In the 1870s, immigrant Jules Dalou developed his success as a sculptor in England. His public status was established about 1877 with royal commissions. Documents are detailed that provide insight ...into the development of his career, focusing on his reception by Queen Victoria and her commissions.
The visual world and its representation figure large in the romances as well as in the life of the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne (PI 1). In The Howe of Seven Gables, published in 1851, one of ...the chief characters is a photographer, and, in the last of his great 'romances', The Marble Faun, the whole plot is built around a sculpture. However, Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, in their Taste and the Antique, rap Hawthorne over the knuckles for the unreliability of his aesthetic judgements, and for not being able to make up his mind whether the Medici Venus is a sublime classic or a botched version of some finer original. In Hawthorne's brushes with the sculptural world attention has focused, rather to his detriment, on the period he spent in Italy between January 1858 and May 1859. There are two obvious reasons for this. One is that, in his travel notebooks, he represents himself as undergoing a sort of initiation into the mysteries of the art, through contact with lauded examples from antiquity, and profiting from the advice of such luminaries as Anna Jameson, Hiram Powers, William Wetmore Story and John Gibson.
To celebrate its 30th birthday, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris put on a show entitled "Spectaculaire Second Empire, 18521870" ("Spectacular Second Empire, 1852-1870"), on view through 16 January 2017, ...devoted to what in France is still considered a problematic era. This may surprise more seasoned visitors, such as this reviewer, who did not find this version of the Second Empire terribly different from that so magnificently presented by a predominantly American team back in 1978. This was a smaller, but equally beautifully presented show, whose accompanying book is more to be commended for its essays dealing with specific issues than for scholarly cataloguing of individual items. Abridged Publication Abstract
In his 1963 biography of Austen Henry Layard, Gordon Waterfield acknowledged the problem of dealing with so protean an individual. His title, "Layard of Nineveh," endorsed the general association of ...his subject in the public mind with archaeological excavations in what is today Iraq. Layard's life seems to have been a long balancing act between politics and diplomacy and art, ancient and modern. The aim of this article is to chart Layard's relationship with the sculptor Carlo Marochetti, in the hope that this may throw light not only on the causes of Marochetti's declining reputation in the 1860s, but also on the direction which his art was taking in this final years. Abridged Publication Abstract
Reviews a publication focused on 19th-century French relief sculpture "Le relief au croisement des arts du XIXe siècle" ("The relief at the intersection of the arts of the 19th century"), by Claire ...Barbillon (Picard, 2014).
