans, and the hero of the escape from Scotland after the Battle of Culloden. The portrait is now reproduced in all biographies of the prince, and has been selected to illustrate the article about him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.’

Now Dr Corp agrees with Bendor Grosvenor’s arguments: ‘The weight of evidence – perhaps regrettably – supports Bendor Grosvenor’s argument that the pastel in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery shows Prince Henry rather than Prince Charles.’

Dr Corp has also concluded that there was once a pastel portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie, by the same artist, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, but that it has been lost, perhaps destroyed during the French Revolution in 1789. Dr Corp believes that the appearance of the lost portrait is recorded in a rare scent
bottle dated 1753 now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (above right).

The mystery is how the La Tour pastel in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery first became known as a likeness of Bonnie Prince Charlie. One red herring was the fact that the sitter was wearing armour, which was thought to be at odds with Henry’s religious vocation. Furthermore, Charles was known to have sat to La Tour in 1747, upon his return to Paris after the failure of the 1745 Rebellion.

However, Bendor Grosvenor was able to discover that Henry also sat to La Tour at some point between late 1745 and, crucially, before his creation as a cardinal by his godfather the Pope, Benedict XIV, in June 1747. Therefore, Henry’s depiction in armour was appropriate, for between 1745-6 he was in charge of a naval expedition to assist Charles’ rebellion in Scotland. Moreover, the portrait of Henry was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1747.

Dr Grosvenor, responding to the news of Dr Corp’s change of mind, said, ‘I am delighted that Edward Corp agrees with me. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery should now look again at re-identifying the sitter in this important portrait.’

Berger Prize Winner 2008 (awarded 2009)

2009-07-03T17:32:00.003+01:00

The WINNER of the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2008 (books published 1 September 2007-31 August 2008) was announced at a reception hosted by Robin Simon, Editor of The British Art Journal, at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art on 2 July 2009.

The winner is Thomas P Campbell for
Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty. Tapestries at the Tudor Court
440pp, hb £45, ISBN 9780300122343
Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The assessors remarked:
‘This was… almost a perfect book containing an incredible amount of research of all kinds, not only archival but on
every piece of tapestry. A wonderful and great work of detection and reconstruction, when something like 90% of the
material in question had been lost, and yet it still came up with a convincing analysis. The book is of great importance
to historians and political scientists as well as to art historians… It has repositioned tapestry where it always
belonged, at the centre of courtly patronage. The book ranged across major questions about the reign of Henry VIII
and his view of monarchy with immense tact and skill.’

The other five titles on the SHORT LIST were as follows:

Robert Hoozee, ed
British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750-1950
424 pp, hb £39, isbn 978-9061537489 Mercatorfonds / Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent
‘For once, here was a catalogue which matched in physical weight its ideas and originality. Robert Hoozee has been
thinking about British art for many years, and here are the fruits of his considerable and profound experience.
Remarkably, for an exhibition held in Belgium, this exhibition has done as much for British art as any show in
Britain over the past decade. Hoozee mined (at times obscure) collections throughout the UK to reveal a unique
strand in British art which, as the title of the book states, combines observation and imagination. It ought to become
an essential text for anyone wishing to understand British art and visual culture over the past two hundred years.’
The assessors wanted to stress the splendour of the very large exhibition, held in Ghent, which featured telling and
often startling conjunctions, and ranged right through, convincingly, to the late twentieth century.

Nicholas Tromans
David Wilkie: The People’s Painter
320pp, hb £65, ISBN 978-0748625208. Edinburgh University Press
‘… A most intelligent and persuasive account of the artist. As the author states, it is a biographical study which
aspires to be a social study of the artist’s career. It achieves both aims admirably. The prose is clear, at times amusing,
and the book is extremely well written, a good read – a rare thing these days among academic texts. The biography is
intriguing and the monographic aspect of the book brought most of Wilkie’s works together for the first time. A major
achievement for which both the author and publisher deserve congratulations and gratitude.’

Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith
Millais
272 pp, hb £35, ISBN 978 185437 746 3. Tate Publishing
‘The catalogue, like the exhibition, brings together a remarkable selection of images that poses important questions
about British art of the period and the course it took in the hands of such an outstanding painter, who was evidently
aware of contemporary European developments but yet trapped within a distinct aesthetic and cultural world.
Confronted some basic problems about British art. It absolutely forces people to take Millais far more seriously, even if,
finally, the enigma remains. It was an especially rewarding exhibition and the catalogue will endure.’

Elizabeth Prettejohn
Art for Art’s Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting
320 pp, hb £35, ISBN 978-0300135497. Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art
‘… addressed the important question of British modernism by taking the starting point back in time. Ambitious and
original, full of sharp insights and fresh material. A really important book that offers a way forward for much further
research and reflection, and which also considered the topics in hand in an international context. Informed by
German idealism, and the writings of Pater and Swinburne, aestheticism in this account is not the trivial and
decadent fashion satirized in Punch, but a revolutionary movement that freed British painting from the relentless
march of modern commercialism and industrial notions of progress. The author’s provocative analyses of the work of
Solomon, Moore, Burne-Jones and Pater especially are revelatory and change how we view these artists and writers.’

