Hello Dolly

These last stages of the process of putting on a big exhibition are by far the most enjoyable. The book has arrived from the printers in all its splendor. The construction of plinths, pedestals, cases, and other items of bespoke furniture is complete. There is a rich array of power tools, trolleys, dollies, tape-measures, spirit-levels, extension cords, fresh light bulbs, and carts laden with all sorts of screws, nuts, bolts, washers, hooks, and other carefully organized fittings. Such smooth wall surfaces as are, in this High Modernist building, permitted a color are now painted the necessary number of coats, and our choice of a powdery, dry pale blue produces exactly the effect we had hoped for. The signage, object labels, and wall texts have been edited, designed, and are now in production—their careful arrangement around the galleries has been decided. The illuminated vitrines outside the front door are almost done. The sound program is finished, thanks to the efforts of our colleagues in Yale Media. The films have likewise been chosen, and await the installation of the monitor and DVD-player at the end of the exhibition. Templates defining the exact position of every object in the show have now been placed around the galleries, together with stickies that indicate the correct orientation of the accompanying labels. All that remains is for the nearly two hundred objects to arrive, one by one, or in groups according to lender. And then we shall open, and start talking about it to our visitors, non-stop.

Hanging a loan show is for the responsible curators somewhat different from re-hanging the permanent collection because under the terms of most if not all loan agreements the placing and installation of other institutions’ works of art must be carried out in the presence of their representatives, and obviously to their satisfaction. That responsibility almost always rests with the couriers who accompany the shipments. To that end much advance planning is necessary, and very little last-minute adjustment is possible. Still, there are decisions to be made when we go ahead install a borrowed object, once they have been condition-checked: an inch or two up or down, left or right. The unexpected or unforeseen effects of sight-lines or adjacencies and even the friendliness or otherwise of neighboring picture frames sometimes require a little attention. Other small problems inevitably arise, and can usually be solved to the contentment of all. The director must be kept apprised of progress, and her views naturally also taken account of. Certainly we are greatly assisted by the expertise and judgment of our out-of-house exhibition designer the excellent Stephen Saitas; by the meticulousness and indomitability of our registrar, together with the professionalism, steady hands, and shrewd opinions of our installation crew. Their views are always worth soliciting and usually right.

So, four weeks from now we will be up and running. The opening week’s festivities will be behind us. The exhibition will have taken on a life of its own. There is already an enormous 15-second advertisement running roughly every half hour or so on the CBS David Letterman screen at Times Square and Forty-Second Street, with an estimated audience of 1.5 millions. I wonder whether this will generate more than average foot traffic from New York. I hope so. Yale University Press, meanwhile, has high hopes for the publication, which in so many respects seems just now to converge strangely with the recent Downton Abbey phenomenon. It seems that something in the zeitgeist is focusing some attention on my beloved Edwardians. What a very satisfactory state of affairs!

Edwardian Opulence

Last Wednesday morning a hefty, air-freighted object of astonishing beauty plopped onto my desk. Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century is now a glorious reality. Our heartfelt thanks must go to everyone for their supremely generous efforts on our behalf. Every exquisitely typeset line, every page, every opening, every illustration is a work of art, and all other aspects of the book a positive joy to us, the co-editors and co-curators, up to and including the snappy gold stitching, and the wonderful ending (this last illustration before the endpapers—just superb). So, three cheers to wonderful Ellie Hughes and her team in exhibitions and publications here at the Yale Center for British Art; the meticulous Elisa Urbanelli, our copy editor; the patient Daphne Geismar, designer extraordinaire, and to our publisher Sally Salvesen and to all her sterling colleagues at Yale University Press in London. Our thanks must also go to Julie Allred of BW&A Books, wizards of the fine art of typesetting, and, above all, gli eccellentissimi Signori Conti Tipocolor SpA, master printers of Florence. Noi ringraziamo loro! All of them deserve a flashy gold medal in the Queen’s Birthday honours list (where else?). And now, full steam ahead with the installation of the exhibition itself, no small undertaking—there are fifty-five lenders from ten countries spread across four continents that straddle the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean, one of the largest and most complicated projects the Center has ever undertaken.

Google Art Project

Last week we joined the Google Art Project, and yesterday I received the first of what I anticipate will be a steady stream of helpful communications from interested persons who may now gain access to reproductions of objects in our collection directly through Google, and obviously know far more about a particular object than we do. An exquisite example is this charming small painting by George Chinnery of a young man playing a guitar. A colleague in Britain has let me know that his sheet music may now be identified as Fantaisie, Opus 7, by Fernando Sor (1778–1839) whose name can be read at the top, a piece that was originally dedicated to the Austrian-born French composer and pianoforte builder Ignaz Joseph Pleyel. All this is due to the sharp eye of James Westbrook, of the Guitar Museum in Brighton, to whom we are most grateful.

