Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship, & The Order of Things 24 SEPTEMBER, 2009 — 7 MARCH, 2010 This display has been extended through March 7, 2010. Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship, & The Order of Things, by London-based artist Jane Wildgoose, was designed to accompany the recent popular exhibition Mrs. Delany and her Circle (September 24, 2009–January 3, 2010). This special installation celebrates and commemorates the friendship between Mary Delany and the Duchess of Portland. The design points to ways in which natural history displays from the eighteenth century may be understood to reflect something of the manners, taste, and material culture of the people who assembled them. It also offers a tribute to the two women's enduring, productive friendship, which was informed and sustained by shared interests in the fine and decorative arts, as well as natural science. The Duchess's magnificent "Portland Museum"—a collection of natural history specimens and curiosities with which Mary Delany was intimately familiar was sold in 1786 in a spectacular auction comprising more than four thousand lots that took place over thirty-eight days. Working in close association with curators at the Yale Center for British Art, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Sir John Soanes Museum in London, Ms. Wildgoose developed site-specific installations for the Center and the Soane Museum. The installations combine a wealth of exotic and curious natural history specimens reflecting the range of lots at the sale, from "Shells, Corals, Minerals" to "Curious Exotic Insects" to the eggs of the "Alligator, Turtle, Lizard & Snake." Also on display are china and rare books selected in response to descriptions of the domestic settings in which the Duchess housed her museum. Evoking the "promiscuous assemblage" described in the preface to the catalogue by the botanist John Lightfoot that accompanied the auction, the installations also incorporate objects specially devised and made for the project that take their inspiration from accounts of Mary Delany's handiwork made as gifts for her friend, and as decorations for her own home. Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp 4 FEBRUARY — 25 APRIL, 2010 In 1824, the Scottish painter David Wilkie wrote to the director of the French Royal Museums, "It is time to show that the arts are cosmopolitan and that all national prejudice is foreign to them." In spite of Wilkie's fine sentiment, drawings by British artists from the Romantic period have rarely been considered alongside those produced across the Channel. In response, this remarkable exhibition will take up the challenge of treating Romanticism as an international phenomenon by bringing together nearly two hundred British, French, German, Danish, and Dutch drawings from the outstanding collection of Charles Ryskamp (MA '51, PhD '56), Professor Emeritus, Princeton University, and Director Emeritus of the Pierpont Morgan Library and The Frick Collection in New York. The first exhibition of this scope dedicated to northern European drawings, it will consider the place of British art in a European milieu. Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp will explore the direct relationship between British and Continental artists during the Romantic period (here defined as the period between the French Revolution in 1789 and the revolutions of 1848). Despite the very different circumstances in which artists across Europe were working, and the diverse modes of representation they employed, they shared common concerns and frequently explored similar themes. The exhibition and accompanying book will focus on Romanticism's novel exploration of two worlds in particular: nature and the imagination. Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp features more than two hundred works on paper acquired during Professor Ryskamp's fifty years as a collector, ranging from drawings purchased while a student at Cambridge to recent additions. His earliest acquisitions in the 1950s were British drawings, an area of interest that complemented his enthusiasm for English eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, which he studied at Yale and Cambridge Universities and later taught at Princeton University. Once Professor Ryskamp became director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1969, his collecting interests broadened to include an array of Continental drawings from the Old Masters to contemporary works. More than half the drawings on display are by leading British artists; the rest are evenly distributed among the northern European schools. Alongside important British works by J.M.W. Turner, Cornelius Varley, William Blake, and Henry Fuseli, are drawings by key Continental artists, such as Caspar David Friedrich, Camille Corot, Eugène Delacroix, and Edgar Degas. A guiding principle in Charles Ryskamp's collecting was to search out uncommon works, those not typically found in the study rooms of the world's major museums. This focus led him to assemble one of the finest collections of Danish Golden Age drawings in private hands. As a consequence, this exhibition has a comprehensive scope that demonstrates the real cosmopolitanism of Romantic art and the remarkable depth and breadth of the varieties of Romantic experience. Varieties of Romantic Experience: Drawings from the Collection of Charles Ryskamp has been organized by Matthew Hargraves, Assistant Curator for Collections Research at the Center, in association with Charles Ryskamp. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated volume of thematic essays by Matthew Hargraves, with a preface by Charles Ryskamp, published by the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press. Yale Student Guide Exhibition Art In Focus: John Flaxman Modeling the Bust of William Hayley 4 FEBRUARY — 30 MAY, 2010 John Flaxman Modeling the Bust of William Hayley is the third exhibition of the Art in Focus initiative. It examines George Romney's complex group portrait of 1795, depicting John Flaxman sculpting a monumental bust of the poet William Hayley, with assistance from Thomas Alphonso Hayley, Flaxman's apprentice and Hayley's son. The exhibition investigates the painting from multiple perspectives, using it as a jumping-off point for exploring the four artists' relationships to their media and to each other. The exhibition features a medallion by Thomas Alphonso—one of only two surviving works by the prodigy—and William Hayley's published life of his son, both gifts to the Center by Professor Charles Ryskamp, MA '51, PhD '56. Students Guide curators of this exhibition are: Page Benkowski (ES '09), Nicole Espy (PC '09), Samo Gale (MC '10), Adam Gardner (TD '09), Andrew Lee (BR '09), Yinshi Lerman-Tan (MC '11), Minghao Liu (JE '09), Nick Robbins (BR '10), and Margaret Tung (CC '10). They have worked under the guidance of Charles Ryskamp, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, and Director Emeritus of the Pierpont Morgan Library and The Frick Collection, as well as under members of the Center's staff, including Matthew Hargraves, Assistant Curator for Collections Research Linda Friedlaender, Curator of Education, and Jennifer Kowitt, Postgraduate Research Associate in the Education Department. This exhibition also includes important new technical information about the group portrait gathered during recent analysis, overseen by Mark Aronson, Chief Conservator of Paintings at the Center.