Search results for ""Trustees of the Wallace Collection""

One of Britain’s most important and influential painters, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723size=1 color=black>–1792) is justly celebrated for his dynamic portraiture, his poignant ‘fancy pictures’, his ambitious history paintings and his role as the first President of Britain’s Royal Academy. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London (12 Marchsize=1 color=black>–7 June 2015), and the result of the four-year research project, this catalogue focuses on Reynolds's innovative, often highly experimental approaches to the practice and materials of painting. It investigates his radical manipulation of pigments, oils, glazes and varnishes, and traces his experiments with colour, tone and handling. It reveals his continual temptation to rework and revise his pictures, illuminates his highly creative responses to the new exhibition culture of his day and explores his continual adaptations of the art of the Old Masters. In doing so, it encourages us to look at the work of this famous eighteenth-century British artist in a new and often surprising light. Technical analysis of some of Reynolds's most important paintings will be revelatory, and close-up photography and detailed examination of a range of pictures size=1 color=black>– at the centre of which are the Wallace Collection’s own outstanding collection of works by the artist size=1 color=black>– will shed light on the fascinating and ongoing process of experimentation that spanned Reynolds’s entire career. The book situates Reynolds’s practice of experimentation, of both technique and of subject, in relation to that conducted at leading societies of science and learning at the time, and specifically to Josiah Wedgwood, one of Enlightenment Britain’s greatest experimentalists in the arts. Finally, it demonstrates how Reynolds’s innovations as a painter were often the product of collaboration size=1 color=black>– in part, with his assistants and his students, but, more importantly, with his patrons and subjects, with whom he continually explored the possibilities of gesture, expression, performance and role-play.

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The outstanding collection of European bronze scupltures formed by Peter Marino, which focuses especially on French and Italian bronzes of the High Baroque, includes masterpieces by some of the greatest sculptors of their age, among them Ferdinando Tacca, Giovanni Battista Foggini, Robert le Lorrain, and Corneille van Clève. This volume of the contributions to the symposium held in June 2010 testifying to the importance of the Marino Collection includes ten essays by distinguished scholars of sculpture. Charles Avery, author of major monographs on Giambologna and Bernini, discusses the impetus behind one of the most exciting models in the Marino Collection, a Hercules and Antaeus, after Maderno. Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Director of the Louvre Sculpture Department, examines the discovery of a large number of small pieces of terracotta sculpture, thought to be from the workshop of Andrés-Charles Boulle, which was destroyed in 1720. Anthea Brook, who has published extensively on Ferdinando Tacca, considers the attribution of a pair of small Florentine bronze hunting groups in the Marino Collection, making the case for Damiano Cappelli - a bronze-casting specialist in the workshop of Tacca - to be considered as a scupltor capable of creating his own designs. Rosario Coppel investigates the impressive collection of small bronzes of the 3rd Duke of Alcalá(1583-1637), who was Philip IV's extraordinary ambassador to Pope Urban VIII and later Viceroy and Captain General in Naples. Phillippe Malgouyres, Curator of Bronzes, Ivories, and Metals at the Louvre, discusses the bronze casts after Bernini sculpture, a little-studied subject in the wide field of Bernini studies. Jeffiner Montagu, Senior Fellow of the Warburg Institute, attempts to put together and define the oeuvre of the unknown sculptor of the magnificent 15-figure group of bronze hunters, their hounds and a bull, in the Suermondt Ludwig Museum in Aachen. Independent scholar Regina Seelig Teuwen extoles Guillaume Berthelot as a sculptor of small bronzes, while Jeremy Warren, Collections and Academic Director at the Wallace Collection, discusses the challenges of cataloguing the Peter Marino Collection for the 2010 exhibition. Dimitros Zikos of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence presents the extraordinary collection of bronzes and terracottas of Giuseppe and Ferdinando Borri. Eike Schmidt, James Ford Bell Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, discusses the adaption of two-dimensional models in Giovanni Battista Foggini's bronze sculpture.

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The collections of glassware and Limoges painted enamels acquired by Sir Richard Wallace may at first glance seem unlikely bedfellows. Yet both are ‘arts of fire’ and both are ‘vitreous art’, albeit with rather different aesthetic ends. Moreover, the collections of glassware and painted enamels at the Wallace Collection are broadly speaking contemporaneous in date of manufacture. Whereas all of the painted enamels in the collection were made in Limoges over a relatively short period from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, much of the glassware was made in Venice or elsewhere on the continent in Venetian style (façon de Venise) at around the same time. Glassware from other traditions includes a mid-fourteenth-century Islamic mosque lamp and early seventeenth-century Bohemian enamelled glasses. All the glass and Limoges painted enamels in the Wallace Collection are published together for the first time. There are approximately sixty glasses and thirty painted enamels in the Wallace Collection. Preparation of this catalogue has included research into their production, function, and the socio-cultural context in which they were made, while comparative examples have been identified and attribution and dating reassessed in the light of recent developments in scientific analysis. Techniques from the so-called‘golden age’ of Venetian glass-making are well represented, including vessels in mould-blown, enamelled and gilt and vetro a filigrana glass. Highlights include a calcedonio goblet, a trick-glass tazza and a chalice-shaped goblet enamelled with the Crucifixion. The Islamic glass mosque lamp, an early seventeenth-century Bohemian beaker (Humpen), evocatively enamelled with scenes of merrymaking and intended for welcoming guests, and an exquisite goblet from a magnificent dressing-table service made in Augsburg in the later eighteenth-century provide fascinating glimpses into very different cultures.

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