Editors’ Welcome

Greetings! And happy spring or fall, depending on the hemisphere in which you find yourself.

We hope you will enjoy reading the articles in this issue, the topics of which range widely from a Gilded Age bedroom in Newport, Rhode Island, to silver altar statues on the Mediterranean island of Malta; and from the representation of a Jamaican artists’ model in the work of a Jewish painter in London to a Swedish art student’s experiences in Paris as detailed in her letters.

Along with these feature articles, you will find two New Discoveries articles—one on a portrait by the sister of the British artist John Flaxman and another on a previously unlocated bust by the US sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens; a Practicing Art History contribution with video recordings of a two-part Virtual Salon, “Reinstalling Nineteenth-Century American Art in US Museums,” organized by NCAW and sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum; and a comprehensive group of book and exhibition reviews. We are trying hard to live up to the “worldwide” in our title.

And now for some exciting news: NCAW has received a Paul Mellon Centre Digital Project Grant of 22,960 pounds, which is approximately 29,000 US dollars. The grant proposal was written by NCAW’s Digital Art History editor, Carey Gibbons, and Temi Odumosu of the University of Washington, to support a project developed by Odumosu titled Annotating The New Union Club: Antiracist Ethics and Curation for Digital Art Histories. The outcome of the project will be a virtual exhibition, published in a special summer issue in 2025. The exhibition, conceived of as an object lesson, will be centered on The New Union Club, a problematic print of 1819 by Frederick Marryat and George Cruikshank that delivers a scathing critique of antislavery and features the genre’s most grotesque racist tropes. Taking seriously the responsibilities involved in curating colonial artworks ethically and for multiple audiences, the exhibition will present the print not as a flat, impenetrable surface but as an object that invites many layers of communication and interaction. Critical annotation is used as a design method for questioning, calling out, and debating the center and peripheries, both literal and conceptual, of the image.

In other journal-related news, this year several Editorial Advisory Board members are cycling off after the completion of their five-year terms. We want to thank Felicity Bodenstein, Nenad Makuljević, Jennifer Raab, and Marjan Sterckx for their generous help and good suggestions. We welcome new members Jan Dirk Baetens (Radboud University, Netherlands), Rebecca Bedell (Wellesley College, Wellesley), Prita Meier (New York University, New York), and Agnieszka Rosales-Rodriguez (National Museum and National University, Warsaw).

Speaking of helping NCAW, as you may know, the journal is published by AHNCA, whose membership dues are crucial to the functioning of both AHNCA and NCAW. So, if you are not a member, please become one by clicking on https://ahnca.org/membership. And, if you are already a basic member, consider raising your membership to the supporter or patron level.

Thank you for your interest and support!