Esther Bell – författare

An illustrated exploration of the largely unpublished collection of eighteenth-century French drawings, albums, and sketchbooks at the Bibliothèque nationale de FrancePromenades on Paper explores the largely unmined collection of eighteenth-century drawings held in the Department of Prints and Photography of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Among the 50 featured artists are some of France’s most celebrated eighteenth-century practitioners, including Madeleine Basseporte (1701–1780), François Boucher (1703–1770), Gabriel de Saint Aubin (1724–1780), and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), alongside architects, designers, and printmakers. Scattered across the institution’s vast reserves, these drawings have until now served primarily documentary purposes. In this book, leading international scholars introduce more than 80 drawings, albums, and sketchbooks—many published here for the first time—and reveal how artists used drawing to record, critique, and try to improve the world around them.Distributed for the Clark Art InstituteExhibition Schedule:Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA(December 17, 2022–March 12, 2023)Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours(May 12–August 28, 2023)

A groundbreaking publication on the Caribbean-born French Neoclassical painter Guillaume Lethière and his extraordinary, yet largely unexamined career  Born in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a key figure in the history of art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The son of a formerly enslaved woman of color and a white government official and plantation owner, Lethière moved to France with his father at age fourteen. He trained as an artist and successfully navigated the tumult of the French Revolution and its aftermath in order to achieve the highest levels of recognition in his time. A favorite artist of Napoleon’s brother, Lucien Bonaparte, Lethière also held important positions at the Académie de France in Rome, Institut de France, and École des Beaux-Arts. A well-respected teacher, he operated a robust studio that rivaled those of his contemporaries Jacques-Louis David and Antoine-Jean Gros.  Despite his remarkable accomplishments and considerable corpus of paintings and drawings, Lethière is relatively unknown today. Lavishly illustrated and authoritative, this groundbreaking study serves to introduce Lethière to new and broader audiences and restore him to his rightful place as one of the most eminent artist of his generation. An international group of scholars offer the first comprehensive view of Lethière’s extraordinary career in its political, social, and art historical context, addressing issues of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora, as well as shedding new light on the presence and reception of Caribbean artists in France during this time.  Distributed for the Clark Art Institute  Exhibition Schedule:  Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA(June 15–October 14, 2024)  Louvre, Paris(November 14, 2024–February 17, 2025)

Celebrating one of Raphael's most beguiling and enigmatic paintings, his Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn of 1505-6, from the Galleria Borghese in Rome, this fully illustrated volume presents extensive new research and conservation work in a clear and engaging way. It features two essays by leading specialists in 16th-century Renaissance art, Dr. Mary Shay-Millea and Dr. Linda Wolk-Simon. They explore, respectively, the stylistic relationship between this masterpiece and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, also dating from this period, and the link between the work and Petrarch's notions of beauty in Renaissance art, as well as attributions and the painting's distinct iconography. The painting poses many interesting questions about both nuptial imagery and patronage during the 15th and 16th centuries. Esther Bell presents details of the painting's conservation; recent x-rays of the panel have revealed that the animal figure was originally intended to be a dog, and was altered, possibly as a result of a change to the terms of the artist's commission when the unknown sitter's marriage was called off. With a thoroughly researched chronology and bibliography, 'Sublime Beauty' is an important contribution to the existing research on Raphael's iconic painting and to the study of the artist's working practice. AUTHOR: Esther Bell is curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Mary Shay-Millea is an independent scholar based in New York, and formerly a Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum Linda Wolk-Simon is the director and chief curator of Bellarmine Museum of Art at Fairfield University, CT 33 colour illustrations