The Bowes Museum and historical costume specialist Luca Costigliolo dress a female model in an exact replica 1870s dress, made by his students at the National School of Cinema in Rome. Link to video.
The National Portrait Gallery has begun a project to catalogue its collection of papers relating to the nineteenth-century British artist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). A grant from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives is funding a project to describe the Watts Collection, which contains approximately 3,000 letters written to, or received by, the artist. […]
The first illustrated scholarly work devoted to the reception and reputation of Edinburgh’s premier Enlightenment portrait painter. Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) is especially well known in Scotland as the portrait painter of members of the Scottish Enlightenment. However, outside Scotland, the artist rarely makes more than a fleeting appearance in survey books about portraiture. Ten […]
In Portrayal and the Search for Identity, Marcia Pointon investigates how we view and understand portraiture as a genre, and how portraits function as artworks within social and political networks. Likeness is never a straightforward matter as we rarely have the subject of a portrait as a point of comparison. Featuring familiar canonical portraits as […]
How can we use visual and material culture to shed light on the past? Ludmilla Jordanova offers a fascinating and thoughtful introduction to the role of images, objects and buildings in the study of past times. Through a combination of thematic chapters and essays on specific artefacts – a building, a piece of sculpture, a […]
The Walpole Society’s guide to freely available online resources for the study of the history of British art and architecture from earliest times to the 20th century.
A collaboration between the artist Nicky Bird and art historian Lara Perry, Knowing the Unknown Sitter brought together writers from a range of disciplines to explore the problem of the unknown sitter, and the value of their portraits, once identity has been lost.
This film from the V&A Channel features author Eleri Lynn as she leads us on a tour of a long hidden world. Eleri’s brief history of shapewear starts with the hourglass and S-bend forms – and steel and whalebone engineering – of Victorian and Edwardian corsets carries on through the breast-flattening bandeau bras worn by […]
Throughout the history of the Western world, countless attempts have been made to define beauty in art and life, especially with regard to women’s bodies and faces. Facing Beauty examines concepts of female beauty in terms of the ideal and the real, investigating paradigms of beauty as represented in art and literature and how beauty […]
The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735 publishes primary sources and research tools for the study of the arts in Britain between the restoration of Charles II and the opening of Hogarth’s St Martin’s Lane Academy. Launched in October 2011, this long-term project is creating a large body of transcribed sources that underpin secondary […]
