Conference | ‘Civilizing’ the World
From ArtHist.net and the conference website:
‘Civilizing’ the World: Classicism, Neo-Classical Sculpture, and Plaster Casts in
the Service of Imperial Powers and Post-Colonial Elites, 1780–1945
Online and in-person, Warburg Institute, University of London, 16 and 21–23 October 2026
Organized by Eckart Marchand, Katherine Harloe, and Amy Smith
This conference explores the uses of Greco-Roman and neo-classical sculpture and architecture by European colonial powers to express and consolidate their power, at home and abroad, and the continuation and adaptation of these strategies in elite nation-building in many former colonies, post-independence. Speakers from across the world will discuss the roles classical and neo-classical art fulfilled globally, addressing the deployment of classical visual culture in the service of self-presentation and as a means to dominate indigenous, subaltern and settler populations. Taking in the history of five continents, the conference is designed to bring out historical differences as well as continuities, putting existing, geographically focused approaches and global frameworks of postcolonial analysis to the test.
‘Civilizing’ the World is organized by Dr Eckart Marchand (Warburg Institute), Professor Katherine Harloe (Institute of Classical Studies, University of London), and Professor Amy Smith (Department of Classics, University of Reading). The conference is generously supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Institute of Classical Studies, John Coffin Memorial Trust, University of Reading Department of Classics and School of Humanities, University of Reading and British Museum Partnership Joint Development Fund, Dino and Raffaello Tomasso, UK, Classics Beyond Borders (University of Cambridge) and the Leventis Foundation, University College London
Booking information is available here»
f r i d a y , 1 6 o c t o b e r
Online
10.50 Welcome by Flora Dennis (Deputy Director of the Warburg Institute) and the conference organizers
11.00 Session 1 | The Representation of Imperial Power and its Discontents
Chair: Katherine Harloe
• Polina Malova (4th-year undergraduate, National Research University, Moscow) — Classical Faces of Empire: Rochette and Catherine II’s Southern Program
• Logan Douglas (PhD student, St Andrews) — The Beit Bequest and the Artifice Underpinning Settler Colonialism
12.00 Break
12.10 Session 2 | Classicism in the Philippines and Japan
Chair: Amy Smith
• Geronimo Cristobal (PhD cand, Cornell University) — The Small Museum of Empire: Plaster Casts and Artistic Formation in Colonial Manila
• Shinya Araki (Lecturer, Tama Art University, Japan) — The Uneven Acceptance of Western Art in Different Regions of Japan
13.10 Break
14.00 Session 3 | Representing State and Nation in the Post-Colonial Americas
Chair: Amara Thornton
• Mauricio Oviedo (Ass. Prof., Universidad de Costa Rica and Leonardo Santamaria Montero, PhD cand., Cornell University) — Allegories of America: Indigenous Representation, Transatlantic Artistic Networks, and Nation-Building Narratives in 19th-Century Central America
• Victoria Jiménez (PhD cand., University of Barcelona) — Civilizing through Copies: Classical Replicas, ‘Mamarrachos,’ and the Visual Politics of Nation-Building in 19th-Century Chile
15.00 Break
15.15 Session 4 | Shaping the Citizen and the Other
Chair: Maria Golovteeva
• Joseph Albanese (Ass. Prof., DePauw University, Indiana) — The Seductive Lie of Classical Pagan Sculptures in Colonial Peru
• Katie Margerison (MA, Tulane University) — Moral Bodies, Secular Virtues: Educación Física and the Idealized Citizen in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
16.15 Final Discussion
w e d n e s d a y , 2 1 o c t o b e r
Online and in-person, University of London, Senate House
