Category: Research
Master I.S. – From Lost to Almost Found
April 23 2025
Picture: Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation, Mänttä
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
CODART (the international network of curators of Dutch and Flemish art) have just published an interesting article by Janneke van Asperen and Tomi Moisio on the elusive painter known as Master I.S. The piece delves into questions regarding defining this master's style and characteristics, drawing on new research and examination of pictures in collections such as the Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation in Finland. Click on the link to read more.
Research on Rediscovered Medieval Panel from Hexham Abbey
April 18 2025
Picture: newsroom.northumbria.ac.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
News from Northumbria University that a medieval panel, discovered in the triforium in Hexham Abbey back in 2017, has been the subject of a research project. Work undertaken by Dr Charis Theodorakopoulos, a heritage scientist at Northumbria University who was commissioned by the Abbey to look into the matter, will be unveiled in an online presentation on 30th April 2025 (more details via the link above).
Lecture on Art History in San Diego
April 11 2025
Picture: timeshighereducation.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
San Diego State University are hiring an Art History Lecturer.
According to the advert online:
The School welcomes applications from prospective temporary faculty with expertise or experience in the following areas of Art History:
Ancient Greece and Rome, Architecture, Graphic Design, and Medieval Art.
The job comes with a starting monthly salary of somewhere between $5,507 - $13,224 and applications must be in by 10th May 2025.
Good luck if you're applying!
Recent Release: Genesis and becoming of the Baroque between Rome and Naples
April 11 2025
Picture: delucaeditori.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
A new volume on the relationship between Rome and Naples, in regards to the emergence of the Baroque in painting, has been published in Italy. The publication, edited by Francesco Petrucci, draws on paintings specifically from the collections of the Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia and from the Koelliker collection.
Imminent Release: Le Comte d'Angiviller
April 10 2025
Picture: editions-monelle-hayot.com
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
News from France (spotted via. @MWeilc) that a publication on Charles Claude Flahaut, Count of Angiviller (1730–1809), a significant figure relating to the arts during the reign of Louis XVI, is due to be published on 15th April 2025. This 384 page volume was penned by Monelle Hayot and Antoine Maës.
According to the publisher's website:
Angiviller took part in the education of the future Louis XVI and his brothers. The King is fond of him and in full confidence shares with him a privacy which allows truthful advices. At his accession on the throne, in 1774, he appoints Angiviller Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi, a minister of arts and architecture with extended powers. He will remain in charge until the Revolution. His role is major. He is responsible for all the royal and state residences (Palais du Louvre, Tuileries, Versailles, Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud…). He buys the hunting domain of Rambouillet on behalf of the king and develops there the Etruscan style, in fashion since the discovery of Herculanum. Thanks to the king of Spain, he develops there the breeding of Merino sheep in a model farm, which still exists nowadays. He reorganizes the manufactures of Sèvres and of the Gobelins, presides over the Académie de peinture et de sculpture, the Académie de France in Rome with the Premier Peintre Pierre’s assistance. He is the founder of the Museum, today Musée du Louvre, which because of the Revolution will only open under Napoleon. He orders its construction within the Louvre palace, following Hubert Robert’s ideas, constitutes its collections, by major acquisitions in sales or private collections. [...]
Order before the 15th April 2025 to receive 20 EUR off the asking price (follow the link for more details).
New Digital Catalogue of the Kremer Collection
April 9 2025
Picture: kremercollection.org
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
CODART (the international network of curators of Dutch and Flemish art) have drawn attention to a new digital catalogue of The Kremer Collection (now in part on loan to the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar). Viewers can either surf through the websites themselves or access a PDF of the physical catalogue through the link above.
Many happy hours of browsing ahead, I think.
The Klesch Collection Scholarship for Graduate Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Painting
April 3 2025
Picture: The Klesch Collection
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Exciting news that The Klesch Collection are inviting applications for the 2025 The Klesch Collection Scholarship for Graduate Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Painting.
According to their website:
Who can apply?
Any graduate student who has been accepted into a full-time Art History MA, MPhil or PhD course of study worldwide, beginning the next academic year. PhD students are welcome to apply for any year in their programme. Applications will be considered from students who will focus/are focusing their studies on European and British painting of the Renaissance and Baroque periods (c. 1400–1700).
What does The Klesch Collection Scholarship include?
-Payment towards the yearly cost of the university fees.
-A paid internship at the collection for a minimum of 1 month.