David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor, ed
Thomas Hope Regency Designer
520pp, hb £50, ISBN 978-0300124163. Yale University Press for The Bard Graduate Center for
Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture
‘As close to the definitive work on Hope as we are ever likely to get, and it will remain the standard work. A
tremendous amount of research and fresh and intiruging material, amplifying David Watkin’s earlier endeavours on
the subject. The book firmly establishes Hope as one of the most influential designers and illuminates every aspect of
his wide interests. Wonderful. A seductive publication produced to the highest standards… it is difficult to see how a
catalogue on this subject could look much better.’

Berger Prize for 2008 Long List published 25 June 2009

2009-06-25T19:18:00.006+01:00

The Long List for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2008 (for books published 1 September 2007-31 August 2008) is below. The Short List of six will be decided at the end of June 2009 and published here and the Prize will be awarded at a ceremony in London on 2 July 2009

• William L Pressly, The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine Frenzy” in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art, 236pp, hb $80, isbn 978-0874139853,
University of Delaware Press 2008
• Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London, 368 pp, hb £61, isbn 978-0-19-922625-2,
Oxford University Press
• Tatiana C String, Art and Communication in the Reign of Henry VIII, 170pp hb £50, isbn 0754663051, Ashgate
• Ron Broglio, Technologies of the Picturesque. British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750-1830, 236pp, hb $50, isbn 978-0838757000, Bucknell University Press
• Marian Kamlish, George Morland, A London artist in 18th-century Camden, 136pp, pb £11.95, isbn 978 0904491 74 6, Camden History Society
• Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie: The People’s Painter, 320pp, hb £65, isbn 978-0748625208,
Edinburgh University Press
• Michael JK Walsh, Hanging a Rebel: The Life of CRW Nevinson, 352pp, pb £25, isbn 9780718830908,
The Lutterworth Press
• Robert Tittler, The face of the city. Civic portraiture and civic identity in early modern England, 272pp, £55, isbn 978 0 7190 7501 8, Manchester University Press
• Peter Lord, Winifred Coombe Tennant. A Life through Art, 255pp, hb, isbn 978-1862250659,
National Library of Wales
• Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women. 18th-century Bluestockings, 160pp hb £18.99, isbn 978 1 85514 389 0, National Portrait Gallery Publications
• Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith, Millais, 272 pp, hb £35, isbn 978 185437 746 3, Tate Publishing
• Robert Upstone, Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group, 160 pp pb £24.99, isbn 978-1854377814,
Tate Publishing
• Robert Hoozee, ed, British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750-1950, 424 pp, hb £39, isbn 978-9061537489, Mercatorfonds / Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent
• Clifford S Ackley, ed, British Prints from the Machine Age: Rhythms of Modern Life 1914-1939, 224pp, hb £24.95, isbn 978-050023847, Thames & Hudson
• Mark Bills and David Webb, Victorian Artists in Photographs: The World of GF Watts, Selections from the Rob Dickins Collection, 256pp, pb £12.50, isbn 978-0954823078, Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey
• Nicholas Tromans and Emily Weeks, ed, The Lure of the East. British Orientalist Painting, 224 pp pb £24.99, isbn 978 185437 733 3, Tate Publishing
• Judy Egerton, George Stubbs, Painter, 655pp, hb £95, isbn 978-0300125092, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz, The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, 288pp, hb £35, isbn 978-0300138788, Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool / The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City / Yale University Press
• Miles Wynn Cato, Parry: The Life and Works of William Parry A.R.A. 1743-1791, 214pp, hb £25, Miles Wynn Cato, Welsh Art
• Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement, 288pp, hb £35, isbn 978-0300140620,
Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake. Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, 320 pp, hb £35, isbn 978-0300135497, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• Elizabeth E Barker and Alex Kidson, Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool, 224 pp, hb £40, isbn 978-0300117455, Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Press
• Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine Macleod, ed, Politics, Transgression and Representation, 288pp, hb £40, isbn 978-0300116564, Yale University Press / Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor, ed, Thomas Hope Regency Designer, 520pp, hb £50, isbn 978-0300124163, Yale University Press for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture
• Arthur MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, 288pp, hb £45, isbn 978-0300124934, Yale University Press
• Edgar Peter Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber, Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome, 230 pp, hb £40, isbn 978-0300126808, Yale University Press in association with The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• Thomas P Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty. Tapestries at the Tudor Court, 440pp, hb £45, isbn 9780300122343, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• Anna Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers, 256pp, hb £40, isbn 978-0300135459, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
• David Solkin, Painting outside the Ordinary. Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century England, 288pp, hb £45, isbn 9780300140613,
Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Van Dyck at Tate Britain: Robin Simon's Daily Mail review