18.00 Welcome — Flora Dennis and Katherine Harloe
18.15 Evening Session | Curatorial Perspectives on Colonial Casts and Mould Taking
Chair: David Saunders
• Eder Ignacio Arreola Ponce (Curator of the Sculpture Collection, Faculty of Art and Design, Academia de San Carlos, UNAM, Mexico City) — Neoclassicism in America: The Sculpture Collection of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico. History, Provenance, and Tracing of a Dispersed Collection
• Iffat Azeem (Senior Research Officer, Lahore Museum) — An Empirical Curatorial Insight into the Ethnographical Heads of Schlagintweits, 1854–1858
• Veronika Tocha (Curator, Gipsformerei, SMK, Berlin) — Plaster Casting and/as Cultural Appropriation: The Politics of Reproduction
t h u r s d a y , 2 2 o c t o b e r
Online and in-person, University of London
9.40 Welcome and introduction — Bill Sherman (Director of the Warburg Institute) and Eckart Marchand (Warburg Institute)
10.00 Session 1 | Mexico
Chair: Claudia Zehrt
• Daniel Sobrino Ralston (CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings, National Gallery, London) — ‘Estatua digna del griego afamado’: The Plaster Cast Collection of Mexico City’s Academia de San Carlos, 1783–1803
• Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas (Prof., UNAM, Mexico) — The Continuing Influence of Neoclassicism in Mexican Altarpieces: A Symbiosis of Sculptors and Architects
• Delia Cosentino (Prof., DePaul University Chicago) — ‘Por no ser traidor a su patria’: Tlahuicole and the Making of a Mexican Spartacus
11.15 Coffee
11.45 Session 2 | Central and South Americas
Chair: Rebecca Levitan
• Maite Álvarez (Project Specialist, Getty Research Center, Los Angeles) — Classical Ideals in the Amazon: The Drawing Academy and Artistic Civilization in the Late 18th Century
• Joseph Hartman (Ass. Prof., University of Missouri-Kansas City) — Queen, Poet, Republic: The Classical and Colonial Formations of Cuban National Identity
• Edgar Ulloa (Ass. Prof., Universidad de Costa Rica) — Rethinking Post-Colonial Assumptions: The Plaster Cast Collection of the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Costa Rica, 1897–1940
13.00 Lunch break
With poster session:
• Mauricio Oviedo (Ass. Prof., Universidad de Costa Rica) and Leonardo Santamaria Montero (PhD cand., Cornell University) — Allegories of America: Indigenous Representation, Transatlantic Artistic Networks, and Nation-Building Narratives in 19th-Century Central America
14.30 Session 2 | Central and South Americas
Chair: Vicky Donnellan
• Paul Niell (Prof., Florida State University) — A Rhetoric of Permanence: Neoclassical Urbanism and the Suppression of Ephemeral Architecture in the Spanish Caribbean, 1830–1898
• Fabio D’Almeida Lima Maciel (Prof., UniCamp, São Paulo) — Neo-Classical Sculpture and the Racial Politics of ‘Civilization’ in Ferdinand Pettrich’s The Dying Tecumseh
15.25 Tea and coffee
16.00 Session 3 | Representing the Colonial Power
Chair: John Tresch
• Ciarán Rua O’Neill (Research Fellow, University College Dublin) — Hibernia Improved: Architectural Sculpture, Neoclassicism, and Imperial Authority in Dublin, c. 1780–1810
• Michael Adam Smith (PhD stud., York University) — A ‘Union of Conciliation and Firmness’: John Flaxman’s Monument to Major-General Sir Barry Close
18.00 Visit and Reception, UCL Flaxman Gallery
f r i d a y , 2 3 o c t o b e r
Online and in-person, University of London
9.30 Introduction — Amy Smith
9.40 Session 4 | Imperialism in Europe
Chair: Marianna Leszczyk
• Agnieszka Skrodzka (Ass. Prof., Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, Warsaw) — The Clash of Neo-Classicisms: The Sculpture in Warsaw against the Signs of Russian Domination in the Art of the 19th Century
