Enfilade

Objects, Images, and Texts: Pope, Roubiliac, and Representations of Authorship
Yale Center for British Art, 21–22 February 2014

Photographer unknown, William Kurtz Wimsatt, ca 1961,
© National Portrait Gallery, London

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This two-day international conference explores the relationship between authorship and the visual arts in the eighteenth century, focusing on the poet Alexander Pope. Building on the work of Yale scholar W. K. Wimsatt, an interdisciplinary panel of speakers will situate Pope’s portraits, both sculpted and painted, within the framework
of debates about his often ambiguous modes of authorial self-presentation involving the design of his printed texts as well as the complexities of the verse itself. The conference coincides with the Center’s exhibition Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac, and the Portrait Bust in Eighteenth-Century Britain, which focuses on a series of busts of Pope made by the French émigré sculptor Louis François Roubiliac. The conference is free and open to the public. Advance registration is recommended. Register online through February 20. On-site registration will be available at the event.

F R I D A Y ,  2 1  F E B R U A R Y  2 0 1 4

10:00  Amy Meyers (YCBA), Welcome

10:15  Panel 1
Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside), Introduction to the Exhibition and Conference
Joseph Roach (Yale), Pope at Yale: The Intentional Fallacy and the Life of the Poet

12:00  Lunch Break

2:45  Panel 2
Session Chair: Gordon Turnbull (Yale)
Jill Campbell (Yale), ‘Give Me Back My Tears’: Monuments and Feeling in the Poetry of Pope
Greg Sullivan (Tate Britain), Roubiliac’s Biographers and his Place in Histories of British Sculpture

2:45  Break

3:15  Panel 3
Session Chair: Matthew Hargraves (YCBA)
Nigel Wood (Loughborough University), Pope and the Reading Public
Matthew Craske (Oxford Brookes), Roubiliac and the Business of Making Sculpture

5:00  Break

5:30  Keynote Lecture
Helen Deutsch (University of California, Los Angeles), ‘Ev’ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style’: Alexander Pope and the Art of Authorship

S A T U R D A Y ,  2 2  F E B R U A R Y  2 0 1 4

10:00  Martina Droth (YCBA), Welcome

10:15  Panel 4
Session Chair: David Bromwich (Yale)
Janine Barchas (University of Texas at Austin), Counterfeit Authority: Frontispiece Portraits of Fictional Authors and Authors of Fiction
James Raven (University of Essex), Images of Authors Within Eighteenth-Century Libraries

12:00  Lunch Break

1:15  Breakout Sessions
Malcolm Baker (UCR), Martina Droth (YCBA), and Anne Gunnison (Yale University Art Gallery), Looking at Busts of Pope
Kathryn James (Beinecke Library) and Margaret Powell (Lewis Walpole Library), Reading Pope: Rare Books and Documents in the Yale Collections

2:30  Break

2:45  Panel 5
Session Chair: Langdon Hammer (Yale)
David Brewer (Ohio State University), Hanging Pope in Effigy
Richard Wendorf (American Museum in Britain), Classicizing Alexander Pope
Malcolm Baker (UCR), Confronting Pope’s Portraits

5:00  Closing Reception