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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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), […]
