19th Century
Big Turner Show at YCBA in March 2025
February 14 2025

Picture: YCBA
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Yale Center for British Art are opening a sizeable show on JMW Turner on 29th March 2025 entitled J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality. The exhibition will contain no fewer than 75 paintings and prints by the artist.
According to the press release:
This exhibition will draw from the Center’s rich holdings of the artist’s work, encompassing all media and phases of his nearly sixty-year career. This is the first show at the YCBA to focus on Turner in more than thirty years, displaying the complete arc of his radical artistic evolution. The exhibition will examine the contradictory nature of this revolutionary figure, who was as inspired by the past luminaries of the European landscape tradition as he was determined to surpass their greatest achievements.
“We are thrilled to welcome visitors back to the museum to reconnect with our extraordinary collections,” said Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director. “Turner is an artist whose groundbreaking works continue to inspire. His work has long been a cornerstone of our collection and we are excited to show our returning and new visitors the full range of our Turner holdings.”
The exhibition will run from 29th March until 10th August 2025.
Nationalmusée Luxembourg acquire three works by Monique Daniche
January 30 2025

Picture: tajan.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Nationalmusée Luxembourg have announced their recent acquisition of three works by Monique Daniche (1737-1824), a portrait painter who made her fame painting the elite of Strasbourg at the turn of the 18th / 19th centuries. The picture illustrated above appears to have been acquired from Tajan last June.
Click on the link above to read more about her fascinating life.
Tissot, Women and Time in Toronto
January 16 2025

Picture: AGO
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The AGO in Toronto (Art Gallery of Ontario) have recently opened their latest temporary exhibition Tissot, Women and Time.
According to the gallery's website:
Exploring the many ways that the French artist James Tissot represented modern women and envisioned their relationship to time during the last decades of the nineteenth century, this exhibition presents two of the AGO’s most beloved Tissot paintings alongside a selection of more than 40 works on paper donated by Allan and Sondra Gotlieb. The contradiction of the period come alive in these works, as the quickness of modernity, exemplified by the newfound speed of travel, fashion and commodity culture, is juxtaposed against the constrained pace of women’s everyday lives, characterized by the wait to find a husband, caregiving, tending to customers or recovering from illness.
The show will run until 29th June 2025.
Musée George Sand acquires Carolus-Duran's Portrait of Émile Aucante
January 10 2025

Picture: Nicolas Nouvelet
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
La Tribune de l'Art has shared news that the Musée George Sand in La Châtre, France, has acquired Carolus-Duran's portrait of the publisher Émile Aucante (1822-1908). The work was pre-empted from Nicolas Nouvelet's auction last October for 5,850 EUR (inc. fees).
According to the auctioneer's catalogue note:
Émile Aucante was a publisher and journalist, godson and close collaborator of George Sand. He began his career as a fervent disciple of the theoretician Pierre Leroux, for whom he contributed to the Revue Sociale. Condemned to exile during the coup d'état of 1851, he was called by George Sand, who made him her secretary in Nohant, inheriting all her manuscripts and papers. He then negotiated all publications with publishers on her behalf. In 1858, following Orsini's attempt on the life of Emperor Napoleon III, Émile Aucante was arrested once again. Our painting shows him at the age of 38, in his period as a political opponent of the Second Empire. Under the Third Republic, he developed his publishing activities, directing L'Univers Illustré and then several collections at Calmann-Lévy, alongside his printing business.
'Thrift Store' Find Connected to Prominent Black Artist Redisplayed
January 8 2025

Picture: artnews.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
An interesting story from artnews.com that a watercolour purchased from a 'thrift store' in the US has ended up on display in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The artwork was purchased by Andy Robbins, an HR professional, by chance. Robbins then spent time cracking the work's inscription which reads 'W.H. Dorsey 1864'. It transpired that this signature referred to William H. Dorsey, a prominent black artist in 19th-century Philadelphia who is known primarily for his extensive scrapbooking of black community history. Read the article above to find out more.
Upcoming: Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism
January 3 2025

Picture: fristartmuseum.org
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Frist Art Museum in Nashville TN will be opening a rather interesting exhibition entitled Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism at the end of this month.
According to the museum's website:
Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores the intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in late 19th-century France. Beginning with the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris and the resultant food crisis and continuing through the 1890s, Farm to Table showcases the work of artists such as Rosa Bonheur, Gustave Courbet, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, who captured the nation’s unique relationship with food, from production to preparation and consumption.
Featuring approximately 50 paintings and sculptures, the exhibition’s portrayals of farmers in fields and gardens, bustling urban markets, and chefs and diners in the age of grand banquets and a burgeoning café scene underscores connections between urban and rural life while capturing changing notions of gender, labor, and class.
The show will run from 31st January until 4th May 2025.
Sir Thomas Lawrence's love child?
January 3 2025

