J.D. Salinger wrote in chapter 3 of Catcher in the Rye ‘What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it’. He concluded […]
The analysis of nineteenth-century political caricature has often been overlooked in favour of the colourful anarchism of James Gillray, Isaac Cruikshank or Thomas Rowlandson of the previous century, as illustrated in the British Museum’s exhibition ‘Bonaparte and the British; prints and propaganda in the age of Napoleon’. But the relative lack of salacious detail in […]
The WWI Centenary is now underway and over the next four years Britain’s museums and art galleries will be striving to make their contributions known. ‘Fred A. Farrell – Glasgow’s War Artist’ marks Glasgow’s first contribution to the centenary. The aim of the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue is to rediscover and reconsider one of […]
This work is part of a collaboration between the Zimmerli Art Museum and the Department of Art History at Rutgers University, which encompassed two multifaceted academic projects and resulted in an exhibition and this accompanying publication drawing from the Zimmerli Museum’s collection, enhanced by a significant number of loans. The authors of Striking Resemblance set […]
This catalogue, produced to accompany the exhibition of the same title recently at the Holborne and soon to open at Derby Museum and Art Gallery, examines a period in Joseph Wright’s life which has been largely overlooked in scholarship on the artist. As Amina Wright, author of Bath and Beyond but of no relation to […]
The excellent Brilliant Women exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008 and the associated conference, where the majority of the essays within this book were first presented, tried to challenge the traditional dour image of bluestocking women. Instead they highlighted the vitality of the women, their ideas, and their associated visual and material cultures. […]
As a National Trust curator for country houses with 18th century portraits in their collections, I hoped this book would increase my understanding of how portraits were commissioned and displayed and their meanings understood. It did. But despite the title, this is not a definitive overview of the subject. It is a series of essays […]
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, until 5 January 2014 Organised to mark the tercentenary of Allan Ramsay’s (1713 – 1784) birth, this exhibition takes the opportunity of ‘Redefining Ramsay’s Reputation’, as the heading of the introductory text on the gallery wall makes explicit. The exhibition aims to reclaim Ramsay from the position of sometimes […]
Portrayal and the search for identity is an enjoyable and meaty read, bound in a handsome but manageably-sized volume with a fascinating sequence of 80 colour illustrations (plus 20 more in black and white). Prospective readers should not take the title too literally, since the book is not on a search for something called identity. […]