• Jonatan Pérez Mostazo (Prof., University of the Basque Country (EHU) — Civilizing the Inner Barbarians: Classicism, Progress, and Basque Culture in Bilbao, 1875–1931
10.35 Coffee
11.15 Session 5 | Neoclassicism and Anthropology
Chair: Charles Burdett
• Elisabeth Décultot (Prof., Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) — Winckelmann’s Beauty Ideal and the Making of Ethnological Difference around 1800
• Aris Sarafianos (Prof., University of Ioannina) — ‘Neptune’s Breast’ and the ‘Chest’ of Wilson, the Black: Extreme Simulations, Vitality and Race in the Imperial Spectrum – Elgin Casts in Russia, 1818
• Laetitia Lai (PhD stud., Open University of the Netherlands) — Between Art and Anthropological Authenticity: The Visual Languages of Colonial Science
• Nam Huh (PhD stud., University of Loughborough) — From Colonial Life-Casting to Archival Ecology: Technologies of Visibility and Robert Zhao Renhui’s Counter-Archives
13.00 Lunch break
14.15 Session 6 | Colonialism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Africa
Chair: Sam Agbamu
• Gaia De Luca (PostDoc., Lille University) — Conquering through Construction: The Fascist Cultural and Architectural Italianisation in the Dodecanese, 1912–1943
• Khalifa Bashbash (Independent Scholar, Libya) — Archaeology as Imperial Propaganda: The Impact of Italian Colonial and Fascist Ideology on Libyan Antiquities
• Carmen Belmonte (Assistant Professor, University of Padua) — Classicism and Fascist Imperial Power in the Sculpture of Romano Romanelli
• Susan Slyomovics (Distinguished Prof. UCLA) — François-Léon Sicard and ‘Great Men’ Sculptures of French Algeria
16.40 Final Lecture
Chair: Eckart Marchand
• Lorenz Winkler-Horacek (Prof. and Curator of the Plaster Cast Collection, Freie Universität Berlin) — From Prussia to China: On the Appropriation, Rejection, and Re-Appropriation of Classical Antiquity through Plaster Casts
New Book | Feminist Friendships, Collaborations, and Networks
From Brepols:
Jennifer Griffiths and Andrea Pearson, eds., Feminist Friendships, Collaborations, and Networks in the Visual Arts: Essays in Honor of Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2026), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1915487315, €100.
Since the late twentieth century, a mounting body of studies has demonstrated that women contributed notably to the visual arts of nearly every culture, despite the ubiquity of patriarchal structures. The present volume looks to collaboration as a key factor in women’s ability to overcome those systemic obstacles in order to play decisive roles in the visual arts, whether as artists, patrons, art critics, gallerists, or interpreters in the public sphere. Until only recently, collaborations and other collective endeavors have largely been ignored by both the panoptic histories of art and the art markets, both of which are predicated on notions of individual agency and their implied prototype of idealized masculine autonomy. By means of seventeen case studies spanning from the Renaissance to the 1990s and covering several continents, the essays in this volume chronicle an enduring pattern of women artists, critics, and intellectuals pursuing their goals together. In elucidating the importance of the collaborative dynamic model, especially in its feminist iteration, these essays promote a fuller understanding of the visual arts across the globe and throughout the centuries.
This book is dedicated to the prominent feminist art historians Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, in admiration for their inspiring and influential collaborative publications on feminism and women in the visual arts.
Jennifer Griffiths is an art historian and editor who currently works at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.
Andrea Pearson is a professor emerita of Art History at American University in Washington, D.C.