2009-04-03T17:06:00.006+01:00

Daily Mail Friday 20 March 2009
Capturing the glitz of a great era

Anthony Van Dyck’s dazzling pictures reflect the glitz and glamour of the most sophisticated court this country has ever seen. He transformed portrait painting in Britain from the moment of his arrival in as a precocious twenty-one-year-old in 1620. As this exhibition shows, his example continued to shape portraiture in Britain until well into the twentieth century. Van Dyck flourished under Charles I and did more than anyone to foster a doomed society’s outrageously lavish vision of itself. He himself was dead, in 1641, before tragedy struck, but in 1649 with the execution of the King, the world that Van Dyck had done so much to create vanished as if it had never existed. While it lasted, London was a great place for a portrait painter to be. In order to cut the right figure and curry favour, courtiers had to emulate Charles I’s passion for art collecting and patronage. Immense collections were built up overnight, stuffed with masterpieces by Titian or Raphael, while portraits and spectacular party pieces were commissioned from living masters, especially Rubens and his star pupil Van Dyck. The exhibition includes two vast paintings from the Royal Collection. One is ‘The Greate Peece’, a portrait group of Charles, his queen Henrietta Maria and their two eldest children, set in front of a view of the Thames and Westminster. Van Dyck manages his gigantic canvas with apparent ease. The children are painted with extraordinary tenderness, and the picture brilliantly combines, as was intended, majestic scale with a vision of domestic harmony. In the same room is Charles I on horseback with M de St Antoine, specifically designed to be seen as a ‘hole in the wall’ at the end of the gallery in St James’s Palace. It is another triumphant combination, this time of portrait painting with full-blown baroque theatricality. A much more intimate portrait is of Van Dyck’s mistress, Margaret Lemon, a rarely seen jewel. She was a ‘demon of jealousy’ who resented her lover painting other women and tried to bite his thumb off to end his career. Fortunately for Charles I and his court, and for us, she failed.

The exhibition is on until 17 May

Pompeo Batoni in Lucca

2009-02-23T19:11:00.009Z

The British Art Journal, Vol. IX, No. 3

(Winter 2008/9)

The exquisite city of Lucca is famous for its romanesque architecture, for one of the best restaurants in Italy, and for being the birthplace of Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), whose 250th anniversary has been noisily celebrated all over the world. The city now has another favourite son, Pompeo Batoni (1708-87), not that is has seemed to care very much about him hitherto. With a spectacular exhibition (6 December 2008-29 March 2009) in honour of Batoni’s tercentenary all that has changed. The show, in the restored Palazzo Ducale, was an unequivocal triumph, to the relieved amazement of the organizers, the city fathers and the regional government, all of whom had plenty to lose: because it was the first art exhibition on this scale ever mounted in Lucca. This act of faith – really, a leap in the dark – was amply rewarded, with hordes of visitors, major international attention and press coverage and, no doubt, economic benefits for the fine chefs and hoteliers of this enchanting town. Furthermore, the exhibition was bigger, better, and set in more splendid surroundings than in its previous venues. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (21 October 2007-27 January 2008), it was very well displayed and accompanied by a good conference. At the National Gallery in London (20 February-18 May 2008), in contrast, it was rather cramped, insufficiently supported by proper educational initiatives and as a consequence rather poorly attended. All of this suggested a failure of nerve on the part of the gallery, which let down the outstanding work of the curator, Edgar Peters Bowron, whose lucid and civilized catalogue is a model of its kind and looks set to remain the most appealing guide in English to this attractive although ultimately elusive painter. In London, a conference was only finally mounted thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
In Lucca, the vast spaces of the Palazzo Ducale were cleverly articulated by discreet design while affording plenty of room to display many of the huge altarpieces and allegorical canvases that formed as large a part of Batoni’s output as his well-known Grand Tour portraits. The exhibition, which had a separate catalogue edited by Liliana Barroero and Fernando Mazzocca, with contributions by others including Bowron, made some efforts to set Batoni within the traditions of pious ‘arts and crafts’ from which he emerged. This was rather canny, since Batoni was occasionally capable of straying into cloying religiosity (The Blood of the Redeemer at the Gesù in Rome was mercifully not on display), and he himself embodied the most active piety with evident delight in the pleasures of the flesh (in his personal life as well as his paintings), a combination that almost defines the High Baroque. It is hard to believe there was ever a more accomplished draughtsman than Batoni, and there was a small but satisfying selection of sketches on view, including several from Eton, one of which, ‘after the Antique’, shows a satyr with a graphically detailed full-frontal erection. Whatever it has done for boys or beaks over the years, in the context of quite so many glorious nudes it was tempting to see this drawing as in some sense a self-portrait.
The Lucca exhibition also suggested the pan-European extent of Batoni’s clientele. Some of this material can make the modern viewer wince, notably the full-scale micromosaic re-working, ordered by Clement XIV for the Empress Maria Teresa, of Batoni’s oil of The Emperor Joseph II and his brother (cat. 66, 67), but it was quite right to show the two in unnerving contiguity. And there were many, many unequivocal treats on view, including the Bacchus and Ariadne (cat. 81) commissioned in a moment of chutzpah by Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn as a confronto to go with a Perseus and Andromeda from Anton Raphael Mengs then in Spain (the Mengs was stolen by the French en route and sold to Catherine the Great, and so the confronto was frustrated). Time and again, similarities to contemporary French academic painting came to mind, and perhaps the model in Batoni’s Martyrdom of St Bartholomew of 1749 (cat. 30) was even identical with that employed for Joseph-Marie Vien’s sole essay into the unconventional, his Sleeping Hermit (Louvre) painted in Rome in 1750.
Batoni was a phenomenon, and it seems curmudgeonly to retain any reservations at all in the face of such marvellous painting. And yet, for all his accomplishment, it is only rarely that one feels like saying of this particular force of nature, ‘Eppur, si muove…’ Robin Simon

Andrea Palladio at the Royal Academy: Robin Simon's Daily Mail review

2009-02-22T17:17:00.005Z

Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy. Royal Academy, London
31 January-13 April 2009

‘The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stand,
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand…’
Noel Coward sings The Stately Homes of England

This is an exhibition about the man who invented those houses. English aristocrats making the Grand Tour of Italy in the eighteenth century were stunned by the country villas that Palladio had created on the mainland near Venice. The visual impact of this show makes you appreciate how it happened. Huge models of his villas, churches and palaces, many cut open or hinged in sections, are in every room. And so, if like me you find plans and elevations tricky to imagine as the finished article, the work has been done for you. Palladio’s drawings are things of unimaginable beauty in themselves. There are also glorious paintings by the likes of Canaletto, El Greco and Tintoretto to make this a feast for the eye as well as the imagination.