Picture: Royal Academy / Art Institute of Chicago
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
I'm sure Bendor would want me to point out this interesting article (here's versions from The Times and Artnet) which was published over the Christmas period, drawing attention to some overlooked aspect of Sir Thomas Lawrence's relationship to Isabella Wolff (pictured). Indeed, the article focuses on research which suggests that Isabella's son Hermann may have been fathered by Lawrence and not her husband Jens Wolff. Click on the links, or find a copy of Bendor's book The Invention of British Art, to read more!
Gérôme celebrated in Doha, Qatar
December 4 2024

Picture: mathaf.org.qa
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Interesting news from Doha, Qatar, that the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art have just opened a new exhibition dedicated to the legacy of Jean-Léon Gérôme.
According to the museum's website:
Organised by the future Lusail Museum in collaboration with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme features nearly 400 works, drawing extensively from the future Lusail Museum’s unparalleled collection of Orientalist art, including European depictions of the MENASA region spanning the 16th through 19th centuries. It also includes significant loans from Qatar Museums’ General Collections and prestigious institutions worldwide such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia. New works commissioned from artists including Babi Badalov (b. 1959, Azerbaijan) and Nadia Kaabi-Linke (b. 1978, Tunisia) will reinterpret Gérôme for the 21st century.
One of the most famous and commercially successful European artists of the 19th century, Gérôme was heralded in his own time as a history painter and a visual storyteller, bringing the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome to life. Yet it was as a chronicler of the modern cultures and peoples of North Africa and the Middle East that he made his greatest impact. Travelling repeatedly to Egypt and Turkey and making many other stops in the region between 1855 and 1880, Gérôme created some of Orientalism’s most enduring images and themes. His depictions, at once fancifully imaginative and faithfully naturalistic, played a major role in defining the MENA world for Europe, America and Britain. Since 1978, his work has been the subject of critical scrutiny by art historians including Linda Nochlin, who famously read his paintings as part of a larger and more disturbing colonial plan. Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme presents new and more wide-ranging interpretations of the artist, without ignoring the contributions of these scholars, or of Edward Said’s groundbreaking book, Orientalism.
The show will run until 22nd February 2025.
2024 Berger Prize Winner
December 4 2024

Picture: walpolesociety.org.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The 2024 Berger Prize has been award to Tom Young's book entitled Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–1858 and published by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
According to the Walpole Society's website:
This revelatory book explores how the visual culture of members of the East India Company prompted significant structural change, nimbly traversing the complex world of post-colonial scholarship. for a modern audience. It explores fresh material from a compelling new angle, charting the ways in which new artistic forms and practices presaged shifts in the governance of the Company and its relationship with the people it governed.
Update - (Bendor adds) there's an excellent podcast with Tom Young (to whom, many congratulations) and also with the rest of the shortlisted authors, called British Art Matters. Available here on Apple Podcasts.
Studentship to Study Artists’ Networks in late 19th-Britain and Belgium
November 28 2024

Picture: Coventry University
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Coventry University are inviting applications for a fully-funded studentship to pursue a PhD on the subject of Art, Memory and Circles of Connection – Artists’ Networks in late 19th-British and Belgian Spaces of Exchange. The studentship is is offered in partnership with KU Leuven and will also require the candidate to undertake research in Belgium.
According to the University's website:
Focusing on artist interactions between London, Brussels and other key loci of exchange, including in the art press and art criticism, this study’s key aim is to shed light on why and how interconnecting, transnational artistic visions and practices stimulated cultural arenas for new projections of modernity. A first area of consideration for this PhD is to explore expanded contexts of art reception between key British and Belgian cultural sites; this may include international responses to Pre-Raphaelite circles, and to John Ruskin’s writings. Second, will be to consider interactions between these networks and gender in creating opportunities for women as artists, designers and craftswomen, operating within and beyond perceived constructs of ‘separate spheres’ of male and female artistic activity. A third, related key area of enquiry will be to examine the significance and porous identities of cultural spaces in expanding circles of artistic exchange, and in their uses by artists across geo-cultural borders as sites of cultural memory, gender and identity-construction. As well as through exhibitions and other public spaces of display – notably museums and art galleries, this study will develop understanding of an expanded range of sites of art via private collections, intimate spaces of ateliers, workshops, artists’ homes or indeed, in letters, diaries and journals. Taken together, this PhD will open insights into pivotal artistic and geo-cultural ecologies between Britain and Belgium as arenas of artistic innovation and exchange to shape cross-cultural sites of modernity, gender and artistic agency.
Applications must be in by 15th January 2025.
Good luck if you're applying!
Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light
November 25 2024

