Conference | Human Kind: British and Australian Portraits
From The University of Melbourne:
Human Kind: Transforming Identity in British and Australian Portraits, 1700–1914
The University of Melbourne & National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 8–11 September 2016
Joseph Wright of Derby, Self-portrait, 1765–68, oil on canvas (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria)
Inspired by the outstanding collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, this interdisciplinary conference will be the largest gathering of international and Australian scholars to focus on portraits. It will provide a unique opportunity to explore both British and Australian portraits through a dynamic interchange between academics and curators. Over sixty speaker will explore various aspects of British and Australian portraiture between 1700 and 1914, both as separate fields and as overlapping or comparative studies. Full details of the program can be found here. Keynotes and a selection of papers on eighteenth-century themes are listed below.
Keynotes
• David H. Solkin FBA Walter H Annenberg Professor of the History of Art, The Courtauld Institute of Art: ‘English or European? Portraiture and the Politics of National Identity in Early Georgian Britain’
• Kate Retford Senior Lecturer, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London: ‘Conversing in and with the Landscape: Edward Haytley’s Portraits of The Brockman Family at Beachborough’
• David Hansen Associate Professor, Centre for Art History & Art Theory, Australian National University: ‘Skin and Bone: Surface and Substance in Anglo-Colonial Portraiture’
• Martin Myrone, Lead Curator, Pre-1800 British Art, Tate Britain, London ‘Portrait and Autograph: Art and Identity in the Age of Reform, c.1820–40’
• Anne Gray Emeritus Curator, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra ‘The Two Titans of Australian Portraiture: Roberts and Lambert’
Sessions and papers on eighteenth-century themes
F R I D A Y , 9 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6
The British Portrait and Europe
• Mark Shepheard, University of Melbourne: ‘The Servile Drudgery of Copying Faces’: Batoni’s Italian Portraits through British Eyes’
• Callum Reid, University of Melbourne: ‘Driven by Glory’: British Self-Portraits in the Galleria degli Uffizi’
• Matthew Ducza, University of Melbourne: ‘Dutch and Flemish Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Its Influence on Sir Joshua Reynolds’
• Sophie Matthiesson, National Gallery of Victoria: ‘Joseph Highmore’s Portrait of David Le Marchand’
Portraits, Prints, and the Business of Art
• Kathleen Kiernan, University of Melbourne: ‘Going…Going… Gone!: Portraits of Auctioneers and Printsellers in London, 1741–1800’
• Louise Box, University of Melbourne: ‘Into the Light: An ‘Unknown’ Mezzotint after Romney at the National Gallery of Victoria’
• Sue Russell, Independent scholar: ‘The Dealer as Artist: Robert Bragge’s Portrait of His Father, the Reverend Robert Bragge’
The Theatre of the Self
• Jennifer Jones-O’Neill, Federation University: ‘Male Sensibility in Late Eighteenth-Century Portraits’
• Matthew Watts, University of Melbourne: ‘Reynolds’s Lady Frances Finch: The Female Form as a Site for Social Meaning’
• Matthew Martin, National Gallery of Victoria: ‘Fragile Identities: Eighteenth-Century British Portraits in Porcelain’
Portraits and Empire
• Deirdre Coleman, University of MelbourneL ‘Susanna Gale: A Rose by Any Other Name’
• Kate Fullagar, Macquarie University: ‘Joshua Reynolds’s Portraits of Empire’
• Kim Clayton-Greene, University of Melbourne: ‘The Portrait of Queen Victoria in Colonial Victorian Print Culture’
S A T U R D A Y , 1 0 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6
Empathy
• Angela Hesson, University of Melbourne: ‘Eighteenth-Century Portrait Miniatures as Love Tokens’
• Gillian Russell, University of Melbourne: ‘Emma Hamilton’s Performance Art: ‘Screening’ the Attitudes’
• Jennifer Milam, University of Sydney: ‘Sympathetic Understanding and Viewing Portraiture during the Enlightenment’
Artists and Sitters
• Mark Ledbury, University of Sydney: ‘James Northcote’s Godwin: Friendship, Politics and Likeness in Radical London’
• Georgina Cole, National Art School, Sydney: ‘Blind Justice: Identity and Allegory in Nathaniel Hone’s Portraits of Sir John Fielding’
• Vivien Gaston, University of Melbourne and National Gallery of Victoria: ‘Artist, Actress, Lover: Zoffany’s Portrait of Elizabeth Farren, c.1780’
Exhibition | Drawing or Design? Fine Art Versus Applied Art
Upcoming exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum:
Drawing or Design? Fine Art Versus Applied Art
Zwischen Disegno und Design? Von der Zeichnung zum Entwurf
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, 2 September — 20 November 2016
The Wallraf-Richartz Museum has recently been able to identify a set of more than twenty vase drawings in its collection as the work of Louis-Claude Vassé (1716–1772). As a Sculpteur du Roi (sculptor to the king), the artist enjoyed a considerable reputation in his lifetime, but today his name is familiar only to experts. The new attributions have prompted the Museum to devote an exhibition to the specific aesthetic properties of designs for works of decorative art. Such works are still categorised as distinct from fine art drawings, yet designs for applied art produced by French, German and Italian artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show that the distinction is spurious both in aesthetic terms and as regards artistic quality. The exhibition in the Print Room outlines the rationale behind the separation of the two kinds of drawing and seeks to encourage debate on the subject.