Palladio was the first person to marry the forms of classical architecture with the country house. Until Palladio came along, they were just big farms. Suddenly, these working estates reflected the graceful palaces that noble families had become accustomed to in Venice and Vicenza. Palladio designed those too. When they went to church on Sunday, they entered his adaptations of Roman temples. Or visiting the town hall, they would find themselves staring in wonder at Palladio’s transformation of a muddled medieval market into a public building straight out of ancient Rome. This is the astonishing Basilica in the centre of Vicenza, and a vast model in this exhibition shows how Palladio’s genius turned it into a vision of harmonious proportions. He cheated, by fiddling the dimensions of the openings so that the wonky streets inside the market appear to be aligned.

Palladio changed the face of Europe. Just look around. At the Royal Academy itself, the National Gallery, or the Banqueting House in Whitehall. And throughout England we still have those stately homes, even if they prove that it is now the National Trust that has the upper hand…

Damien Hirst sale. An entirely legal scam?

2008-12-21T19:24:00.001Z

That Damien Hirst sale. Was it an entirely legal scam?
This is Robin Simon's editorial in The British Art Journal, Vo. IX, No. 2 (Autumn 2008)
Left hand, right hand…
We promise not to mention the Turner Prize ever again. With any luck, euthanasia will soon be applied to what is clearly a very sick patient: the Turner Prize has been moribund for years. Finally, this time, even the national press appears to have despaired and its otherwise gallant troopers, the several art critics who have become accustomed to just reprinting the press release or repeating the jargon of a ‘curator of interpretation’, have decided to criticize the quality of what is on offer. This long drawn-out exercise in pseudo-competition, complete with a pretence of public nominations, has done good service. Not in the cause of art, but in public relations, promoting to prominence one limited kind of art that no member of the public would voluntarily have paid real money to see, and in gaining vast publicity for the empire Tate buildings.
The appearance of the latest array has coincided with some more than usually odd goings-on within the world of art PR. The strangest was undoubtedly the Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby’s, which is still being reported as having ‘made’ £111m. For whom? This was an operation along similar lines to the ‘sale’ of Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull for a purported £50m, one of those adapatations of existing designs that might be termed ‘derivatives’: and about as risky an investment as those speculative vehicles that have brought the world’s financial market to its knees. In the case of the skull, it transpired that the major shareholder in the supposed purchasing partnership was none other than… Damien Hirst. Did he hand over money from left hand to right hand? Could it be that this was not what is usually understood by the term purchase?
Certainly, the ‘auction’ was a farce. Hirst announced that he was going to take the bold step of going to auction and cutting out his dealers. There was nothing bold about it. For who should turn out to have been a major bidder and ‘buyer’ but Hirst’s dealer, Jay Jopling. The whole thing looks very much as though it was a ploy whereby the value of Hirst stocks was maintained at little or, conceivably, no cost to either the artist or the dealer (and there was no seller’s premium to pay). Indeed, two other bidders at the auction were also Hirst dealers. And so was the money supposedly involved , one might wonder, merely passing back and forth again, from one hand to the other?
The elaborate net thus cast at Sotheby’s caught a mere dozen or so genuine suckers who did not know what was going on and who paid prices that in some instances were pushed up by underbidding on the part of experienced dealers with a vested interest in keeping prices high. These foolish virgins (they were mostly first-time buyers from such well-known art-loving countries as Kazakhstan) should take heed of the lessons of history and the experience of those ruined by the bursting of the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles in the 18th century. Similar exercises took place then in the manipulation of evidence to make it appear that the relevant stocks had genuine value. But the lucky ones – chiefly those operating the scam – sold out and got out before the bubble burst. One of those fortunate to escape with their profits, incidentally, was Sir James Thornhill, who had been tipped off by Robert Knight, cashier of the South Sea Company, whose house he was decorating. Knight nipped off to a long and happy retirement in France; Thornhill bought back the family estate in Dorset. The time for holders of Hirst stocks to be worried is at the merest hint of either the artist or his dealers genuinely getting rid of their holdings…
One of the more tiresome myths peddled by Hirst and co., and dutifully repeated by the press, is that this was the first time an artist had gone direct to auction with his own work. Thornhill’s son-in-law William Hogarth did it in 1745, the difference being that the sales on that occasion were all to genuine buyers – and that they were acquiring works of art of lasting value.

Leonardo da Vinci drawings: look at the back!

2008-12-20T18:08:00.004Z

Robin Simon on the Leonardo da Vinci drawings on the back of the Virgin and Child with St Anne…

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-11-01T11:17:00.002Z

Opening historic houses (right)

‘Cartoons & Coronets. The Genius of Osbert Lancaster’
Wallace Collection, Manchester Square London W1
Free admission

Genius is not too strong a word for this much loved inventor of the pocket cartoon. Sir Osbert also produced theatre designs and elaborate satires on architecture and social life. Far from looking dated his wit will enchant new generations. The accompanying illustrated book by James Knox is scintillating.
'The Vulture', Daily Mail, 31 October 2008

Byzantium at the Royal Academy

2008-10-24T11:47:00.006+01:00

St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai (the subject of the final room in the exhibition). Photo RS

Robin Simon's review of 'Byzantium 330-1453' at the Royal Academy (Daily Mail, 24 October 2008):

Byzantium is synonymous with splendour, and the treasures on view will live up to your wildest expectations. Here is the sixth-century Antioch Chalice, once believed to be the Holy Grail, and the greatest piece of silverware to survive from the fourth century, the Projecta Casket. There are icons, mosaics, manuscripts, ivories, gilded ornaments, silver plates, medallions, amulets, tapestries, and plenty of Byzantine bling. Wags will be getting all sorts of ideas from the gold body-chains studded with gems.