Applications must be in by 20th June 2025.
Good luck if you're applying!
Paul van Somer in the Burlington
April 2 2025
Picture: Burlington Magazine via. Edward Town on Instagram
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
April's edition of The Burlington Magazine features the usual array of fascinating bits of art history research, including on the late Elizabethan / Jacobean portrait painter Paul van Somer (pictured above).
Here's a list of the leading articles featured:
Turner’s ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’: exporting ‘indistinctness’ - By Ian Warrell
‘The monarch of the glen’: painting for the new Houses of Parliament - By Stephen Duffy
The discovery of James Gibbs’s designs for the façade of Burlington House - By William Aslet
A serendipitous discovery: a lost Italian portrait from Horace Walpole’s miniature cabinet - by Adriana Concin-Tavella
The portraits of Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and her family by Paul van Somer - By Edward Town and Jessica David
Cambridge seeking Professor in the History of Late Imperial Chinese Art
March 31 2025
Picture: jobs.cam.ac.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The University of Cambridge are hiring an Assistant Professor in the History of Late Imperial Chinese Art (ca. 1200-ca. 1800).
According to the job description:
The Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge seeks to appoint a permanent Assistant Professor in the History of Late Imperial Chinese Art (ca. 1200-ca. 1800). The Department welcomes applications from specialists in all mediums of art, including painting and the graphic arts, sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, and textiles, all of which are well represented in University collections. The successful candidate will be expected to take up appointment on or close to 1 September 2025.
The job comes with an annual salary of between £46,735 - £59,139 and applications must be in by 30th April 2025.
Jean Honoré Fragonard & Marguerite Gérard at Galerie Hubert Duchemin
March 26 2025
Picture: Galerie Hubert Duchemin
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
For those in Paris this week for Salon du Dessin, the dealers Galerie Hubert Duchemin have an interesting small exhibition focusing on seven works by Jean Honoré Fragonard & Marguerite Gérard. Their display is also accompanied by this rather thorough-looking catalogue too (via the link above), in case you're not in Paris currently.
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Please do let me know if any other members of the Paris art trade are putting on things this week, happy to plug anything interesting!
Funded PhD Studying Portraiture and the East India Company, c.1757–1857
March 26 2025
Picture: courtauld.ac.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Courtauld Institute & Tate are inviting applications for an AHRC doctoral studentship studying Imperial Intimacies: Portraiture and the East India Company, c.1757–1857.
According to their website:
This studentship will explore portraiture produced in connection with the East India Company between 1757 and 1857, to uncover new stories about the individuals impacted by, or involved in, British imperialism in South Asia, and to rethink the role of portraiture within ‘British’ art histories.
This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Tom Young, the Courtauld, and Dr Alice Insley, Tate, and the student will be expected to spend time at both the Courtauld and Tate, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK.
The Studentship comes with a stipend of £20,780 plus London Weighting of £2000/year. Applications must be in by 6th April 2025.
Good luck if you're applying!
The British Art Journal is Back!
March 25 2025
Picture: britishartjournal.co.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Exciting news to report that The British Art Journal is returning in a new digital format with long-time editor Robin Simon continuing at the helm. Volume XXV, which includes the story about the Van Dyck thief I posted about here last week, is already free and available to read online! Many happy hours of reading ahead, it seems clear!
Funded PhD Studying WWI Prints & Lithographs
March 25 2025
Picture: warwick.ac.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The University of Warwick and the Imperial War Museums are advertising an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentship in Lithographs of the First World War: printmaking, propaganda and mobilisation.
According to the university's website:
IWM holds a fascinating but under-researched collection of European fine and popular prints gathered by John Crichton-Stewart, the 4th Marquess of Bute, when he was a diplomat in Paris during the First World War and donated to the museum in the early 1950s. It contains around 3,600 predominantly French prints, representing all aspects of French patriotic print production of the period, most of them lithographs, as well as relief and intaglio prints, and some drawings. It is envisaged that the PhD project will focus on this collection, as well as the museum’s collection of British lithographs of the period, mainly instigated by the government’s War Propaganda Bureau / Department of Information. These include the 1917 series Britain’s Efforts and Ideals by various artists and the work of soldier-artist Gerald Spencer Pryse.
The proposed investigation of these collections will fill in a curiously outstanding gap in the field. Both scholars of France and art historians have paid relatively little attention to lithography. Moreover, in both Britain and France, the cultural history of the conflict has often underplayed the specificities of artistic production in wartime.
