In 1806, the Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford opened a gallery at Cleveland House, London, to display their internationally-renowned collection of Old Master paintings to the public. A ticket to the gallery's Wednesday afternoon openings was a sought-after prize, granting access to the collection and the house's dazzling interior in the company of artists, celebrities, and Britain's elite. This book explores the gallery's interior through the lens of its abundant material culture, including paintings in gilded frames, furniture, silver oil lamps, flower arrangements, and the numerous printed catalogues and guidebooks that made the gallery visible to those who might never cross its threshold. Through detailed analysis of these objects and a wide range of other visual, material, textual and archival sources, the book presents the gallery at Cleveland House as a methodological case study on how the display of art in the 19th century was shaped by notions about public and private space, domesticity, and the role art galleries played in the formation of national culture. In doing so, the book also explains how and why magnificent private galleries and the artworks and objects they contained gripped the public imagination during a critical period of political and cultural transformation during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Combining historical, cultural and material analysis, the book will make essential reading for researchers in British art in the Regency period, museum studies, collecting studies, social history, and the histories of interior decoration and design in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Canvasses past and contemporary problems of cultural representation and the relationship between the artist, the museum and society.

The Paintings of Karel du Jardin (1626 Amsterdam-Venice 1678) is the first monograph devoted to this talented and versatile artist. It comprises six chapters outlining Du Jardin's life, his reception, his patrons, portraits, history paintings and landscapes, followed by a conclusion, a list of documents, and a catalogue raisonné of his approximately 158 autographs paintings, as well as doubtful and rejected works. Celebrated in his own lifetime by poets and playwrights, and known primarily for his luminous Italianate landscape paintings, he also produced a modest number of elegant and aristocratising portraits of Amsterdam's patrician and merchant elites, along with stunning and recondite history paintings. Never fully studied before, these works have been carefully researched, with much new or additional provenance, and are discussed in terms of their content and meaning; at times unusual and innovative. They are set within the context of artistic developments both in the Netherlands and abroad, as well as Du Jardin's own life, now fully reconstructed with a wealth of new archival material, and that of his circle of well-to-do, educated patrons and buyers, who turned out to share certain notions of civility and honnêteté.