This is a blockbuster show about a blockbuster subject, one of the greatest empires the world has ever known. As the title tells us, it lasted for more than a thousand years, from its foundation by Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, until it finally succumbed to the Islamic Ottoman Turks.

Despite the quantity and complexity of the material, the display is a model of clarity. It reveals how the classical world of Rome was transformed into that of the Christian era. Constantinople, built upon the earlier city of Byzantium, was at the centre of an empire whose riches were directed towards the creation of what we call ‘Byzantine’ art, although the emperor continued to rule over what he considered ‘The Empire of the Romans’.

The first room makes the point. Here are Late Antique sculptures of Christian significance from as early as the third century. These exquisite marble carvings in classical style tell the story of Jonah, which prefigured the death and resurrection of Christ. Nearby is a complete floor mosaic and a magnificent bronze head of Constantine himself, and even an early fifth-century tomb complete with wall paintings showing the tale of Susanna and the Elders, understood as an allegory of the triumph of the Christian church over heresy.

And then, of course, there are icons. Not any old icons, but some of the rarest in existence and some of the largest. Lots of them. And, in a suitably over-the-top gesture, a pair of gigantic bronze doors brought all the way from the church of S Salvatore in the southern Italian town of Atrani.

The exhibition continues until 22 March 2009

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-10-24T11:46:00.000+01:00

‘Renaissance Faces’
National Gallery, London
Until 18 January 2009
Admission charge

Stunning array of masterpieces. Sculptures, paintings and drawings, including works by Van Eyck, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Dürer, Memling and Pontormo. The marble bust of Niccolo Strozzi by Mino da Fiesole is a work of cruel realism and almost steals the show from Titian’s penetrating portrait of Pope Paul III.
'The Vulture', Daily Mail, 24 October 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-10-24T11:45:00.001+01:00

‘Sporting Art’
James Harvey British Art
15 Langton Street London SW10 OJL
Free. 10-6 Mon-Fri, 10-4 Sat

Attractive new gallery showing no fewer than ten rediscovered paintings by Sir Alfred Munnings, whose painting, once so sniffed at, is looking better and better. Typical mixture of romantic gypsy lads and posh people hunting. Splendid animals by the likes of John Wootton, Sawrey Gilpin, John Sartorius and J.F. Herring Jr.
'The Vulture', Daily Mail, 17 October 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-10-24T11:43:00.000+01:00

‘Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and his artists’
Royal Academy, London, until 2 January 2009
Admission charge

The highlights of this show are works by Bonnard and Matisse, who do not appear in the title, although Braque is represented by major work. The rest reveals how the dealer Aimé Maeght conjured major reputations out of the whimsical creations of Miró and Calder. The jury is still out on Giacometti.
'The Vulture', Daily Mail, 10 October 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-10-24T11:41:00.003+01:00

‘Horses & Landscapes: George Stubbs at Welbeck’
Until 21 December 2008
Admission charge

Magnificent paintings by Stubbs star in a show exploring the historic significance of nearby beauty spot Cresswell Crags. Also near-life-size paintings of horses commissioned by the 1st Duke of Newcastle in the early 17th century are on public display for the first time, in a striking new gallery.
'The Vulture', Daily Mail, 3 October 2008

Spectator papers

2008-10-23T12:35:00.000+01:00

You can click on the links below for a selection of articles by Robin Simon in The Spectator

The Courtauld at 75

The Courtauld Institute: Home House

Bruges

The Maya… deadly ball games

Giovanni Bellini and the Etruscans

In Venice for pleasure

Charles I in Madrid

Lily Cole and Playboy: definitely art

2008-10-04T10:00:00.004+01:00

Some seriously philosophical and aesthetic reflections on Lily Cole by Robin Simon in The Independent…

Robin Simon reviews 'Miró, Calder, Giacometti and Braque: Aimé Maeght and his Artists'

2008-09-30T18:39:00.015+01:00

Robin Simon's review of 'Miró, Calder, Giacometti and Braque: Aimé Maeght and his Artists' (Royal Academy, London, until 2 January 2009) in the New Statesman might make you think about how the reputations of some 20th-century artists were created and how they have since been shored up.
One vehicle for maintaining the reputations of 'Aimé Maeght's artists' has been the impressive-sounding Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vence. The commercial Galerie Maeght in Paris continues to flourish…

Entrance Garden of Fondation Maeght. Photo RS

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-09-28T12:33:00.002+01:00

‘Tea and Coffee in the Age of Johnson’
Dr Johnson’s House,
17 Gough Square, London EC4A 3DE
Until 13 December

Coffee houses were well established when Samuel Johnson was growing up in the early 1700s, but tea was rare and expensive. By the end of his life tea was a favourite with all classes and Johnson would drink 25 cups in an evening. Excellent exhibits and accompanying events in this evocative location.