As Roberta Smith remarked in yesterday’s New York Times, “The top contributor [to the Google Art Project] is the Yale Center for British Art, which has uploaded images of 5,414 paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings by 580 artists—about 10 to 12 percent of its entire collection and everything in the public domain that appears on its own Web site—including scores of works by John Constable and J. M. W. Turner.” In fact, we have put up all our paintings and sculptures that are in the public domain, and it is only a matter of time before all the many thousands of works on paper go up in tranches. This is merely an extension of our new policy of open access that, together with partner institutions including the British Museum, we have lately implemented—that is, to make available free of charge easily downloadable high-resolution images of anything in our collections that is out of copyright, so that they can be published anywhere, in any form, printed or digital, without a fee for permission to reproduce. We ask only that our users let us know where our things appear, so that we can maintain as accurate a record as possible, though of course in future this, too, will be an exercise made largely redundant by increasingly powerful online searching methods that, like Googe, will eventually span whole collections.

True, there are some slightly surprising aspects of the arrangement of the images on the Google Art Project site, and a curious determination to list artists in alphabetical order of first or Christian name instead of surname. With Leonardo and Michelangelo this is not such a problem, but informed searchers may be puzzled to find Arthur Devis listed under A, and Jonathan Richardson under J. No doubt this was the work of a computer programmer, and not a librarian. I am sure they will get around to fixing this.

The awesomeness of the whole exercise may be illustrated by the following scenario. You see a winsome detail of a painting or sculpture in an advertisement on the side of a bus, and are curious to know what it is. You take a photograph of it with your smart phone. The relevant Google art app will then correctly identify the original work, and not only bring you the pertinent information and a full reproduction but also provide a link to the parent institution’s web site, and, in the case of MoMA, for example, show you exactly where it hangs on which wall, and in what gallery—together with a map. Instantaneously. One prays that this will not provide too convenient a blueprint for future generations of thieves, and that our security measures are sufficiently robust, but I also notice that such qualms when expressed in meetings by cautious art museum curators in the firm grip of middle age can at times be greeted with soothing noises of good-natured indulgence by much younger colleagues who are completely embedded in the world of information technology.

There was a time, not so long ago, when hunting for a work of art involved shuffling through black-and-white photographs in any number of cardboard boxes, or an exercise in memory. One thinks of needles and haystacks. The Google Art Project promises to revolutionize the process, and it seems just incredible.

Our new website

All my working life authors wishing to publish photographic reproductions of works of art that are (a) owned by public institutions, and (b) out of copyright, have labored under a punishing regime of fees for permission, fees for reproduction, fees, fees, fees. It is a burden that has cost many of us more than our published work will ever earn back in royalties, and has therefore put an almighty brake on scholarship in every branch of the history of art, and much else besides. For many impecunious art museums, the system has been regarded as a valuable income stream, and as a way of controlling the quality of such reproductions of the works in their care as find their way into print. However, the cost of gathering those fees is often greater than the annual income so generated, and in the era of the internet no museum, however great, can ever possibly hope to maintain that control. People will simply go ahead and scan a magazine illustration then manufacture Mona Lisa bathmats any way they can, usually in Guangzhou.

So we are leading by example. Henceforth we at the Yale Center for British Art will gladly make available through our website easily downloadable high-resolution print-quality photographic reproductions of anything in our collection that is out of copyright—free, gratis, and for nothing. Nor does it concern us in any way whatsoever how you wish to use these reproductions, in print or online. We are sufficiently confident that people everywhere will grasp the difference between a photo and the real thing, and if the dissemination of accurate reproductions of our works of art achieve wide distribution, so much the better. We do not and will not make judgments of taste in respect of the suitability or otherwise of George Stubbs’s Zebra, say, wandering onto a muu-muu or shower curtain any more than we interfere with law-abiding visitors to our galleries during normal opening hours. And we are certainly not so paranoid that we regard such unconventional forms of reproduction as an affront to the artist, or so pompous as to see ourselves as the sole custodian of his posthumous reputation—indeed we are confident that Stubbs will be taken no less seriously should his zebra ever put in an appearance on a G-string at the carnival in Rio. Ideally we would prefer non-commercial use, but these days what is non-commercial? You will see that we have put in place a simple mechanism that ought to prevent a robot from vacuuming up everything. All that we are asking our users is that in due course they let us know where they elect to publish reproductions of works in this collection so that our records can be kept as up-to-date as possible.

It’s about time, isn’t it? And the cultural and philosophical bases are entirely logical. We are a public institution, and thanks to the munificence of our founder the late Paul Mellon access to the objects entrusted to our care is free, clear, unrestricted, and open to any and everyone in perpetuity, subject of course to the law of copyright, and to routine logistical or conservation constraints. But even there we do our best to show people whatever they want to see that may happen to be in storage just now. So the new website and our new policy about reproductions are merely an extension of that.