c o n t e n t s
Foreword — Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard
Introduction: On Feminist Alliances in the Visual Arts — Jennifer S. Griffiths and Andrea Pearson
1 Sisters in Art: Female Sodality in Early Modern Bologna — Babette Bohn
2 Female Networks and Collaboration: Spiritual Philanthropy, Convents, and Art Patronage in Seventeenth-Century Rome — Marilyn Dunn
3 A Female Maecenas: Vittoria della Rovere, Feminist Friendship, Collaboration, and the Arts in Baroque Florence — Adelina Modesti
4 The Banana Garden Poetry Club and Women’s Artistic Exchanges: Writing about Paintings and Friendships in Seventeenth-Century China — Lara C. W. Blanchard
5 Illustrating Nature in the Dutch Seventeenth Century: The Collective Power of a Female Community — Catherine Powell-Warren
6 Representations of Female Friendship: Vigée Le Brun’s Portrait of Mrs. Chinnery (1803) — Mary D. Sheriff
7 Brought into Friendship: Women, Social Networks, and Amitié in Some Portraits by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Gabrielle Capet — Melissa Hyde
8 ‘My Life Has Been Devoted to Friendship’: The Danish Painter Bertha Wegmann and the Feminist Reinvention of the Friendship Image — Carina Rech
9 Mary Cassatt and Louisine Havemeyer’s Friendship: A Personal, Professional, and Political Alliance — Ruth E. Iskin
10 An American Dantista and Her Friends — Jacqueline Marie Musacchio
11 ringl + pit, from Their House to Bauhaus: Collaborative Partnership, Modernist Photography, and Queer Visual Forms — Elizabeth Otto
12 Lesbian Collaboration as Subterfuge in the Works of Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun — Julie Cole
13 The Force of Futurist Friendship: Růžena Zátková, Natalia Goncharova, and Benedetta — Jennifer S. Griffiths
14 We Shall Overcome: Women, Art, and Anti-Fascist Networks in Buenos Aires — Georgina G. Gluzman
15 A Friendship Written in the Stars: The Artistic Constellation of Alma Thomas and Delilah Pierce — Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton
16 Black Feminist Art: Negotiating Networks and Identities — Lisa Farrington
17 Heresies’ Heresies: Collaboration and Dispute in a Feminist Publication on Art and Politics — Amy Tobin
List of Illustrations
Call for Papers | 10th Feminist Art History Conference
From the Call for Papers:
10th Feminist Art History Conference
Online and in-person, American University, Washington, D.C., 24–25 September 2027
Proposals due by 15 December 2026
Keynote Speakers
• Sherry Farrell-Racette (Professor of Art History and Curation, University of Regina, Canada) — “The Labour of Learning: The Resurgence of Traditional Practices in Indigenous Women’s Art”
• Melissa Hyde (Professor and Associate School Director, School of Art + Art History, University of Florida) — “Cultivating ‘Créolité’: Louise Bouteiller’s Portrait of Baronne de Barante”
We invite established and emerging scholars of art history as well as advanced graduate students to submit proposals for the 10th Feminist Art History Conference at American University in Washington, D.C. All panels will be held online via Zoom, with select in-person activities for local participants.
In the spirit of feminist practice, this is an open call for papers that may address any time period (ancient to contemporary), region, and issue relevant to the ways in which gendered ideologies have shaped the visual arts and their study. We especially welcome submissions that are inclusive, intersectional, and/or interdisciplinary in topic or approach and are eager to see the keynote speakers’ subfields well represented.
Topics may include (but are not limited to) artists, movements, works of art and architecture; cultural institutions and critical discourses; practices of collecting, patronage, and display; the historiography of feminist art history; the gendering of objects, spaces, and media; the reception of images; and issues of power, agency, gender, and sexuality within visual and material cultures.
Proposals are due by 15 December 2026. To be considered for participation, submit your proposal here. You will be asked to provide select biographic information, your paper title and abstract (max. 250 words), three keywords, a short CV (max. 2 pages, .pdf), and one image (.jpg or .jpeg). Contact FAHC@american.edu with any questions. Consult the conference website. Invitations to participate will be sent in February 2025.
The Feminist Art History Conference was established in 2010 to celebrate and build on the feminist scholarship and pedagogy of Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, Professors Emeritae at American University. It is sponsored by the Art History Program in the Art Department, College of Arts and Sciences, at American University, with the generous support of Robin D’Alessandro and the late Dr. Jane Fortune.
New Book | The Portrait Miniature: A New History
From Thames & Hudson:
Damiët Schneeweisz, Rosalind McKever, and Adriana Concin, The Portrait Miniature: A New History (London: Thames & Hudson, 2026), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0500481172, $50.