The studentship comes with an annual Doctoral Stipend for 2025/2026 of about £20,780 plus London Weighting of £1000/year. Applications must be in by 3rd June 2025.
Good luck if you're applying!
Upcoming Release: Josefa de Óbidos
March 25 2025
Picture: Lund Humphries
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The publishers Lund Humphries will be releasing a new volume on the Portuguese female artist Josefa de Óbidos (1630-1684) by Professor Carmen Ripollés (Portland State University) in September 2025.
According to their website:
The first monograph on the artist to be published in English, this book provides a long-overdue introduction to the life and work of Portuguese painter Josefa de Ayala, known as Josefa de Óbidos (1630-1684). One of the best known and most celebrated artists of the Portuguese baroque, she is the only early modern female artist to be credited with representing the art of a whole period and a geographical area. Her paintings encompass a diversity of religious and secular subjects in a variety of formats, from portraits to still lifes; small oils on copper to large church altarpieces; seemingly ‘feminine’ themes revolving around the Virgin Mary and female saints to gruesome portrayals of the Passion of Christ. Her oeuvre also includes engravings.
New Release: Works in Collaboration - Frans Snijders and Other Masters
March 20 2025
Picture: brepols.net
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The latest volume of the Corpus Rubenianum has just been released, this time focusing on Works in Collaboration - Frans Snijders and Other Masters.
According to the volume's blurb (worth reproducing in full, I think):
Peter Paul Rubens already had assistants working for him in his studio when he first gained admission to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1598. At this period too he began to co-operate with other masters, such as Jan Brueghel the Elder; a separate volume, dedicated to that collaboration, was published in 2016 (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XXVII (1): Jan Brueghel I & II). On his return from Italy in 1609, not only did Rubens’s studio assistants increase in number, so too did the co-operative projects that the artist undertook. Rubens continued to work with Jan Brueghel the Elder until 1621. When Brueghel died in 1625, his son Jan continued the partnership with Rubens until the latter’s death in 1640.
Similarly productive was the collaboration between Rubens and the still life and animal painter Frans Snijders. It began shortly after Rubens's return to Antwerp and is reflected in various large-format works for the courts of Brussels and Madrid [?], but also in smaller ‘cabinet’ paintings, some of which were executed by members of the respective workshops of the two masters. The collaboration soon extended to the studio of the animal painter Paul de Vos, whose sister Margriete had married Snijders in 1611. One such joint painting was still in Rubens’s possession at the time of his death and was listed in the 1640 catalogue of the works for sale from the artist’s estate. This document also reveals that, among the paintings by other masters that he owned, Rubens possessed a surprisingly large quantity by the Dutch landscape and genre painter Cornelis Saftleven. Rubens had worked with Saftleven during his stay in Antwerp at the beginning of the 1630s, and evidently appreciated his talent, even if this collaboration can be represented only by a single painting.
The present is devoted to Rubens’s fruitful partnership with Frans Snijders, as well as to his collaborations with Paul de Vos and Cornelis Saftleven. It thus contributes not only to the documentation of Rubens’s oeuvre, but also to the understanding of workshop practices and the lives and social networks of painters in the city of Antwerp.
Adriana Verelst, not Maria Verelst
March 20 2025
Picture: Oud Holland
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
Readers of this blog might remember me posting (perhaps a bit too boastfully) about a newly discovered work by Maria Verelst a few weeks ago, which I happened to spot on ArtUK belonging to a museum in Wales (more on that picture another time). Well, very kindly Richard Stephens, editor of the Journal for the Walpole Society - the go-to journal for primary source materials relating to British Art, has drawn my attention to a fascinating article published in Oud Holland last year by Peter Hancox (who happens to be a computer scientist) on the Verelst family. The paper draws on some rather in-depth research, mostly focusing on archival and primary-source material, and makes a rather strong case that 'Maria Verelst' never existed. In fact, records show that the daughter of Herman Verelst and his wife Cecilia Fend was a Adriana Verelst, not Maria (a mistake which appears to be found in a publication dating to as late as 1816).
Overall, the paper points out how little is known of this complex family of artists (in fact, this is generally the case for lots of painters and female artists of the period), and where many confusions have arisen. I had consulted R.W. Goulding's notes on Maria and the family at the NPG, which was compiled over a century ago now. There are apparently some signed and dated works with this same face pattern and type, including on a painting of Lady Mary Howard last recorded in the collection of the Earl of Haddington's collection, however, these often plainly record Mdme or Mrs Verelst and not her Christian name.