So, authors, come ye, shout it from the rooftops, tell your colleagues and friends, alert your publishers to this valuable new resource, and feel free to rake through our website, search high and low, right across the collections, and download to your heart’s content. Be fruitful, and multiply!

Francesco Renaldi in Dacca

Francesco Renaldi was an English-born painter of Italian heritage about whose life little is known. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1776, aged twenty-one. For two years after 1781 Renaldi traveled in Italy, initially with Thomas Jones, the Welsh landscape painter and pupil of Richard Wilson.

Evidently on at least one occasion Jones exploited Renaldi’s name to pass himself off as an Irish catholic in order to gain access to the prior of a monastery at Caserta near Naples—which would normally have been inaccessible to him on sectarian grounds—but Renaldi seems to have accepted this with good grace, even affability. Years later, in 1798, he exhibited at the Royal Academy a workmanlike but affectionate group portrait of the Jones family, which is now in the collection of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff; it may contain the artist’s discreet but cheerful self-portrait.

Upon returning to London in 1783, Renaldi attempted without success to establish himself as a portrait painter at 2, Portugal Street, a modest house tucked behind Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on the Thames side. On November 3, Jones was pleasantly surprised to bump into Renaldi in Fleet Street, and the two dined together not long afterwards.

In 1785, perhaps frustrated by commercial sluggishness, even sensing the prospect of professional failure in a highly competitive metropolitan market for portraits, Renaldi applied to the East India Company for permission to travel to Bengal. He supplied the names and addresses of two guarantors—Mr. Job Hart Price of Aldershot House, and Robert Codd of the 59th Regiment of Foot. These sureties were obviously acceptable to the company, because the following February Renaldi was given formal approval to go. He sailed aboard the Hillsborough, and reached Calcutta in August 1786.

For ten years Renaldi lived in Calcutta, Lucknow (working, it is believed, for نواب آصف الدولہ Asaf ud-Daulah, the Nawab Wazir of Oudh), and in Dacca (now the capital city of Bangladesh). He was therefore one of only a relatively small number of European painters—among them William Hodges, Johan Zoffany, Tilly Kettle, and Ozias Humphry (all of whom are represented in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art)—who spent extended periods painting portraits of and for the nabobs (English, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish gentlemen of the East India Company whose tendency was to “go native”) and their more or less official Indian mistresses, or bibis. This painting is a fine example of the latter.

This portrait represents a young Muslim bibi reclining on an expensive carpet, propped up on a plump cushion in a corner of her small, private house, known as a bibi khana. She contemplates the elaborate jewel in her left hand, probably a pendant necklace. By her side there are a few other beautiful objects—the hookah; the paandaan, or silver tray with cruets containing a soporific preparation made from betel-leaf, and her casually discarded jutis, or slippers with the elaborately upturned toes.

The fine, layered formal costume consists of a fine peshwaz or kurta (a kind of loose shirt or tunic) with an inner layer made of gold brocade patterned with buti, a design of orange and green. Her peshwaz has a fine white gauze veil. The dupatta, meanwhile, a double-sided scarf or shawl, is made of fine, dusty rose muslin edged with silver-threaded gota, or ribbon. The jewelry is delicate and plentiful, and includes several necklaces, numerous bracelets, large earrings, a wide slender hooped nose-ring, rather heavy anklets, and gold rings on all of her toes, and on most of her fingers (some sporting substantial gemstones).

Judging from the angle of the shadows cast by the shutters on the left, this scene evidently takes place in the late afternoon, that hottest and most oppressive time of the equatorial day—the sun never sets much earlier than approximately 5.45 p.m. (in January) or later than about 7.00 (in August).

In the postcolonial context, one is tempted to interpret this bibi’s focused gaze towards that fine jewel as a sort of rumination upon her own standing as an item of great luxury, a rare commodity, installed for the nabob’s pleasure upon the periphery of Anglo-Indian society in the time of Warren Hastings.

However, it is worth noting that very often the relationship between nabob and bibi was lasting, respectful if not sincerely affectionate, and sometimes involved the eventual bequest of substantial property (i.e. from nabob to bibi). And despite their unofficial domestic status and the impossibility of marriage, bibis could nevertheless be quite comfortably accepted (on both sides of the racial divide) as being of “good family.” Indeed, some were even minor members of the princely houses. Unfortunately we know nothing at all about the identity of this particular bibi, nor indeed the nabob for whom Renaldi painted her portrait. According to an inscription, it was painted at Dacca in 1789.