'The Vulture', Daily Mail, 26 September 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-09-22T10:20:00.003+01:00

'Francis Bacon'
Tate Britain
Until 4 January 2009

How good was Bacon? This shrewd selection gives him every chance to shine and there are undoubted masterpieces, such as the Crucifixion triptych of 1962 and the 1965 Study from portrait of Pope Innocent X. Room 7 has portraits of lyricism and wit amid all the blood and guts.
The Vulture, Daily Mail, 19 September 2008

And another thing:
One of the finest paintings on view is the Study for Crouching Nude of 1952. It is at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a gift from its former director William Valentiner because (wait for it) the museum of which he was currently director, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, turned it down… ouch.

There is a brief but enjoyable interview with Bacon online:
BBC interview

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-09-15T15:21:00.005+01:00

Crikey, get this price:
Lifeguards on the Mall, 66 x 91cm, oil on canvas. Yours for £125,000…

‘Edward Seago: the Artist’s Artist’
Colnaghi, 15 Old Bond Street, London W1, until 19 September (closed Sunday)
Free

Seago was not so much the artist’s artist as the people’s artist. Until his death in 1974, Seago defied the trendy art establishment to become the most popular of ‘traditional’ painters, loved by high and low alike. Splendid show filled out with loans from Prince Philip, his admirer and painting companion.

The Vulture, Daily Mail, 12 September 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-09-07T12:30:00.007+01:00

Lucian Freud, Girl with White Dog, 1950-1, oil on canvas ©Tate, London 2008

‘The Naked and the Nude’
Mima, Middlesborough

Lucian Freud’s 1951 Girl with white dog features in a fine selection of paintings from Tate Britain at the swish new Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art. The building is fun and holds an impressive permanent collection of 20th-century British works, with plenty of contemporary ‘cutting edge’ art on view. 'The Vulture', Daily Mail, 5 September 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-09-02T11:14:00.005+01:00

'BP Exhibition: Drawn from the Collection'
Tate Britain
Until 1 March 2009
Free admission

Selection of rarely seen treasures from the Tate's drawings collection. Superb draughtsmanship from the likes of Cozens, Cotman, Turner and Burne-Jones, a tradition continued in the twentieth century by such as Nevinson, Kennington and Spencer. The Tate's insistence upon displaying stuff by Tracey Emin and chums amid such skill is self-defeating.

The Vulture, Daily Mail, 29 August 2008

PS what I did not mention in the paper is that the efforts of Tracey Emin and David Shrigley are so poor that, to quote Shrigley, 'You've got to laugh.'
Or weep, for British art…
What Shrigley actually said, with unconscious irony, was: 'It’s a matter of making fun of the things you could get depressed about. You've got to laugh.'
See for yourselves on this link: feeble stuff

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-09-02T11:09:00.005+01:00

'Reunited. Gwen John, Mere Poussepin and the Catholic Church'
Barber Institute, Birmingham
Until 21 September

If you like Gwen John, you will like this lugubrious display of nuns. After her disastrous love affair with the sculptor Rodin, John converted to Roman Catholicism. The six portraits of the local Mother Superior were commissioned, one for each room in the convent. It suited the artist's repetitious nature.

The Vulture, Daily Mail, 22 August 2008

The Nun (Late 1910s). Oil on board.
Tate

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-08-10T14:51:00.003+01:00

Wyndham Lewis PortraitsNational Portrait Gallery

London. Until 19 October
Admission charge

Wyndham Lewis seemed the epitome of ‘modern art’ after World War I. Now his portraits looks like charming pastiches. The RA turned down his portrait of TS Eliot in 1938, although Sickert called him ‘the greatest portraitist of this or any other time’. A baffling episode in the history of taste.

The Vulture, Daily Mail, 8 August 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-08-02T23:25:00.008+01:00

Edgar Degas, l'Absinthe

'Impressionism & Scotland'
National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh
Until 12 October
Admission charge

Magnificent display of over 100 masterpieces telling the story of the powerful relationship between the French Impressionists and Scotland. The Glasgow draper Arthur Kay bought Degas’s great l’Absinthe (see illustration) as early as 1892, while Scotland boasted its own ‘Glasgow Boys’ and ‘Scottish Colourists’. Knockout works by Van Gogh, Monet (Poplars on the Epte illustrated here), … the lot.

The Vulture, Daily Mail, 1 August 2008

Robin Simon's Daily Mail weekly choice

2008-07-26T07:47:00.004+01:00

Winifred Coombe Tennant: A Life through Art
National Museum Cardiff
26 July-9 November
Free admission

The Davies sisters gave incomparable Impressionist painting to the National Museum of Wales. Now a new exhibition celebrates Winifred Coombe Tennant who donated outstanding Welsh paintings. Eighty works on view include plenty by Kyffin Williams (see picture) and also Gwen John who linked Tennant’s two great loves, Wales and France.

The Vulture, Daily Mail, 25 July 2008

Courtauld 75th anniversary

2008-07-24T09:39:00.005+01:00

Enjoying a joke… his own. Robin Simon giving the welcoming speech at the Courtauld Institute's 75th anniversary evening at Somerset House, London, on 5 July 2008.

For more pics click Courtauld at 75.

Doing a runner at the Tate (whoops! 'Tate')

2008-07-23T23:39:00.003+01:00

Another Tate stunt… I forbear to mention the stunt artiste responsible and you will have to look at this link to an Oz paper that knows a piece of nonsense when it hears of it.