New Book | Paul Revere: Sons of Liberty Bowl
One of the latest installments in the MFA Spotlight series, from Distributed Art Publishers:
Gerald W. R. Ward, Paul Revere: Sons of Liberty Bowl (Boston: MFA Publications, 2016), 56 pages, ISBN: 978-0878468324, $10.
American patriot Paul Revere is wrapped in the swirling mixture of myth and poetry through which history often descends, but as a craftsman and artist, he left behind more tangible traces as well. In this volume, esteemed art historian Gerald W.R. Ward tells the true story of Revere’s most iconic creation, the Sons of Liberty bowl, bravely made and marked by the rebel and silversmith on the threshold of the Revolutionary War. John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Revere, created the same year, 1768, helps introduce the man he was and the legend he became. The painting and the silver bowl are both popularly reproduced and have joined retellings of his Midnight Ride to define Revere in the American imagination, in turn signifying the Revolution and the young country’s values.
Exhibition | Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific
Double-hulled Fijian Canoe (drua), Suva Harbour, August 2015.
Photo: Steven Hooper.
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Press release for the exhibition:
Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific
Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 15 October 2016 – 12 February 2017
Curated by Steven Hooper with Katrina Igglesden and Karen Jacobs
Revealing stunning sculptures, textiles, ceramics, and ivory and shell regalia, Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific opens in October 2016 at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich. The largest and most comprehensive exhibition about Fiji ever assembled, it will take the visitor on a journey through the art and cultural history of Fiji since the late 18th century. A highlight of the exhibition will be a beautiful, newly commissioned, eight metre-long double-hulled sailing canoe that has been built in Fiji and shipped to Norwich for display. Made entirely of wood and coir cord, with no metal components, the canoe results from a project to encourage canoe-building skills and is a small version of the great 30-metre- long vessels of the 19th century, the biggest canoes ever built.
Over 270 works of art, including European paintings and historic photographs, are being loaned by exhibition partner the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology at Cambridge, and by the Fiji Museum, the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford) and museums in Aberdeen, Birmingham, Exeter, London, Maidstone, as well as Dresden and Leipzig in Germany.
This exhibition results from a three-year Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded project which examined the extensive but little-known Fijian collections in the UK and overseas and uncovered some significant treasures. Research project leader and exhibition curator Professor Steven Hooper says, “An important aspect of this exhibition is that the many examples of exceptional Fijian creativity on display are not presented as ethnographic specimens or illustrations of Fijian culture, but as works of art in their own right, as worthy of attention as any art tradition in the world, including Modernism. Remarkable creative imagination is applied to the making of ancestral god images, ritual dishes and regalia, and to the decoration of enormous barkcloths.”
Paintings, drawings and photographs of the 19th and 20th century provide context for the artworks. These include exquisite watercolours by the intrepid Victorian travel writer and artist Constance Gordon Cumming and by naval artist James Glen Wilson, who was in Fiji in the 1850s.
Fiji has always been a dynamic place of cultural interactions and exchanges. Since 1000 BC voyaging canoes have transported people and objects around the region, including to Tonga, Samoa and other neighbouring Pacific islands. In the 19th century new voyagers arrived—Europeans—with their new technologies, metal, guns, and Christian religion. Sophisticated strategists, Fijian chiefs twice asked to join the British Empire, and a colonial government was established in 1874. Fiji became independent in 1970. Fiji managed the British colonial administration quite effectively, establishing a particularly close relationship with the British royal family, notably with Her Majesty the Queen.
Fiji has also succeeded in maintaining and adapting many of its proud cultural traditions, and today woodcarvers and textile artists continue to produce sailing canoes, kava bowls (for the preparation of the important ritual drink), and impressive decorated barkcloths—some over 60m long, for weddings and mortuary rituals. In the vibrant Pacific fashion scene designers are using barkcloth and other local materials to make gowns and wedding dresses, showing their creations in London and Los Angeles.
