Hunterian Museum, Glasgow
Boucher and Chardin: Masters of Modern Manners
128 pages, paperback, 280 x 240 mm, 100 colour illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
ISBN: 978 1 903470 75 6
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By Anne Dulau, Dr Christoph Vogtherr and Dr Ann Eatwell
Almost 200 years ago, William Hunter (1718–1783), founder of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, was one of a small number of British art collectors to acquire works by his contemporary Jean-Siméon Chardin. Among these, Woman taking Tea of 1735 has become something of an iconic image of French art from this period. It has a pair in a near contemporary painting Madame Boucher (1743) by François Boucher in the Frick Collection, New York.
Accompanying an exhibition at the Wallace Collection, this catalogue seeks to examine relationships between these two works and their creation, focusing on establishing common threads drawn from contemporary French social and cultural history. When seen together, the two paintings acquire a new resonance, showing the imaginative and Parisian response of two very different painters to a new interest in scenes from everyday life. The paintings are examined in the context of a dozen further works by the artists, and prints, drawings, books and decorative art objects including oriental textiles and porcelain. This provides an opportunity to address undercurrent social history themes, such as the artists’ attitudes to fashion, interior decoration, and even the consumption of tea – a pastime borne from the contemporary fashion in eighteenth-century France and Great Britain for anything oriental, influenced by new trade links with China.
Anne Dulau is curator at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow; Dr Christoph Vogtherr is curator of pictures pre-1800 at the Wallace Collection, London; Dr Ann Eatwell is curator in the Silver Department of theVictoria & Albert Museum, London.
Accompanied an exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London, 12 June to 7 Sept. 2008, and at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, 24 Sept. to 13 Dec. 2008
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the opening of the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow in 2007, this book provides a full study both of William Hunter - the many-faceted surgeon/connoisseur - and of his collection of art, which not only contains a number of outstanding masterpieces, such as a Rembrandt, but also provides a revealing snapshot of the taste of the period. While illuminating this crucial transitional period in British art, the book is at the same time a catalogue of the Hunterian collection. More
