European Decorative Arts at the Met
View contents
Outstanding examples of European art in North American collections dominate this month’s issue. In a special supplement we celebrate decorative arts acquired over the last decade by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; they include splendid works from Britain, France and central and northern Europe, as well as magnificent Judaica. From the west coast of the United States, a superb Joseph Wright of Derby painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, is carefully re-assessed, leading to a new chronology for some of the artist’s most important paintings and drawings. The latest technical analysis of Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy’ in the Huntington collection, San Marino, is also published: who is the figure hidden beneath the surface of the picture?
Meanwhile, discoveries made in private collections and published here for the first time include a hitherto undiscussed portrait of a woman dating from the 1550s attributed to Titian and a powerful painting of ‘Christ bound to the column’ by Hendrick Ter Brugghen which was recorded in 1638 in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani in Rome. Rome also provides the context for fascinating documentary research that has unearthed the will of the seventeenth-century Safavid ambasaddress, Lady Shirley, who was the subject of one of Anthony van Dyck’s most magnificent portraits; it provides insights to the latter part of her extraordinary life in Italy.
Authoritative reviews embrace a broad chronological span and richly varied range of subjects: exhibitions considered include Italian Renaissance drawings at the Kings Gallery, London, and the Fondation Custodia, Paris, as well as Medieval Women at the British Library, London, and the history of department stores at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. New books scrutinised include studies of thirteenth-century Rome, Florentine sculpture, Cassiano dal Pozzo and Scottish furniture.