This richly illustrated study brings the fascinating stories behind this intimate art form to a broad audience and restores women to their place in the history of the portrait miniature.
The portrait miniature—a precious, hand-held painting, exchanged as a token of love or remembrance—has long been cherished for its ability to connect people. This book reveals the extraordinary stories, artistic achievement, and cultural and political impact behind these tiny artworks. This vibrant history of miniature painting, from its fifteenth-century origins to the early twentieth century, links art, fashion, and society in a captivating tale of identity and representation. The Portrait Miniature expands the story to explore the genre’s global reach and highlights the important role of women in its development. Illustrated with miniatures shown at or close to their actual size, as well as enlarged details that allow the reader to revel in the painters’ skill, this book celebrates some of the most sophisticated portraits ever accomplished.
Damiët Schneeweisz is assistant curator of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a specialist in early modern European and American art and empire.
Rosalind McKever is curator of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She specializes in modern European art, its reception in Britain and North and South America, and its relationship with fashion and design.
Adriana Concin is a research fellow and former assistant curator of paintings and drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She is a specialist in early modern portraiture and the history of collecting.
Exhibition | Gardens: The Art of Experiencing Nature in the 18th Century
Installation view of Giardini: L’arte di vivere la natura nel Settecento.
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Now on view in Turin at the Palazzo Madama:
Gardens: The Art of Experiencing Nature in the 18th Century
Palazzo Madama, Torino, 15 July 2026 — 6 January 2027
Curated by Clelia Arnaldi di Balme
The exhibition offers an evocative stroll through the gardens of the 18th century, when the relationship between humankind and nature gave rise to extraordinary landscape designs. Through a selection of drawings, botanical tables, and engravings, the exhibition traces the evolution of taste and social customs through the century.
It begins with the geometric rigour of the Italian garden, a model of power widespread throughout Europe—here evoked by the architectural design of the Savoy royal residences described by Antonio de Pienne—before exploring the symbolic dimension of green spaces in the 18th-century theatre, as documented by the exquisite set designs by Filippo Juvarra and the brothers Bernardino and Fabrizio Galliari for the court theatres of Turin.
The exhibition explores the complex hydraulic engineering and levelling works required to create these gardens, as in Juvarra’s monumental project for the Luigi Mansi’s villa a Segromigno. Engravings by Ignazio Sclopis depict social life in the open air, with concerts and games in the park at Stupinigi. The journey concludes with a shift towards the romantic sensibility of the English-style garden theorised by Francesco Bettini, the exotic fascination with the Chinese gardens of the Qing dynasty, and the scientific research documented by the exquisite botanical watercolours of Lorenzo Freylino.
Visitors will also be able to admire the refurbishment of the nearby Fabric Gallery with the exhibition Bianco al femminile, dedicated to fifty rare textile artefacts from the museum’s collections.
New Book | Prints from the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria in Naples
Enfilade readers may find this volume from Bibliopolis particularly interesting for its analysis of the creation of the print collection of Carlo Firmian in the 1770s, its discussion of the publishing history of Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte and antiquarian practices in eighteenth-century Naples, early Neapolitan experiments with aquatint in the 1760s, and of publication projects such as the so-called Vestiture del Regno (begun in 1784) and William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei, of 1776.
Paola D’Alconzo and Domenico Pino, eds., Le Stampe nel Castello: Studi sul Fondo Grafico della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2026), 302 pages, ISBN: 978-8870887570, €40. Also available in digital format, with the option of purchasing either the entire volume or individual chapters.
This volume brings to the attention of the public the first results of a several-year-long work of reorganization, conditioning, and cataloguing of the works pertaining to the Fondo Grafico (Prints and Drawings Cabinet) of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, Naples. Created shortly after the foundation of the Società in 1876, and enriched throughout the years, the Cabinet contains today around 3.600 drawings and 7.000 prints, with works varying in quality, subject, and material conditions. Although it has always been accessible to scholars, the print collection is undoubtedly the lesser known part.