Picture: gilesltd.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
A new exhibition on Claude Monet's step-daughter and later daughter-in-law Blanche Hoschedé-Monet (1865-1947) is set to open at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University Bloomington, in February next year. The show will be accompanied by a very detailed and scholarly book, the first monographic publication on the artist in English.
According to the museum's website:
Recognized for her sophisticated approach to color, composition, and technique, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet (1865–1947) was part of a successful network of artists in Giverny, Rouen, and Paris during the first half of the twentieth century, although she is most often recognized for her relation to Claude Monet, her stepfather and one of France’s most famous painters. Having come of age at the center of the Impressionist movement, Hoschedé-Monet grew up surrounded by the modern masterpieces in the collection of her father, Ernest Hoschedé, who was a patron of such renowned artists as Édouard Manet, Monet, and Auguste Renoir. Her family’s move to Giverny in 1883 prompted her to take up painting in earnest. With Monet as her mentor, she developed a distinct style that favored carefully framed points of view and landscapes painted en plein air. As the first monographic exhibition of her work in the United States, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet in the Light brings together over forty paintings which attest to Hoschedé-Monet’s unique vision and ambitions as an artist in her own right. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue, with contributions by Nicolas Bondenet, Nancy Mowll Mathews, Galina Olmsted, Haley Pierce, and Philippe Piguet, constitute a definitive account of Hoschedé-Monet’s life and art.
The show will run from 14th February until 15th June 2024, and the book is due out in March.
Leighton and Landscape
November 14 2024

Picture: Leighton House
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Leighton House in Holland Park will be opening their latest temporary exhibition in a few days' time. Leighton and Landscape: Impressions from Nature will be a celebration of the relatively underappreciated works from nature Lord Leighton undertook on this various travels.
According to the museum's blurb:
This first major exhibition of Frederic Leighton’s small landscape oil sketches, painted en plein air as he travelled, reveals the celebrated Victorian artist in a new light. Discover a spontaneous, experimental artist who took the road less well trodden by his contemporaries, documenting the places he encountered. Created between 1856 up until his death in 1896, many of these delicate artworks will be returning to Leighton's house for the first time over 120 years, including new acquisition Bay of Cádiz, Moonlight (1866).
The show will run from 16th November 2024 until 27th April 2025.
New Release: Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement
November 11 2024

Picture: Thames & Hudson
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The publishers Thames & Hudson have just this month released Karen Livingstone's new book Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement, a publication produced in collaboration with the V&A in London.
According to the publisher's website:
Women Pioneers of the Arts & Crafts Movement is a celebration of the work and ambition of the women who were at the heart of the most influential art and design movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shines a light on the vital contribution of figures such as May Morris, Gertrude Jekyll, Annie Garnett, and many others, and describes the Arts and Crafts Movement from the perspective of these women who worked against the odds as artists, makers, teachers, authors, and entrepreneurs.
Women of the era took part in, and often led, the founding of exhibitions, societies, art schools, and small craft industries. Some were activists and social disruptors while using their skills and talents to make a living. This book highlights the versatility and range of these talented women, who worked across a host of disciplines, including textile design, embroidery, bookbinding, illustration, painting, enameling, stained glass, metalwork, furniture design, and architecture. It is richly illustrated with a wide array of their work, much of it previously unpublished. Featuring objects from the V&A’s renowned Arts and Crafts collection, the book also includes key pieces from other museums and private collections across the UK.
Upcoming Release: Turner and Constable - Art, Life, Landscape
September 26 2024

Picture: Yalebooks.co.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Yale University Press will be releasing Nicola Moorby's latest book entitled Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape in March 2025.
According to the blurb:
Born just fourteen months apart, one in London and the other in rural Suffolk, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable went on to change the face of British art.
The two men have routinely been seen as polar opposites, not least by their peers. Differing in temperament, background, beliefs and vision, they created images as dissimilar as their personalities.
Yet in many ways they were fellow travellers. As children of the late 18 th century, both faced the same challenges and opportunities. Above all, they shared common cause as champions of a distinctively British art. Through their work, they fought for the recognition and appreciation of landscape painting – and in doing so ensured their reputations were forever intertwined and interlinked.
Nicola Moorby offers us a fresh perspective on two extraordinary artists, uncovering the layers of fiction that have embellished and disguised their greatest achievements. For Turner & Constable is not just a tale of two artists; it is also the story of the triumph of landscape painting.
JMW Turner and changing visions of landscape in Norwich
September 24 2024

Picture: Norwich Castle Museum
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Norwich Castle Museum will be opening their latest exhibition next month. JMW Turner and changing visions of landscape has been organised in-part to celebrate their fairly recent acquisition of Turner's Walton Bridges which was acquired from Sotheby's for £3.5m back in 2019.
According to the museum's website:
JMW Turner and changing visions of landscape is a major new exhibition exploring artists' approaches to landscape from the 17th century to the present day. It commences the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the birth of JMW Turner, one of the most influential artists in the history of western art.
The exhibition explores the evolution of landscape art, centring on Turner's influence, whose landscapes conveyed a full range of artistic, historical and emotional meanings. Featuring seven oil paintings and nine works on paper by Turner, it compares his visionary approach with those who influenced him, like Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael and Canaletto, and those he inspired, from John Sell Cotman to Govinda Sah. Renowned twentieth-century artists like Paul Nash and contemporary figures such as Ibrahim Mahama, Emma Stibbon, and Henna Nadeem demonstrate the ongoing relevance of landscape in art.
Marcel Proust and the Arts at the Thyssen in 2025
September 20 2024

Picture: Thyssen-Bornemisza website
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid have announced a new exhibition on Marcel Proust and the Arts for 2025 (spotted via. @martevelazquez). The show will examine the artistic stimulus for Proust's work, alongside his theories and aesthetic philosophy. Works on display will include examples by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck, Watteau, Turner, Fantin Latour, Manet, Monet, Renoir and Whistler amongst others.
Lecture on Guillaume Lethière
September 18 2024
Video: The Clark Institute
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
I failed to spot that the The Clark Institute have published this free lecture on Guillaume Lethière on their YouTube channel in August. The lecture gives an introduction to the artist and their ongoing exhibition which closes on 14th October 2024.
Bruno Liljefors - Wild Sweden at the Petit Palais
September 16 2024

Picture: Petit Palais
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Petit Palais in Paris will be opening a new exhibition next month dedicated to Sweden's foremost painter of animals, Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939).
According to the museum's website:
Less known than his peers, Bruno Liljefors was nevertheless an important figure on the Scandinavian arts scene in the late-nineteenth century. By showing his work for the first time to the French public, the Petit Palais seeks to highlight his pictorial skill and Liljefors’ original contribution to the construction of the imaginative repertoire of Swedish nature.
This unique exhibition features an ensemble of some one hundred pieces, including paintings, drawings, and photographs from the collections of Swedish museums like the Nationalmuseum of Stockholm—partner of the exhibition—the Thiel Gallery, and Gothenburg Museum, as well as numerous private collections.
The show will run from 1st October 2024 until 16th February 2025.
Van Gogh at The National Gallery
September 16 2024
Video: Euronews
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The National Gallery in London have just opened their latest Van Gogh blockbuster entitled Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. The reviews thus far have been rather positive, so, it looks like one not to be missed!
The show will run until 19th January 2024.
Coming Soon: Caillebotte Painting Men
September 11 2024

Picture: Musée d'Orsay
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Musée d'Orsay will be opening their latest exhibition next month dedicated to Gustave Caillebotte's paintings of men.
According to the museum's website:
The exhibition on show at the Musée d'Orsay in autumn 2024 focuses on Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) and his predilection for masculine forms and portraits of men, and seeks to examine this artist's profoundly radical modernity through the lens of art history's changing perspective on 19th-century forms of masculinity.
In a desire to produce a new, authentic form of art, Caillebotte took his subjects from his surroundings (Haussmann's Paris, the country houses around the capital), his male acquaintances (his brothers, the workers employed by his family, his boating friends), and ultimately from his own life. In response to the realist movement, he introduced new figures into his paintings: an urban worker, a man on a balcony, a sportsman, and even an intimate portrait of a male nude at his 'toilette'. In an era when virility and republican fraternity prevailed, but traditional masculinity was also in crisis for the first time, these new, powerful images challenged the established order, both social and sexual. Beyond his own identity - that of a young rich Parisian bachelor - Caillebotte also brought profound questions into the male condition at the heart of Impressionism and Modernism.
The show will run from 8th October 2024 until 9th January 2025.
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Is it just me, or have French museums been creating some brilliant exhibition posters recently?