I was trying to teach in the Tate when this began. We were greeted by a health and safety adviser when we arrived. As we passed, for various reasons, through the bowels of the Tate 'back stage', with relays of sweaty runners under our feet and we under theirs, I warned my students not to touch 'the art works'. The sprinters, some of whom were clearly swifter and fitter than others, were under no illusions about the absurdity of the exercise but then, they were being paid quite well to trot back and forth.

Lars Tharp new director of Foundling Museum

2008-07-17T16:54:00.004+01:00

The amiable and brilliant Lars Tharp is the new director of the Foundling Museum where he will begin work on 1 October 2008. Lars follows the remarkable Rhian Harris who has overseen every stage of the creation of the Foundling in its new form as one of the outstanding museums in Britain and is moving on to take over as Director of the V&A's Museum of Childhood.

Lars is familiar as one of the long-term stars of BBC1's The Antiques Road Show. He is a leading ceramics expert and general all-round Hogarth nut, which is just as well since the Foundling contains three of Hogarth's greatest paintings as well as works by Allan Ramsay, John Michael Rysbrack, Joshua Reynolds and John Singleton Copley. It also houses the Gerald Coke Handel Collection and the fair copy of the score of Handel's Messiah. Louis-François Roubiliac's terracotta bust of Handel is one of the glories of the Foundling's Picture Gallery, which is dominated by Hogarth's unforgettable portrait of Captain Coram.

The BP Portrait Award 2008

2008-07-05T17:25:00.005+01:00

The BP Portrait Award 2008 is the worst yet, a dismal array of photo-realist images: if they were not executed with a spray-gun, they look like it. This annual show at the National Portrait Gallery in London used to be one of the few places left where those still engaged in the skilful use of brush, oil and canvas were recognized. In 2003, this ceased to be the case. I wrote at the time in the Daily Mail:

'This annual show, now in its twenty-second year, performs the invaluable task of reminding us that each generation is bursting with young people still determined to paint people, and to find fresh ways of doing so.

These are the hardy souls who survive the scorn of their supposed teachers at the art schools, where they are often forbidden to draw from the model, and sneered at for painting the world as they see it.

Naturally, they are ignored by the likes of Charles Saatchi and have to scrounge a living without the massive subsidies of the state-sponsored art of the Tate and its Turner Prize parade of charlatans.

And yet… this year I smell a rat. I arrived full of optimism and carried out my usual exercise of spotting the works I admired without looking at the labels or knowing which had won the four awards. The nominations – my four nominations – were: Eddie by Jack Scouller; Jack by Toby Wiggins; Self-portrait, postman by Jason Walker; and Libby Sheldon by Emma Wesley. And my winner is… Emma Welsey for her portrait of Libby Sheldon.

Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? At least so far as the official awards are concerned. Not one of my winners picked up any of the awards, from the £25,000 first prize to the £1,000 fourth. The trouble, I discovered, is that I was still judging the pictures on the ludicrously old-fashioned basis of how well they were painted.

Three of the official prizes all went to images of slick hyper-realistic trickery that look suspiciously as though they were painted with a spray-gun on top of a colour transparency projected onto canvas. Technically, it is clever, of course, just as spray-painting a stolen vehicle has to be cleverly done. But without the excitement of the brush mark on the canvas, it is all sterile stuff. Only the fourth prize looked as though it had any life in it, and there the brush had actually intervened.

This "snap, enlarge and spray" method is not a new trick, not by any means. And judging by the evidence of this competition it is the predominant technique now taught in the colleges, and approved by the BP judges. It has long been the only kind of realistic art approved by the Tate, and the winner adhered to that dubious formula…'

That was 2003. Now, in 2008, there are NO worthwhile portraits in this selection that have been made by traditional brushwork. It is not that excellent examples of this kind of painting do not exist. They still continue to be made, in the teeth of official discouragement. It is that they have been here, as everywhere else, deliberately excluded. Such artists are now 'non-people'. As a result, the once-marvellous BP Portrait Award no longer serves any useful purpose.

John Harris wins the Berger Prize

2008-07-03T07:58:00.011+01:00

The doyen of architectural history, indeed the maverick of architectural history, John Harris, OBE, has won the £5000 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2007 for Moving Rooms: the Trade in Architectural Salvages, published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre. The prize is awarded annually by The British Art Journal together with the Berger Collection Educational Trust of Denver.

In a reception at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in London on 2 July 2008 the presentation was made by Tim Knox, Director of Sir John Soane's Museum.

The assessors commented: 'The author wears his immense knowledge and scholarship lightly, and lifts the lid on so many subjects. The tale he has to tell is rich in its implications. The book forces us to reconsider fundamental questions about the nature of authenticity in all fields, so radically indeed, that this study could almost be reckoned a "postmodern" achievement. It opens up endless possibilities for future research. No-one else could have written it.'

Guests at the reception included Professor Brian Allen, Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; Dr Martin Postle, Assistant Director, Paul Mellon Centre; Eileen Harris; Richard Ormond (formerly Director of the National Portrait Gallery and of the National Maritime Museum) and Professor Leonee Ormond; Dr John Martin Robinson; Dr Paula Henderson (winner of the 2006 William MB Berger Prize); Dr Wendy Baron; Dr Gert-Rudolf Flick; William Drummond; Elizabeth Einberg; Dr Celina Fox; Dr Susan Jenkins (English Heritage, Apsley House); Emeritus Professor Andrew Sanders; Jane Martineau (Burlington Magazine); Kim Sloan (British Museum); Professor Edward Chaney; Sally Salvesen (Yale University Press).