The recent reorganization work has allowed for a better understanding of this nucleus, unveiling its specificities and layered history: as a whole the collection appears valuable in that it presents the potential to complicate, and in certain instances also to rewrite, some passages of the historiography on the graphic arts and their fortune in Naples and beyond.
Even as the essays take important steps in that direction, they also look beyond the prints held by the Società, considering works from the collection in reference to other categories of objects (such as porcelain and terraglie, i.e. Neapolitan earthenware) as well as other collections of works on paper in the city. This approach has proven particularly successful in that it unveils articulate relationships between the material heritage held by the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria and wider discourses, according to a methodological model that has proven very useful for historical studies, but that had never before been applied to the Fondo Grafico.
Paola D’Alconzo is Associate Professor of Museology, Art Criticism, and Conservation Theory at the University of Naples Federico II, where she also coordinates the Master’s degree programme in ‘Cultural Heritage, Art History and Museum Studies’. Her research mainly concerns the history of art-historical heritage conservation and the history of collecting in the 18th and 19th centuries. She has focused in particular on the restoration and musealization of wall paintings found in excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii; the reception of Vesuvian antiquities and their influence on artistic production; the collecting and antiquarian interests of Ferdinando Galiani; the regulations promulgated in the Kingdom of Naples and Spain to safeguard the archaeological and art-historical heritage; and the conservation and exhibition of paintings of the Farnese and later Bourbon collections. She sits on the directing board of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, being the referent for the Fondo Grafico.
Domenico Pino takes care of the Fondo Grafico of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria since 2024, being in charge of cataloguing, reorganisation projects, and access to the collection. He obtained a PhD in History of Art from University College London in 2025 with a thesis on printmaking in Naples between 1734 and 1799. He has held fellowships from the British Museum (2020), the Centre for the History of Art and Architecture of Port Cities at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte (2022–23), and the Pio Monte della Misericordia at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici (2023–25).
c o n t e n t s
Preface – Renata De Lorenzo
• Le Stampe nel Castello: Un patrimonio da riscoprire — Paola D’Alconzo and Domenico Pino
• MetaFAD e il Polo Digitale degli Istituti Culturali di Napoli: Un modello di catalogazione e fruizione integrata — Donatella Zampano
• La Storia del Fondo Grafico della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria — Costanza Marsico
• Diplomacy in Print: Carlo Firmian’s Collection at Capodimonte — Emma De Jong
• Un’inedita veduta della città: Iscrizioni manoscritte sulle incisioni napoletane — Domenico Pino
• Alla ricerca di un metodo per pubblicare le prime scoperte vesuviane: Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte tra tentativi falliti e ipotesi in corso d’opera — Paola D’Alconzo
• Esperimenti e innovazioni dell’industria editoriale napoletana del ‘700: Il San Gennaro di Giuseppe Aloja — Domenico Pino
• Creato sotto pressione: Il Vesuvio e gli scambi interculturali dell’Illuminismo europeo — Domenico Pino
• 1770–1800: Gli anni d’oro dell’Illuminismo ferdinandeo e la fortuna delle Vestiture del Regno — Angela Caròla Perrotti
• Declinazioni dall’antico: Dalle stampe alle terraglie — Alessandra Zaccagnini
Index of names
Index of places
Exhibition | Laughing Matters
George Cruikshank, A Scene in the New Farce of the Lady and the Devil, 1820, hand-colored etching, sheet: 25 × 35 cm
(Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, 2025.33.38)
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Opening in December at Ackland Art Museum:
Laughing Matters: Social Satire from an Unruly Age
Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 11 December 2026 — 28 March 2027
Humor has long provided artists with a powerful means of exposing folly, challenging authority, and scrutinizing human behavior. Laughing Matters: Social Satire from an Unruly Age brings together British and French prints from the 1770s to the 1840s, to explore how artists responded to an era of profound social and political change through pointed visual commentary layered with meaning.
