James Gillray (1756-1815) was one of the greatest caricaturist of the 18th century. From around 1775 until 1810, he produced nearly 1,000 prints—including brilliantly finished portrait caricatures of the rich, famous, or frivolous, wonderfully comic caricatures of people being awkward, and unquestionably the best satiric caricatures of British political and social life in the age […]
The Garrick Club in London holds a remarkable collection of art works representing the history of the theatre, much of which is displayed throughout the building. There are over 1,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, a fascinating selection of theatrical memorabilia, and thousands of prints. The new Collections Online Catalogue has just been launched, and can […]
The British country house has long been regarded as the jewel in the nation’s heritage crown. But the country house is also an expression of wealth and power, and as scholars reconsider the nation’s colonial past, new questions are being posed about these great houses and their links to Atlantic slavery. This book, authored by […]
The Profiles of the Past initiative is focused on British portrait silhouette history, a story that developed over the last 250 years and which is still an intriguing part of life today. The project is being developed by The Brunswick Town Charitable Trust and The Regency Town House Heritage Centre, in co-operation with members of […]
Regular high quality blog posts by Lynn Roberts on the history of picture frames and their iconography – also active on Twitter @TheFrameBlog. Link to The Frame Blog.
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 […]