Recent scholarship has hardly begun to gauge the strands of influence flowing out of the studios of western artists in what were then called the “presidencies” of Bengal, Behar, and Oudh—and thence to the workshops of indigenous Indian court and other local painters who evidently admired, or at least for whatever reason sought to emulate them. However, we are beginning to see that western materials, techniques, and styles of representation stimulated widespread imitation among Bengalis, with rather mixed results.

By 1796 Francesco Renaldi was back in England. To the following year’s summer exhibition at the Royal Academy he sent paintings of two Industany ladies, and one Mogul lady—all three were presumably bibis, possibly including this one—and also listed his address as 69, Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, very close to what is now Oxford Circus. In 1798 he may have exhibited a portrait of his own family, about whom we know nothing.

Thereafter he vanishes from view, but completely.

Serendipity

In the course of a rich and busy life there are coincidences that, upon measured reflection, aren’t really all that coincidental, such as coming face to face with someone you know on a busy street in the middle of an enormous foreign city—I think of the two separate occasions when I ran into David Jaffe, first near the Campo dei Fiori in Rome some time in 1986, and then again in New York City in 1995 (on Madison at 77th Street; we were both attempting to dodge the enormous cavalcade of Pope John Paul II). Not too surprising if you really think about it, because our shared interests inevitably attract us to the same kind of places. However, what happened yesterday is harder to account for. At a morning meeting with numerous colleagues around a large conference room table here at the British Art Center, a London-based scholar—whom I do not know very well—spread out at random quite a lot of his own photographs of examples of distinguished eighteenth-century English picture frames, and after a moment I realized to my astonishment that the photograph nearest to the spot where I was sitting was of a picture that I knew, and knew well. Our guest had photographed this particular painting on the wall at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide some years ago, long before we ever met, but I first saw the picture in wholly, even radically different surroundings in 2001—namely the modest home near Mount Barker, deep in the Adelaide Hills, of a ship’s captain and his wife, who soon afterwards donated it to the Gallery in memory of his parents. It is a fine, large maritime painting, as befits its provenance, signed and dated by Francis Swaine (1765), and carries the evocative title The Landing of the Sailor Prince at Spithead. At the time I guessed that the elegant, openwork frame was rather special, and in all probability “original,” meaning that the finished canvas had probably never been housed differently. But what caused my bosom to swell with pride yesterday was that our visitor, who evidently knows what he is talking about, included that Swaine among a handful of the most distinguished English frames that he has yet had the opportunity to photograph. If the photo had shuffled further up the conference-room table I might not have noticed it at all. Objects and images swim around us with ever accelerating speed, and in daunting numbers, so I cannot conceive of the odds against such a chance encounter taking place—unless, of course, our visitor choreographed it for my benefit. I very much doubt if he did.

Viscount Cremorne and Signor Luzzi

I cannot now recall why these photographs were taken, but I suspect it may have been at around the time we put on a mini-show of our best marble busts in the entry court, here at the Yale Center for British Art. No doubt we were seeking a little publicity, or else maybe somebody needed a photograph to go with some altogether different piece about my last book, A Brief History of the Smile.

In any case, I am on the left, and Thomas Dawson, first Baron Dartrey (later first Viscount Cremorne) (1725–1813) is on the right, in a fine marble portrait bust, c. 1770, by Joseph Wilton. Not perhaps the most attractive man, Lord Dartrey was an Anglo-Irish Member of Parliament. He married twice. His second wife was Philadelphia Hannah Freame, a granddaughter of William Penn. Lady Cremorne was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, which must have made life for her slightly awkward after the Declaration of Independence.

The jacket I am wearing here was made for me in 1988 by the excellent Signor Luzzi at Via del Babuino, 41, in Rome. My dear friend Clare Broadbent, who had recently retired from her position as librarian at the N.A.TO. Officers’ Training College in E.U.R., guided me to Signor Luzzi, who is a man of great skill, exquisite taste, and still going strong. So is his beautiful jacket.

Ellinor, Mrs. James Guthrie by Frederic Leighton

Frederic Leighton, 1830–1896
Ellinor, Mrs. James Guthrie
Oil on canvas, ca. 1864–65
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn.

Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.10

Ellinor Guthrie (1838–1911) was one of the eleven children of Admiral Sir James Stirling, the first governor of the Swan River Colony (Western Australia), and was actually born in Perth. Her maternal grandfather was a member of the so-called Reform Parliament of 1832. Ellinor Stirling married the wealthy Scottish merchant banker James Alexander Guthrie in 1856. In London the Guthries lived in some style in Robert Adam’s magnificent Portland Place, adjacent to Regent’s Park, and between 1857 and 1868 produced nine children. Sittings for this portrait took place in October 1864, after Mrs. Guthrie had recovered from the birth of her fifth daughter. The flowers, vases, embroidered tablecloth, ornate chair, and large history painting in the background, which were probably furnishings in the artist’s studio in St. John’s Wood, suggest a refined world of beauty, art, and culture.