Berger Prize 2007

2008-06-27T17:43:00.013+01:00

The British Art Journal announces the Short List of six titles for the £5000 Berger Prize for British Art History

The winner will be announced in London at 7.15 pm on 2 July 2008 in a reception at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

The six books short-listed for the 2007 prize (for an outstanding book published between 1 September 2006 and 31 August 2007) are:

Inigo Jones and The European Classicist Tradition
Giles Worsley
Yale ISBN 978-0-300-11729-5 £40

A New World, England’s First View of America
Kim Sloan
British Museum ISBN 978 0 7141 2650 0 [PB] £19.99

Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvage
John Harris
Yale for the Paul Mellon Centre ISBN 9780300124200, £30

War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity
in Britain (1939-1945)
Brian Foss
Yale for the Paul Mellon Centre ISBN 978-0-300-10890-3 £35

Pictures and Popery. Art an Religion in England, 1660-1760
Clare Haynes
Ashgate ISBN 978-0-7546-5506-0 £55

James ‘Athenian’ Stuart. The Rediscovery of Antiquity
Ed Susan Weber Soros
Bard Graduate Center/Yale ISBN 9780300117134, £60

Since its inception in 2001, the Berger Prize has come to be recognized as the most prestigious in the field. It celebrates outstanding achievement in the history of British art and is administered by The British Art Journal, the leading research journal, and awarded jointly with the Berger Collection Educational Trust of Denver. The Denver Art Museum houses the important collection of British art assembled by the late William MB Berger in honour of whose memory the prize was established.

Assessors
A panel of no fewer than five and no more than seven assessors selects the recipient. The assessors committee includes the editor of The British Art Journal (Robin Simon), and is chaired by Dr. Timothy J. Standring, Gates Foundation Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Denver Art Museum, and Trustee of the Berger Collection Educational Trust.
The other assessors for the 2007 prize are:
Professor Linda Colley, Princeton University
Dr. Ann Bermingham, University of California at Santa Barbara
Olivier Meslay, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Dr. Martin Postle, Assistant Director, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The Long List can be seen in the current issue of The British Art Journal (IX, 1).

The following titles were deemed Hors Concours

Hogarth France and British Art
The Rise of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Robin Simon
Paul Holberton Publishing/Hogarth Arts
ISBN 978-0-9554063-0-0, £45

Inigo Jones’s ‘Roman Sketchbook’
Edward Chaney
ISBN 0901953121 Maggs Bros/Roxburghe Club, £200

Some day my plinth will come

2008-06-23T18:06:00.005+01:00

Boris, our new Mayor of London, has inherited the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square… This classic exercise in fake democracy ('vote for the project you want to see on the plinth') had a short list of the usual suspects presented to the public by the usual suspects, who then picked the final two (each gets a year of the plinth).

The 'winners' are Anthony Gormley and Yinka Shonibare.

Gormley proposes getting members of the public to stand on the plinth in a rota so that it is occupied 24 hours a day for a year. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?

But listen to Gormley:

'Through elevation onto the plinth and removal from common ground the subjective living body becomes both representation and representative, encouraging consideration of diversity, vulnerability and the individual in contemporary society.'

Or, of course, not…

And the same goes for Shonibare's offering of a ship in a bottle. It comes with the customary assertion of profundity without which the object would, as usual, be completely meaningless:

'For me it's a celebration of London's immense ethnic wealth, giving expression to and honouring the many cultures and ethnicities that are still breathing precious wind into the sails of the UK.'

The wind is hot air, we presume. The sails get in to this guff because the model will have sails made out of pretty (vaguely ethnic) fabric bought in Brixton market. (He's used this stuff before. It's a trademark gimmick.)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Bonnie Prince Charlie earlier suspicions

2008-06-22T10:46:00.003+01:00

Portrait painter Sandy Cheyne had come to the conclusion that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery had got the wrong prince in 2002 in an article in The Leopard

The Courtauld at 75

2008-06-21T10:37:00.006+01:00

The Courtauld Institute of Art celebrates 75 years with a festive weekend 4-6 July 2008. Robin Simon will be there as Chairman of the Courtauld Association and he has written about the place on a number of occasions (see the links in Spectator Papers below).

NOT Bonnie Prince Charlie

2008-06-21T07:57:00.003+01:00

The new issue of The British Art Journal (Vol IX, No. 1) publishes a revelation about the best-known portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Here's a funny thing: it isn't – a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie, that is. Instead, as Bendor Grosvenor reveals, it shows his brother Cardinal Henry Stuart, or 'Cardinal York' as he was known, who later preferred to be known by the title of 'King Henry IX'. A story, in fact, of all sorts of pretenders…

Other versions of the story can be found at these links

Daily Mail

BBC News

The Parthenon and the Elgin Marbles

2008-06-19T12:22:00.002+01:00

A new book by James Cuno (reviewed by Robin Simon) offers some powerful arguments in favour of keeping all the marbles just where they are…

The archaeologist Dorothy King agrees.

And so does Jonathan Keates.

Hammershoi at the Royal Academy

2008-06-19T12:15:00.002+01:00

Villhelm Hammershoi is at the Royal Academy. Robin Simon went to Copenhagen to have a look and wrote a preview.