January 15th, 2019
The November visit to Ham House more than lived up to the very high standard of study days arranged by Understanding British Portraits. Once more the combination of excellent expert speakers covering a wide range of relevant topics, a superb venue and seamless organisation, made for a thoroughly fascinating and enjoyable day. I am very […]
January 10th, 2019
‘The National Portrait Exhibition having led to the exposure of so many errors with regard to the portraits of British worthies and the artists who painted them – it turning out in many cases that the names given were in both respects altogether wrong – it has been suggested that county magnates and others interested […]
November 7th, 2018
As custodian of British portraits that form part an NHS arts collection, I have been a member of Understanding British Portraits for some time. This year’s Annual Seminar was the second I have attended and I was interested to follow new research findings from the network and hear the speakers’ curatorial case studies. As a […]
October 29th, 2018
Brighton Museum is part of The National Gallery Masterpiece Tour 2018 and currently has on display A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Hans Holbein the Younger. To accompany this is the See Portraits, Be Portraits exhibition showcasing portraits from our own fine art collection. The exhibition has been curated with local school […]
October 17th, 2018
In 2016 we were very fortunate to be awarded funding from the Understanding British Portraits Professional Partnership Fellowship to research The Twins by John Everett Millais and create a learning resource for young people. We hoped that our project would help to reveal more about the role of women in the Victorian age, whose stories have for many years only been told […]
September 17th, 2018
As a decorative art specialist, I have been taking my first tentative steps into fine art since being appointed as curator at Temple Newsam House two years ago. Earlier this year, I was very excited to acquire a John Russell (1745-1806) portrait of Savile Green, Senior (1743-1805; Fig. 1).¹ Green was a key figure in […]
August 6th, 2018
The Baring Archive is one of the finest archives of a financial institution in the world and tells the story of Barings Bank, the merchant house established in 1762. Barings was acquired by ING in 1995 and in 2008 the collections were loaned to The Baring Archive Limited, a charitable trust that seeks to preserve […]
August 6th, 2018
In 2000 Rugby Art Gallery and Museum acquired a collection from Reddings, a local photographer’s studio, containing around 25,000 glass plate and cellulose acetate negatives dating from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Predominately studio portraits, the collection also contains negatives of local businesses, product shots, local events and weddings. Largely due to lack of resource […]
July 24th, 2018
Sixteenth and seventeenth century portraits are a wonderful resource for lace historians. Two types of lace evolved during the sixteenth century: needle lace and bobbin lace. Needle lace, as the name suggests, is a form of free embroidery, worked with a needle and a single thread, while bobbin lace is a combination of plaiting and […]
July 18th, 2018
In 2016 a portrait, identified as Elizabeth Fanshawe (1609-1668), née Cockayne, came up for sale at a well-known auction house (left). This portrait bore an uncanny resemblance to the female sitter in a small double portrait of Sir Thomas Fanshawe and his second wife Elizabeth, née Fanshawe at Valence House (below). A visit to Melbourne […]
