The Robert Lehman Collection, Volume XV: European and Asian Decorative Arts


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This volume catalogues more than 400 decorative objects in the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including painted enamels, snuffboxes, porcelain, pottery, ceramics, jewellery, furniture, cast metal, and textiles from throughout Europe and Asia, with the majority dating from the late seventh century to the 20th century.




Catalogue of the Astor Library


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Bernard Quaritch


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The Eighteenth Century French Paintings


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The impressive collection of 18th-century French paintings at the National Gallery, London, includes important works by Boucher, Chardin, David, Fragonard, Watteau, and many others. This volume presents over seventy detailed and extensively illustrated entries that expand our understanding of these paintings. Comprehensive research uncovers new information on provenance and on the lives of identified portrait sitters. Humphrey Wine explains the social and political contexts of many of the paintings, and an introductory essay looks at the attitude of 18th-century Britons to the French, as well as the market for 18th-century French paintings then in London salerooms. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press




The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century


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In The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century, Ronit Milano probes the rich and complex aesthetic and intellectual charge of a remarkably concise art form, and explores its role as a powerful agent of epistemological change during one of the most seismic moments in French history. The pre-Revolutionary portrait bust was inextricably tied to the formation of modern selfhood and to the construction of individual identity during the Enlightenment, while positioning both sitters and viewers as part of a collective of individuals who together formed French society. In analyzing the contribution of the portrait bust to the construction of interiority and the formulation of new gender roles and political ideals, this book touches upon a set of concerns that constitute the very core of our modernity.







The Persian Mirror


Book Description

The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.




Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-century European Drawings


Book Description

"Early European art was a consuming interest of both Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, an interest reflected in the remarkable number and quality of drawings they owned from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In addition to an important group of early German drawings, the collection includes a "Saint Paul" from a series associated with Jan van Eyck and the famous "Scupstoel" from the circle of Rogier van der Weyden, the only design for a decorative sculpture to survive from the fifteenth century. The great artists of the seventeenth century, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Claude Lorrain, and Rembrandt among them, are also represented, Rembrandt by seven drawings, including the large study of Leonardo's "Last Supper" that would stay in his mind all through his career. Drawings by Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Thomas Gainsborough, Paul Sandby, and George Romney are among the many from eighteenth-century France and England. The volume discusses all 153 drawings at length, placing each in its art historical setting and complementing the discussion with comparative illustrations of related works." This e-book on the MetPublications website is also accompanied by links to related works and under the "Additional resources"tab are links to Met works of art and Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History essays and timelines (viewed May 1, 2014).