As a curator working within a museum with a large collection of nineteenth-century portraits, I was initially drawn to the Eton College study day for the opportunity to view their well-known collection of Leaving Portraits, often completed by leading society painters such as Sir Thomas Lawrence. However, as the day progressed it was the far-reaching […]
A thin, black thread wound around the wrist of Anne Fanshawe in her 1628 portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger drew me to the study day at Valence House Museum, Dagenham, organised by the Understanding British Portraits network- but more of that later. As a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I have researched […]
The Grosvenor Museum’s greatest acquisition in 2015 was a portrait of Richard Crewe-Milnes, Earl of Madeley, the three-year-old son of the 1st Marquess of Crewe, painted in 1914 by Philip de László, one of the most celebrated portrait painters of his age. This masterly oil sketch exemplifies the artist’s painterly panache and retains its original […]
The latest British Portraits Subject Specialist Network seminar was held at Knole, generously hosted by Lord Sackville and the National Trust and expertly co-ordinated by Caroline Pegum. On a crisp March morning over thirty delegates from a range of institutions and fields assembled in the Great Hall. This being my first visit to Knole I […]
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 […]
