CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The Harvard Art Museums hold the largest and finest collection in the West of a rare and strikingly beautiful type of ceramic ware used in the private quarters of the Forbidden City, the Chinese imperial palace in Beijing. These numbered Jun wares—so named because each is marked on its base with a single Chinese numeral—have long been admired for their fine potting, distinctive shapes, and radiant purple and blue glazes. Opinions on these vessels’ dates of origin vary widely, and given the scarcity of numbered Jun in most museum collections, a comprehensive study of this unusual ware has never been undertaken outside the imperial collections in China and Taiwan.

Drawn entirely from the museums’ permanent collections, "Adorning the Inner Court: Jun Ware for the Chinese Palace" introduces the typology, technical characteristics, collecting history, and controversies surrounding numbered Jun ware. It features approximately half of the museums’ 60 numbered Jun, all of which were given to Harvard in 1942 by Boston-area collectors Ernest B. Dane (Harvard College Class of 1892) and his wife Helen Pratt Dane. This exhibition marks the 75th anniversary of the Danes’ extraordinary gift of nearly 300 Chinese ceramics and later jades. It is also the first focused exhibition of their unique collection of palace Jun ware since it came to Harvard. The exhibition has been complemented by an online special collections feature that provides further contextualization and analytical research on Harvard’s entire numbered Jun collection.

Curated by Melissa A. Moy, the Alan J. Dworsky Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Harvard Art Museums.

Reverie: Christopher Wilmarth, Before and After Mallarmé
In 1978, sculptor Christopher Wilmarth was asked by poet Frederick Morgan to illustrate his translation of a group of seven poems by the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé. The resulting print series, known as Breath, is also connected to an elaborate group of works by Wilmarth—charcoal and pastel drawings, etchings, and wall sculptures—each titled after the first line of a Mallarmé poem. This exhibition is selected primarily from these paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints; it focuses on the way that Wilmarth worked in a variety of media to deal with the themes of Mallarmé’s poems and to shape his project. The exhibition also includes related works on loan from two private collections, providing a sense of how the Mallarmé project continued to inform Wilmarth’s sculpture in the years that followed. While the exhibition largely features works related to or emerging from the Mallarmé project, it also highlights several other sculptures from the Harvard Art Museums collections—including two early, Brancusi-inspired wood sculptures (part of a recent gift of the Susan Wilmarth estate) and the recently acquired October Ladders—that have never previously been exhibited at the museums.

An online resource dedicated to the Christopher Wilmarth archives held by the Harvard Art Museums accompanies the exhibition. The Christopher Wilmarth Special Collection assembles many of the artist’s studio files given to the Fogg Museum over the last 16 years by the artist’s widow, Susan Wilmarth, and later by her estate. The materials in the online repository include technical specification sheets, diagrams, and maquettes for assembling many of the Wilmarth sculptures that can be found in collections worldwide, as well as installation shots of the works. Some of Wilmarth’s musical recordings are also available through the special collection.

Curated by Sarah Kianovsky, Curator of the Collection in the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums; and Laura Kenner, Ph.D. candidate in Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture.