July 23rd, 2013
This year I have been a fortunate recipient of the UBP bursary, an opportunity that has allowed me to learn more about specific artworks in Pallant House Gallery’s collection of British Pop Art. The benefits of my research have had huge impact, none more so than in my ability to curate informed exhibitions and displays […]
June 18th, 2013
Idealistic, spiritual and known as the ‘Signor’ to his intimate friends, George Frederic Watts was one of the most sought after portrait painters of the Victorian age. Soon Watts’ correspondence will be fully searchable online, opening a resource to discover this significant artist as well as the culture of Victorian celebrity. After Watts’ death in […]
May 22nd, 2013
Queen Caroline has proudly surveyed the Octagon Room at Orleans House Gallery since we opened 40 years ago. Given our dynamic exhibition programme, she’s the only part of the Richmond Borough Art Collection that you are guaranteed to see every time you visit. We love to share stories about the occasion in 1729 when she […]
May 21st, 2013
We have been extremely fortunate this year to be awarded a bursary from the Understanding British Portraits Network. I work as part of the Learning Team at the Laing Art Gallery, where we currently run a successful schools workshop interpreting one of our most famous paintings, Isabella and the Pot of Basil by William Holman […]
April 22nd, 2013
Harriet Jordan (left) might well be seated in her sitting room interrupting her sewing to look up at the camera. In reality, she was photographed when a patient at Bethlem Royal Hospital. This photograph and others like it could, at least on first viewing, have been plucked from a family album, so far removed […]
April 17th, 2013
Last month I attended the excellent Portrait Network seminar Copy, Version and Multiple: the replication and distribution of portrait imagery. I was particularly interested in the papers on Lely’s studio practice and Victorian carte-de-visite portrait photographs but the last talk of the day by video artist Marty St James resonated unexpectedly with another area […]
April 15th, 2013
Pallant House Gallery’s Pop Art collection is one of the most comprehensive and significant in the country. Works by Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Jann Haworth and Eduardo Paolozzi not only feature regularly in displays at the Gallery but also, as temporary loans to major international exhibitions they have represented British Pop Art alongside […]
April 9th, 2013
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts’s exhibition Close to the Heart (1 February – 5 May 2013) features around fifty mostly British miniatures dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Half of them are on loan from an eminent UK private collection largely assembled around 1890-1920 on the advice of George C. Williamson (1858-1942), […]
April 9th, 2013
Marketing staff based at Heelis (National Trust’s head office) are mostly preoccupied with attracting and retaining members, fundraising campaigns and looking after the NT brand. So I am delighted and privileged to be awarded one of the Understanding British Portraits network’s NT staff bursaries this year, and will be sharing my findings with marketing colleagues […]
March 20th, 2013
During my second term as Hon Secretary, when The Lace Guild was working towards museum registration, the Museums’ Association Journal appeared regularly in my pigeon-hole at The Hollies. As with any such journal there were good months and bad months, but in most issues I found plenty of general interest, in addition to specific information […]