More news on the Welsh picture in due course.
AI Fails Again
March 19 2025
Picture: The Art Newspaper
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Art Newspaper has run another curious AI art authentication story, this time in relation to a version of Rubens' Diana discovered by Actaeon (pictured) which was unveiled by the Zurich-based Art Recognition at the Art Business Conference at Tefaf Maastricht (do get in touch if any readers were in attendance). The story is particularly complicated to the survival of a badly damaged and reduced 'fragment' in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, which may or may not have been the original from which many copies were produced. The presentation was delivered by Dr Carina Popovici, who you might remember was behind the reoccuring claims about the NG's Rubens back in 2021.
Most intriguingly:
After their latest investigation, Popovici and Art Recognition concluded that the painting, while not the original The Bath of Diana, could be by Rubens and his studio. “It was an authenticity evaluation not a confirmation,” Popovici says. “We concluded that it is partially by Rubens. Our AI cannot know who did the rest but one possible interpretation would be the [artist’s] workshop contribution.”
Click into the story to read the further claims, which include the ways AI is now hoping to show which parts are and are not by the hand of an artist such as Rubens.
____________
I find it rather mysterious that AI is not happy with the National Gallery's Samson and Delilah, yet is perfectly happy (it seems) with duds like this.
Update - Bendor adds: Yes. Oh dear.
Recent Release: Taddeo di Bartolo - Siena's Painter in the Early Quattrocento
March 18 2025
Picture: brepols.net
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The publishers Brepols have recently released the following two volume publication on Taddeo di Bartolo by the scholar Gail Solberg.
According to the blurb:
Taddeo di Bartolo, Siena’s premier painter in the years around 1400, is the focus of a cultural history of a great Italian school in an understudied period. His patrons commissioned important fresco cycles and the most impressive polyptychs of the age. In part a travelogue, the text follows Taddeo (ca 1362-1422) from training in straitened times at Siena across central and northern Italy. Ten years of itinerancy drew him to various Tuscan centers, along the Ligurian coast from Genoa to Provence, probably to Padua, and into Umbria. About 1399 he resettled at Siena to rapidly become the preferred painter of his commune. His mural cycles made a greater imprint on Siena’s civic iconography than has been acknowledged while his efficient Sienese shop produced outstanding panel paintings for, among others, the most dynamic religious orders. Until his last years he received grand commissions in and from beyond Siena. He drew a pope’s portrait and was employed by a cardinal at Rome. Attention to his production methods shows how his busy shop ensured variety in numerous paintings for mid-level clients by a flexible design system. Taddeo’s works, including rediscovered and reconstructed paintings, come alive in beautiful illustrations. This chronicle of an indefatigable and successful late medieval career positions the painter, his colleagues, and his patrons in their political, economic, and social circumstances. It provides new insights on Siena’s artistic culture at the start of the Renaissance.
Culprit of Boughton Van Dyck Theft Exposed
March 17 2025
Picture: The Guardian
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
The Guardian have run a very interesting story regarding the theft of this Van Dyck grisaille from Boughton House in 1951. The piece focuses on research by Dr Meredith Hale which is going to feature with the newly revamped online edition of The British Art Journal (a cause for celebration in itself). It transpires the small panel was pinched by LGG Ramsey, the then editor of The Connoisseur, who managed to offload the picture onto the art market before it was eventually acquired by a museum in the US. Click on the link to read the full story!
Lecture on Art and Material Cultures of Britain at UCL
March 14 2025
Picture: ucl.ac.uk
Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz:
University College London (UCL) are hiring a Lecturer / Associate Professor in Art and Material Cultures of Britain, c.1650-1900.
According to the job description:
UCL History of Art is seeking to appoint a full-time Lecturer (Grade 8) or Associate Professor (Grade 9) specialising in British art and material culture in its global and colonial contexts, c. 1650-1900. UCL History of Art has a long, distinguished engagement with the politics and aesthetics of British art and empire, as well as histories and theories of material culture, broadly understood. The successful appointee will have a relevant PhD and a track record of publications and research excellence in their field. The position will begin on 1 September 2025.
The job comes with an annual salary between £66,711 – £72,370 and applications must be in by 22nd April 2025.
Good luck if you're applying!