Drawn from a recent gift of over 300 prints to the Ackland from Robert and Jane Sylvester, the exhibition features 100 works, including hand-colored etchings and lithographs, by such artists as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank, and Honoré Daumier. Arranged thematically, the exhibition reveals how artists used exaggeration, visual puns, and the interplay of words and images to scrutinize a range of topics, from the arts, musical performance, and the weather to love and marriage, social status, and politics. Although the humor in these prints speak directly to the events and concerns of their time, their social critique and visual language remain just as relevant and impressive today.
Exhibition | Inspired by Flaxman
Wedgwood, The Apotheosis of Homer, 1777–80
(National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery)
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Now on view at the York Art Gallery:
Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman
York Art Gallery, 18 September 2026 — 17 January 2027
Curated by Beatrice Bertram and Richard Johns
Marking 200 years since the death of York-born artist John Flaxman, this exhibition celebrates his life, work, and lasting influence on art and design.
Showcasing Flaxman’s remarkable skill as a draughtsman, sculptor, and designer, the exhibition explores his influence on fellow artists including J.M.W Turner, William Blake, and potter Josiah Wedgwood. Objects from York Art Gallery’s collection are displayed alongside key loans from UK institutions including the National Gallery, Royal Academy, V&A, and the Barber Institute of Fine Art, amongst others.
Flaxman is one of the York-born artists engraved into the façade of York Art Gallery, celebrating the incredible talent that emerged from the city. Following classic Grecian and Roman styles, Flaxman’s designs were used on the iconic Wedgwood pottery as well as inspiring drawings, paintings, stonework, buildings, sculpture, metalwork, chess pieces, funerary monuments, and more. Though not as well-known as Turner or Wedgwood have come to be, Flaxman had a significant influence on art that extends through to modern day from humble beginnings in the city.
Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman is curated by Beatrice Bertram, Senior Curator at York Art Gallery, and Richard Johns, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of York. The exhibition has been supported by and produced in partnership with the University of York’s History of Art Department and accompanied by an academic publication, this is the first major exhibition dedicated to Flaxman in York.
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From Paul Holberton Publishing with distribution by Yale UP:
Beatrice Bertram and Richard Johns, eds., Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2026), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1917976220, £25 / €30 / $35.
This collection of thought-provoking new writing explores the far-reaching creative legacy of the sculptor, designer, and illustrator John Flaxman (1755–1826). Timed to coincide with the bicentenary of Flaxman’s death in 1826, it accompanies a major exhibition at York Art Gallery, developed in collaboration with the University of York.
Flaxman found his subjects in the epic myths of ancient Greece and on the streets of modern Rome, in the drama of a game of chess, and in the global events that unfolded in his lifetime. His work has, in turn, inspired generations of artists and makers. For the first time in more than 40 years, Turner, Wedgwood, and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman explores the full range and impact of the artist’s work across different media. A collection of insightful essays and shorter ‘objects in focus’ by leading curators, artists, art historians, and literary critics introduce Flaxman for a new audience, as an artist whose work in ceramic, marble, silver and gold, and on paper continues to resonate.
Each author takes an object or concept from the exhibition as a starting point to bring new light to Flaxman’s legacy, including the creative dialogue between his art and the work of William Blake, William Etty, Henry Fuseli, Angelica Kauffman, J.M.W. Turner, and Josiah Wedgwood. The result is an ambitious reframing of the artist’s creative connections, with new perspectives on the collaborative nature of Flaxman’s enterprise, his identity as a disabled artist, the colonial reach of his monumental sculpture, the poetical legacies of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, and more.
Turner, Wedgwood and Beyond: Inspired by Flaxman is edited by the exhibition co-curators, Beatrice Bertram and Richard Johns, with additional contributions by Pat Barker (Booker Prize winner and author of The Silence of the Girls), Kenneth Clark (University of York), Jason Edwards (University of York), Tony Heaton (sculptor and disability activist) and Martin Myrone (art historian), Catrin Jones (V&A Wedgwood Collection), Brigid von Preussen (Oxford University), Erica Sheen (University of York), and Michael Smith (University of York).
