For the past year, The Getty Center in Los Angeles has celebrated the reign of Louis XIV during the tercentenary of his death. Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV, which opened on December 15, 2015 and runs until May 1, 2016, is the last major event in this program. Three…
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, with Lidy Jane Chu, eds., Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015) This collection of sixteen essays gives a good sense of the much-increased body of work now being carried out on cultural contacts between the…
Passing through what is now southwestern Mexico in 1763, the Spanish Capuchin friar Francisco de Ajofrín paused to praise a local artist: “Today there flourishes a celebrated painter, a noble Indian named Don José Manuel de la Cerda, who has greatly perfected this faculty [of painting lacquerware], so that it…
Review of Portrayals from a Brush Divine – A Special Exhibition on the Tricentennial of Giuseppe Castiglione’s Arrival in China (October 6, 2015 – January 4, 2016) On October 10, 1925, the Forbidden City in Beijing officially ceased to be the residence of the former imperial family and became…
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, with Lidy Jane Chu, eds., Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015) This collection of sixteen essays gives a good sense of the much-increased body of work now being carried out on cultural contacts between the…
Can a period room be brought back to life? In the spring of 2015, twelve Barnard and Columbia undergraduates and I made the attempt, in a seminar called “A Virtual Enlightenment.” We had the support of the Mellon Foundation, the collaboration of Metropolitan Museum of Art curators Jeffrey Munger and…
This has of course been quite the year for Louis XIV, with a number of events and exhibitions staged across many months to mark the tercentenary of the close of “the great” monarch’s reign. On the 5th of December the V&A held a symposium – Lambrequins and Luxury: Ornament in…
When he advertised “a Collection of Pictures to be seen in Great Marlborough Street, facing Blenheim Street, at Mr. Liotard’s” in 1773, Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–1789) can hardly have imagined that it would be over 240 years before a substantial number of his works were brought together again in Britain.[1]…
Melissa Percival writes about her experience of preparing a new exhibition of fantasy figures with the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse. Exeter, Thursday 5th November Next week it all becomes real. I’ve received a spreadsheet with a detailed delivery schedule of 78 old master paintings borrowed from all corners…
In the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery of the China Through the Looking Glass show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a flat, uncut semiformal robe for the Jiaqing Emperor (r. 1796-1820) was suspended next to a Dries Van Noten Autumn/Winter 2012-13 ensemble, comprised of a jacket cinched at the…