Terra Foundation for American Art

This chapter concerns the double valency of commercial and aesthetic values in reversed paintings depicted in nineteenth-century French and British paintings and cartoons of academic juries. My concern is not with actual backs of paintings, but with representations of them on the rectos of actual paintings, of which the best-known example is probably the huge canvas back in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Likewise, my concern is not with the frame itself, but with intra-compositional frames of paintings (which I sometimes call versos or “backs”) depicted on the picture plane. Though the topos makes us aware that the painting we are looking at has a frame (which we can see) and a verso (which we cannot), I shall show how, especially when depicted on the move in outdoor settings, the reversed canvas embedded in the illusion may alert us to “extended” or “secondary frames” well outside its enframed setting, such as the studio where the painting was made or the gallery it will hang in or the jury room from which it has been rejected. In this respect the commercial and aesthetic meanings richly associated with the topos merge, intermingle and define each other in ways that illuminate polemical clashes of value in and between places of display in nineteenth-century London and Paris.

David Fée, Bob Colenutt and Sabine Coady Schäbitz (eds.), Lessons from the British and French New Towns: Paradise Lost? Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021. 266pp. 15 figures. 3 tables. £70.00 hbk. - Volume 48 Issue 4

Telle qu’elle est pratiquée aux États-Unis, l’histoire de l’art est une discipline largement autoréflexive qui privilégie l’établissement de généalogies, la clarification méthodologique et le positionnement critique. Les chercheurs se sentent souvent contraints de se joindre à des débats autour de sujets jugés pertinents pour l’époque, et de prendre clairement position. Au cours des dernières décennies, l’un des débats les plus récurrents a porté sur le rôle joué par le visuel. Depuis les ann...

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewChristina Bates. A Cultural History of the Nurse’s Uniform. Quebec: Canadian Museums of Civilization Corporation, 2012. vii+270 pp.; 76 color and 88 black-and-white illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 (paper).Shoshana ResnikoffShoshana ResnikoffTerra Foundation for American Art Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 48, Number 4Winter 2014 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/678588 Views: 107Total views on this site For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.