Enfilade

From The Yale Center for British Art:

Visiting Scholars

The Yale Center for British Art offers short-term residential awards to scholars undertaking research related to British art. The awards are intended to enable scholars working in any discipline, including history, the history of art, literature, and other fields related to British visual and material culture, to study the Center’s collections of paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts, as well as primary and secondary reference materials. The Visiting Scholars for Spring 2013 are as follows:

January 7 – February 1

William L. Coleman, PhD candidate, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley. To conduct research for a dissertation entitled “Constable, Cole, and the Country House: The Domesticated Landscape in Anglo-American Art, 1800-1850.” Coleman’s dissertation project studies the way in which the art of house portraiture participated actively in dialogues about aesthetics, wilderness, leisure, and class in Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century. The Center’s rich collection of country house portraits, including one of Constable’s earliest house portraits, Trentham Park (ca. 1801), will be examined.

January 7 – March 1

Matthew C. Hunter, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University. To conduct research for a project entitled “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry.’” Drawing upon collections and archival materials uniquely available at the Center, Coleman’s project uses Reynolds’s complex engagement with painting’s “nice chymistry” to reconsider this crucial figure in British art and the longer legacies of his practice.

January 14 – March 8

Chi-ming Yang, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania. To pursue research for a book project entitled Global Chinoiserie and the Lives of Objects, 1660-1800. This project examines how Asian decorative art shaped English discourses of racial difference in eighteenth-century literary and visual culture.

February 3 – March 1

Ada Sharpe, PhD candidate, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University. To conduct research for a dissertation entitled “Rapture at Work: Romanticism and the Discourses of Female Accomplishment.” Materials to be consulted from the Center’s Rare Books and Manuscripts collection include a number of handbooks (some explicitly aimed at female readers) that provide instruction on the decorative arts, as well as commonplace books compiled by women living in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

February 3 – May 24

Joerg Trempler, Privatdozent, Member of the Collegium for the Advanced Study of Picture Act and Embodiment, Humboldt University, Berlin. To conduct research for a project entitled “On Representations of Elemental Violence or the Invention of the Image of Catastrophe.” A range of materials from the Center’s collections which focus on the subject of catastrophes will be explored, including images and accounts of the Great Fire of London of 1666.

March 3 – March 29

Sean Willcock, PhD candidate, Department of History of Art, University of York. To conduct research for his PhD thesis, “Consolidating the Colonies: Art and Unrest in the British Empire, c.1850-1900.” Taking the form of a series of case studies predominately relating to colonial India, Willcock’s project considers moments of turbulence or crisis in which the British invoked graphic and photographic practices with a degree of ideological urgency and with an eye to their military or diplomatic utility. Among the materials to be consulted at the Center are William Simpson’s sketchbooks (of which over 200 are in the YCBA) and Sir Charles D’Oyly’s watercolors.

April 3 – April 27

Stephen Bann, Emeritus Professor of History of Art, University of Bristol, will be at the Center as a Senior Visiting Scholar. Professor Bann will be bringing to completion a major edition of the letters of Ian Hamilton Finlay, which extends over the years 1964-74. This correspondence covers the vital period in which Finlay built upon his decisive move from metrical to concrete poetry, producing innovatory poster poems and poems sand-blasted on glass, and finally establishing his celebrated garden of Stonypath/Little Sparta, in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh. Professor Bann will also be initiating a project on “British Prints and Printmakers in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Senior Visiting Scholars are invited to spend one month at the Center annually for a term of three years, pursuing their research and participating in the intellectual life of the Center and Yale University. This is Professor Bann’s second year at the Center.

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Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Scholars

This spring the Center welcomes four curators from different British museums as part of a new program generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This program provides four-week residential fellowships to curators based in museums in regions in the UK, beyond London, whose curatorial remit or activities encompass British art. These awards are intended to enable curators to make use of the resources and collections of the Center, and other Yale holdings where relevant, in order to advance research on their own collections or curatorial projects. While in residence, visiting curators will be encouraged to engage with the scholarly community of the Center and at Yale, discuss their research projects, and share information about the collections they oversee. Our first curatorial scholars in this program, all visiting in Spring 2013, are:

March

Charlotte Keenan, Tomlinson Curator of Works on Paper, across the three art galleries managed by National Museums Liverpool; the Walker Art Gallery, Lady Lever Art Gallery and Sudley House. She will conduct research into the British artist Walter Sickert for a catalogue and major exhibition of works by the artist from their collection, planned for 2014 and tentatively titled Walter Richard Sickert: The Hand behind the Brush.

April

Sara Cooper, Collection Curator at the Towner, a contemporary art museum in Eastbourne, East Sussex, will investigate works in the Center’s collection by the British artist Robert Bevan, who was local to Eastbourne but is not yet represented in the Towner collection. She will examine Bevan’s connections with his contemporaries, including Sickert, Wadsworth and Nash, who are well-represented in the Center’s collections as well as in those at the Towner.

May

Anna Rhodes is Assistant Collections Officer, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, and coordinator for Enlightenment! Derbyshire, part of the Heritage Lottery Funded Enlightenment Project, a partnership focused on the enhancemnt and interpretation of collections relating to Derbyshire. She will investigate the Center’s holdings relating to 18th- and 19th-century Derbyshire, particularly topographical art by professional and amateur artists.

Lucy Salt, Keeper of Art for Derby Museums and Art Gallery, will conduct preliminary research for a major retrospective of Joseph Wright of Derby, which aims to revisit his artistic and Enlightenment legacy and explore the artist’s place in the shaping of the modern world, utilizing the YCBA’s own important collection of works by Wright and  his contemporaries.