Previous Posts: articles 2018

The Watts Collection, held in the Gallery’s Heinz Archive and Library, contains approximately 3,000 letters written to, or received by, the artist. This series was compiled by his second wife Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) following her husband’s death, in preparation for her biography of him, published in 1912. In July 1905 Mary Watts advertised for the loan of Watts’s letters, intending to make copies for biographical research. The correspondence, both original and copied, was arranged and pasted into 15 albums, of which the National Portrait Gallery acquired 14, plus many loose letters.

The letters represent a broad cross-section of the artistic and social circles in which Watts moved. Many important Victorian figures are represented, including Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Carlyle, William Ewart Gladstone, Sir John Everett Millais, Cecil Rhodes, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The shortest letters record appointments for sittings and social engagements. More detailed exchanges relate to the organisation of exhibitions of Watts’s work and his art practice.

Three much loved works from the National Gallery Collection – Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian, Canaletto’s A Regatta on the Grand Canal and Rembrandt’s Self Portrait at the Age of 63 – will be visiting galleries and museums around the country between 2014 and 2016. The Masterpiece Tour is part of the National Gallery’s aim to promote the understanding, knowledge and appreciation of Old Master paintings to as wide an audience as possible. This opportunity to bring hugely popular National Gallery paintings to the public’s doorstep is being made possible by the generous support of Christie’s.

I assume that it is not a later copy.

IMO not by Van Dyck, studio of Van Dyck or Van Dyck and studio. Surely if it had been anywhere near Van Dyck’s studio it would have a more interesting background. It looks English. The fictive oval frame invites the idea of Cornelius Johnson, but the style doesn’t match him. 

You don’t say what the support is – presumably canvas rather than panel. 

The neckline is low, and there is little sign of lace. Could the costume be second half of the 17th century? The uninteresting background makes me rule out  Lely and its probably not Wright either. 

Ellis Waterhouse’s Painting in Britain has some small black and white illustrations of work by a painter by the name of John Scougall. I know nothing about him, but that’s my guess.

Nah.

The head on the 'Van Dyck' looks to be better than the very poorly painted lower body and costume,I'd plump off a unfinished portrait by Van Dyck? but finished by an inferior hand.

The angle of the shoulders looks too sharp for the proportion of the face and the rest of the body.  The mis-balance suggests overpainting.

I'd venture to say it does indeed have a very good chance!

The current quagmire around image copyright & failure to sort out the law restricts the full power of digital art history.

Experience the majesty of the courts of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I to Ivan the Terrible and the early Romanovs in a major exhibition at the V&A. From royal portraits, costume and jewellery to armour and heraldry, Treasures of the Royal Courts tells the story of diplomacy between the British Monarchy and the Russian Tsars through more than 150 magnificent objects.

Was wondering how they got the loan of Bob from Waddesdon but checking on the website confirmed that it’s not part of the permanent collection there – which never lends – but one of the objects on loan from the Rothschild family trusts.

I think you’ve remarked before how unhelpful it is for specialists to be averse to attributing 16th portraits to particular artists or their circle.  What’s worse is the approach is inconsistent: going through the PCF records as I have done there are cases where versions of the same portrait are, depending on the view of the collection curators, are in one case given to a named artist and in another to English School – or even British School.  Aargh!

I have read your article in The Art Newspaper about Sotheby's Institute MA Program and agree with you completely.

My MA in Lisbon has a partnership with Sotheby´s and I have also participated in other of their courses - Could not be more pleased with the Institute. 

Like you mentioned the school is, indeed, very good - Well-structured programs, high quality classes, really good teachers and so on.

Nevertheless, I would like to add the following, regarding to the expensive fees:

• Sotheby´s Institute students have many visits and lectures outside the school. Also many visits to museums, auctions, exhibitions, galleries... (Which is fantastic!) Usually the school take care of all expenses (tour guides, entrance tickets, trips - Last time I was at Sotheby's we had a bus and a boat trip that were totally organized by the Institute) This, facilitates students lives and solves logistics problems, but it is an additional economic burden to the school - Not sure if other schools do the same (in Portugal, certainly not).
• Sotheby´s Masters students have access, during (I think) a week, to personalized support in order to help them to develop a plan on how they should approach the job market. I suppose this help includes: tips on how to write resumes; motivation letters; approach on interviews. To decide which type of job position is best suited for them to start and to pursue their professional goals. They provide a "guide" with places where to look for jobs and (I guess) they even make the first approach for you. They care and want to help their students to find a job, which is, obviously, good for the school as well. 
• Sotheby´s Institute have one of the best networks in the art world. Certainly, their employability rate is quite high and, I guess, that is also included in the $ 75,000 fee.

