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), […]
Marketing staff based at Heelis (National Trust’s head office) are mostly preoccupied with attracting and retaining members, fundraising campaigns and looking after the NT brand. So I am delighted and privileged to be awarded one of the Understanding British Portraits network’s NT staff bursaries this year, and will be sharing my findings with marketing colleagues […]
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 […]
During my second term as Hon Secretary, when The Lace Guild was working towards museum registration, the Museums’ Association Journal appeared regularly in my pigeon-hole at The Hollies. As with any such journal there were good months and bad months, but in most issues I found plenty of general interest, in addition to specific information […]