Call for Applications | Distant Viewing Workshops
From ArtHist.net and the University of Richmond’s Distant Viewing Lab:
Mellon Distant Viewing Workshops
Online, 15–18 February 2026, meets virtually each day from 10am to 2pm (Eastern time)
In-person, University of Richmond, 8–11 March 2026
Applications due by 31 October 2026
The Distant Viewing Lab at the University of Richmond invites applications for two separate training workshops in 2027 sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.
Over four days, participants will learn
• ways to formulate humanities questions that are amenable to computational analysis
• how to apply state-of-the-art AI algorithms to study visual and multimodal collections
• develop custom AI annotations to understand an image archive of their choice
• theory and method of distant viewing
The March workshop will have an emphasis on teaching and research in a liberal arts environment.
We welcome applications from researchers with a range of backgrounds and experiences, including but not limited to: art history, data science, digital humanities, film and media studies, library and information science, museum studies, and science and technology studies. Whether based in the United States or abroad, participants may also be at different points in their careers, including PhD candidates, early-career researchers, faculty at any rank, and those based in museums, archives, libraries, and related areas. We anticipate about 15 people per workshop.
Due by 31 October 2026, application materials include: CV/résumé and a statement of interest (300–500 words) that addresses current research or interests related to distant viewing or visual culture, what you hope to gain from the workshop, and (optionally) how you might apply what you learn. There is no technical background required for participation; however, please briefly describe any relevant background you may have (prior coursework, tools you’ve used, related projects).
A stipend to cover travel and related expenses will be provided thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation. Applicants can expect to hear back by 13 November 2026. More about the Distant Viewing Lab is available here. Please address any questions to jennifer.marine@richmond.edu. Please submit applications to https://distantviewing.org/workshops/.
New Book | Birth of a Global City: London in a Revolutionary World
From Penguin Random House:
Jerry White, Birth of a Global City: London in a Revolutionary World, 1789–1815 (London: Bodley Head, 2026), 528 pages, ISBN: 978-1847927354, £30.
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars changed London beyond recognition, turning it into the capital of the world—the centre of international finance and trade. Victory over France in 1815 ushered in the ‘British Century’: the next hundred years would be defined by Britain’s capitalist innovation and financial might, naval supremacy and imperial ambition. In this brilliant portrait of these pivotal years, Jerry White looks at how revolution and war on the Continent transformed the capital. While the manufacture of war materials brought wealth for some, high food prices led to bread riots. The war divided public opinion, with ultra-patriots clamouring for the defeat of ‘Boney’, while others sought to emulate the democratic reforms pioneered across the Channel. Crucially, the chaos and uncertainty on the continent led to a mass flight of aristocratic wealth, foreign bankers and European merchants to London, which would help turn the capital into the world’s leading financial centre.
Jerry White shows how huge docks transformed the Port of London into the world’s trading centre; how the City of London financed the war against France and Nathan Mayer Rothschild provided the gold that crushed Napoleon at Waterloo; how a newly embellished Paris stimulated the reconstruction of central London and fuelled its expansion; and how this moment of Britain’s greatest imperial expansion revived briefly the London slave trade before it was finally ended in 1807. It was this turbulent period of war and political turmoil that created London as we know it today.
Jerry White teaches London history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of London from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His more recent books include Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison and Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War. He was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by the University of London in 2005 and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
c o n t e n t s
A Note on Money
Maps
Prologue: A World Turned Upside Down
Part 1 | Chaos, 1789–1801
1 Divided City
2 Gateway to a Turbulent World
3 Pitt’s Gold
Part 2 | Foundations, 1802–1815
4 Revolution on the River
5 Party v Country
6 Wellington’s Gold
7 London Remade
Afterword: The End of the Beginning
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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