Sometimes I wonder if instead a Postgraduation in Art Connoisseurship + a Master in Art Business (a total of 4 years + 5 in college!!!) I should not have gone for a one-year course at Sotheby's... The answer is, probably, yes...

I work at the Getty Research Insititute [...] and we attend these very obstruse lectures by the various residential scholars [...] and the people that can understand the presentations might be five or ten other scholars throughout the world. So I think that art history, also because of its apparent hesitation at embracing digital technology, really risks being left behind, and becoming marginalised or obsolete. It's also being dropped in a lot of academic programmes.'

The literature studies field was actually really early to adopt [digital means], by digitising texts and making it really easy to analyse vast quantities of data. And it really transformed the literature field, so in the past a scholar who would have to spend his entire career learning all of the classical texts, for example, in order to analyse and create meaningful analyses of the text, now, through something like the Perseus digital library [...] within hours can do the research today that it would take a scholar, forty years ago, his whole career [to do].

Yes I quite agree about digital art history - brilliant, but binary. Either you find what you are looking for, or you don't; nothing else.

It's like my beef about music. No one listens to albums any more, just cherry-picks tracks they've already heard elsewhere. In the old days your favourite song on an album would often be one you'd discovered on it, not the ones they played on the radio.

But as you say, digital benefits are vast.

Access to digital articles and research is fantastic, especially when thirty students get set the same essay title and there are limited library books…and book hoarders! 

But as Annelisa Stephan points out, art history needs to find ways of getting the full use of digital scholarship. Surely Your Paintings has already made huge headway with this, after all where would art historians be without art, especially art in excellent digital quality that can be pasted and referenced easily into essays! Even more excitingly, with the increased development of 3D scanners and digital microscopy, perhaps at some point in the future someone in, for instance, China will be able to digitally tilt/rotate a painting in, say,  Hawaii, every direction to analyse brushstrokes in minute detail. Or, if the painting has been conserved, to see the paint layers and therefore be able to analyse the artist’s technique, date the painting etc. This would obviously be 10x more awesome for sculptures and other three dimensional art and artifacts. 

In the first place, as I mentioned above, I believe that we are in the midst of a “re-establishment”—not the beginning—of digital art history, in which, obviously, we have to take into account the specifics of our time: the new knowledge economy, new technical tools, and the changes brought about by the evolution of the Web, which has become an enormous data warehouse waiting for us to analyze it.

In the second place, I think that digital art history, without losing its ties to the digital humanities, needs to establish itself in accordance with its own idiosyncrasies, basing itself on the preceding decades of research, analysis, and exploration, which should in no way be devalued in comparison with the digital humanities.

In the third place, I believe that it is crucial that we focus our attention on the specific epistemological and methodological problems of our discipline, and that we include not only academic art history but also museums, art publications, art criticism, artistic creation, the reception of works of art by the public, and so on, under the rubric of digital art history.

I read with great interest (and amusement) your internal monologue on the idiosyncrasies mentioned in the Getty piece!  If anything, Nuria Rodriguez Ortega is perhaps guilty of some of the wordy banter that makes some forms of written art history inaccessible as much as it is idiosyncratic. 

To attempt to de-guff , I propose this synopsis of these somewhat valid{?} points

i. art history as a discipline, and individual art historians are adapting to using technology in their work (some obviously better than others)?

ii. art history as a discipline, and individual art historians are wondering if use of technology will mean they will lose something they value?  note: this point does seem very ambivalent. What element being preserved do art historians have a vested interest in? eg. particular methods of teaching or modes of analysis? or the dependence on print publishing as a marker of academic reputation and success etc?

iii. Many different people are interacting with and commenting on art. These relationships are being studied more closely than ever before. It would be good for art historians to be involved in this as well ?

Thanks for sharing the Getty article - it's an absolute gem!  I love every word of it.  The attempted informality that degenerates into ponderous sub-clauses.  The ignorant reference to the 'new knowledge economy' (a novel term back in the 1970s), which we're supposed to realise is 'obviously' related to art history.  I've read a fair amount on the new knowledge economy, and quite a lot of art history, but I have no clue here.  I guess I'm just dim.  The plea for equality with the 'digital humanities' - is there some hidden debate about the status of digital art history?  Are the digital geographers dissing the digital art historians?  Oh, and then of course it's "crucial" that we consider epistemology.  We need to think differently in art history.  And we need to think especially differently in digital art history.  Finally she makes an unarguable case for the importance of digital art history by asserting that everything connected with art is part of digital art history.  I definitely prefer analogue.

