Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Boughton in Northamptonshire is an improbable dream of a house. It is an essay in restrained French Classicism that was gently set into the English countryside in the late seventeenth century, encasing an older building (Fig.1). The house was chiefly the creation of the francophile Ralph, 1st Duke of Montagu (1638–1709), who served as Charles II’s ambassador to the court of Louis XIV. Its most splendid internal feature is the so-called Grand Apartment, which consists of a parade of impressive state rooms.
A once-in-a-lifetime event, this exhibition spans the century of the greatest grandeur enjoyed by the Mughal Empire, from 1560 to 1660. One of the largest centralised states in Early Modern history, it encompassed most of subcontinental India, far outstripping in size and resources both the contemporary Islamic empires of the Safavids and Ottomans, and in global terms it was rivalled only by Ming China.
J.M.W. Turner’s ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’ in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, was the first of the artist’s oil paintings to reach the United States. The circumstances surrounding its transport and reception, as well as the artist’s involvement in this process, are fully revealed for the first time through a close study of the related correspondence in the New York Public Library.
Research into a portrait at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, has revealed the identities of twelve Jacobean portraits attributed to the Flemish painter Paul van Somer. The portraits were probably commissioned by Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and create a potent illustration of her dynastic heritage.
