Networks and Practices of Connoisseurship in the Global Eighteenth Century

The 18th century was the age of the connoisseur. It was also an era of an expanding global consciousness born of accelerating trade and imperial conquest. This volume puts into dialogue the consolidation of connoisseurship as an empirical mode of artistic analysis in Europe and Asia and the increasing exposure to different modes of artmaking facilitated by local and global networks over the course of the long 18th century. Focusing on exchanges between India, Japan, China and Europe, the contributors to this volume examine the complex and nuanced impacts on connoisseurial practice of encounters with artworks from different regions of the globe, the international networks that made those encounters possible, and the intricate transactions through which connoisseurial knowledge of art was generated.

• Expansive focus on practices and networks in India, Japan, and Europe in the 18th century

• Complexities and asymmetries of connoisseurship in an expanding world

Valérie Kobi is Assistant Professor of Early Modern Art History and Museology at the Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She is also leading the FNS PRIMA research group Bibliothèques et musées en Suisse entre 18^e et 19^e siècles.

Chonja Lee is lecturer in Early Modern Art History at the University of Neuchâtel. She is currently completing a monograph on designs of printed cotton textiles for the transatlantic trade. Her publications include the co-edited exhibition catalog Exotic Switzerland. Looking Outward in the Age of Enlightenment (2020).

Kristel Smentek is Associate Professor of Art History at MIT. Her publications include Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014) and the co-edited exhibition catalog Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Harvard Art Museums, 2022).