Thanks for discussing the piece we published yesterday on the Getty Iris. I enjoyed your inner monologue!

I'm the editor of the Iris and wanted to add my $0.02 to "translating" Nuria's three points into simpler wording. Yesterday I attended day 1 of the Digital Art History Lab convening this week at the Getty, so can bring the background of that discussion to this clarification.

1. Digital art history got off the ground in the 1980s and '90s and then stalled. So rather than talking about launching a digital art history, let's instead talk about picking it up where we left off. (This relates to points made earlier in the piece, as she notes.) Side note: the knowledge economy isn't new in Internet time, but in art historical time, it is.

2. Digital art history is part of the broader digital humanities field, but art history shouldn't slavishly copy models of digital scholarship adopted in other fields, such as linguistics or history. We need to consider art history's methods, history, and subject matter to come up with our own path.

3. Art history has its idiosyncrasies just as any field does, and rather than pretending that it doesn't, we should acknowledge them. Moreover, we should take this moment to explicitly affirm that art history isn't just about critiquing individual objects, but about analyzing visual culture more broadly. (The Mona Lisa image search became a meme of sorts in yesterday's discussions of this theme, which is why I used it in the post.)

If you’re not quite ready for an interview, ask someone at the museum for an informational interview. See if you can take someone in the department you’re interested in to coffee in order to hear about their job and give you advice. People love to talk about themselves and their job, and it’s likely they would love to feel important enough to share their story and advice with you. You will learn a lot about the many paths people take to work in arts institutions, and you will almost definitely gain a connection. (And, although you should try to pay for the coffees, they will probably treat you, because they were once a broke college student too.)

One thing that is super important about the informational interview: DO NOT try to weasel a job out of it. Seriously. They know you’re looking to break into the museum world–everyone understands the underlying reason for informational interviews–you don’t need to put it out there. Be subtle by not mentioning it at all, graciously thank them for their time, and there’s a good chance they will say something along the lines of “feel free to contact me if you have any other questions, and I’d be happy to keep you in mind for any internships if they come to my attention.” If they don’t offer something like that, don’t bug them to do so–it puts them in an awkward position if they didn’t really connect with you.

[...] key works by the artist amidst paintings by such famous predecessors as Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens [...]. This extraordinary confrontation of old masters is essential to the understanding of seventeenth-century art. Famous painters often produced their works in response to one another, seeking to outdo the other artist and create something exceptional. The best way to assess the results of their efforts is to look at comparable works side by side. Visitors can see for themselves the artistic challenges Hals must have faced and what makes him unique. The paintings come from some of the world’s greatest museums, among them the National Gallery in London, the Prado in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris, and from various private collections. 

Through iconographic comparisons - particularly emblematic, among the many that the exhibition will be hosting, is a comparison between the Crucifixion from the Dominican church in Ancona, the Crucifixion for the Escorial in Madrid, and the fragmentary Crucifixion now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna - visitors will be able to gain a direct perception of the master's innovative approach and compositional structure, in an exhibition designed to convey not only his crucial role as a religious painter but also his complex career as portrait-painter extraordinary to the nobility and aristocracy of his day. [...]

The exhibition will be accompanied by the results of an extensive campaign of scientific analysis which has encompassed a large part of the artist's output.  Conducted by the Centro di Ateneo di Arti Visive at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo, the campaign has achieved results of the utmost importance in defining the relationship between autograph works and workshop products, and in fully documenting Titian's technical development from the earliest days of his apprenticeship.

 Art history is more nervous and self-doubting than any other humanities discipline. The reason is obvious. Literary, political and social historians all use words to analyse other words – texts, documents, archives. But art historians grapple in the rational tool of language with material far less ordered. It will always be an uneasy mix.

Art history is also young. It lacks foundational texts like Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria or Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Until the 20th century, writers on art offered partisan, if sometimes brilliant, commentaries on their own or recent times – Vasari on the Italian Renaissance, Ruskin on Turner. The Books that Shaped Art History, a path-breaking volume emerging from a series in The Burlington Magazine, explores through a focus on 16 works how the discipline evolved after 1900.