The Sainsbury Centre’s large 900m suite of galleries will be used to present Fiji’s rich cultural past and its important relationship with Britain. Despite a population below one million, Fiji is known globally as a major rugby nation (they are currently World Champions at Rugby 7s) and as an alluring destination for travellers, for whom Fijian hospitality is legendary. The Sainsbury Collection, housed at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich is world renowned for its works of art from the Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, as well as for its antiquities and modern works by Picasso, Moore, Giacometti, and Bacon. A selection of contemporary Fijian works such as painted barkcloths and small wood carvings will be stocked for sale in the Museum shop during the exhibition. A fully illustrated book by Steven Hooper will serve as a catalogue of the exhibition and an art history of Fiji.
The exhibition is curated by Professor Steven Hooper, with Katrina Igglesden and Karen Jacobs, all at the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Steven Hooper became passionate about Pacific art when growing up in his grandfather’s private museum, the Totems Museum in Arundel, Sussex. It was full of objects brought back from the Pacific as a result of Britain’s naval, missionary, and colonial past. He initially spent over two years (1977–79) doing anthropological research on Kabara, a remote island in eastern Fiji, where canoes, bowls, and barkcloths were still made and which had retained a rich traditional culture. In August 2015 he was in Fiji sailing on, and filming, the canoe that has been specially made for the exhibition. Katrina Talei Igglesden is a PhD student studying Fijian barkcloth and design/fashion. Her mother is Fijian. Karen Jacobs is Lecturer in the Arts of the Pacific specialising in clothing, missionary collections, and the arts of the Kamoro region of West Papua. In 2014 Jacobs and Igglesden co-curated the exhibition Art and the Body at the Fiji Museum.
This exhibition is one of the main outcomes of a research project Fijian Art: political power, sacred value, social transformation and collecting since the 18th century, funded by the UK s Arts and (umanities Research Council A(RC from 2011 to 2014. It was a collaborative endeavour of the Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU) at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge. Led by Professor Steven Hooper (SRU) and Dr Anita Herle (MAA), project members undertook extensive research on Fijian collections in the UK and overseas, with the aim of bringing these substantial but hitherto little-known collections into the academic and public domains. Artefacts, archives, and pictorial material, including photographs, are being brought together to allow fresh perspectives on the art and history of Fiji.
The islands now called Fiji were first settled about 1000 BC by voyagers from the west, probably from Vanuatu. During the subsequent 3000 years further migrations occurred and the population had expanded to over 120,000 by the late 18th century, when Fiji was briefly visited by Captain Cook and Captain Bligh. After the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, Bligh was chased by Fijian canoes and was fortunate to escape. The 19th century saw the arrival of European traders, missionaries and planters, and after the first request in 1859 to join the British Empire was turned down, Fiji eventually became a British colony in 1874, with Sir Arthur Gordon as first Governor. He and others based at Government House, including Baron Anatole von Hügel and the redoubtable lady traveller Constance Gordon Cumming, were avid collectors and turned it into a kind of museum. Much of this material was eventually sent back to Britain, hence the substantial collections at Cambridge, the British Museum, and elsewhere. There is also a major high-quality collection in Fiji Museum in the capital, Suva. Although pre-Christian images, ritual objects, and weapons ceased to be made after conversion to Christianity and the cessation of warfare during the 19th century, other traditions, such as canoe building and barkcloth making, have continued as part of a rich traditional cultural life.
Exhibition | Revisiting Rome: Prints of the Eighteenth Century
Giuseppe Vasi, Prospetto dell’ Alma Città di Roma visto dal Monte Gianicolo, ca. 1765, etching
(Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)
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Upcoming exhibition from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden:
Revisiting Rome: Prints of the Eighteenth Century
Begegnungen mit Rom: Druckgraphik des 18. Jahrhunderts
Dresden Royal Palace, 19 October 2016 — 15 January 2017
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri episode: The round tower, ca. 1749–50, etching.
In the eighteenth century Rome was a popular travel destination. Its remains of antiquity, the Renaissance, and Baroque monuments transformed the city into a laboratory of urban and aesthetic innovation. As a location with a rich publishing tradition, Rome also had the necessary infrastructure at its disposal to effectively spread the fame of local landmarks through printed images: illustrators, engravers, and etchers met here with publishers, printers, and distributors of different nationalities.
Thanks to the international circulation of the images, most visitors to Rome had already taken a visual journey through the city. Veduta, maps or panoramas, such as those from Giuseppe Vasi, provided the viewer with an overview of the monuments. Like today’s tourist guides they offered directions on how one might explore the city.
For artists, Rome was also an inexhaustible source of inspiration for architectural fantasies, which, alongside the realistic panoramas, enjoyed a growing popularity. With these inventions, Veneto-born architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi caused something of a stir. At the time, his masterly etchings were significant in establishing Rome alongside Venice as a center of Italian printmaking.
Pier Leone Ghezzi, Signor Domenico Annibali, che parla all’Eminentissimo di San Cesareo, ca. 1749
During his lifetime, almost the entire etched œuvre of the artist made its way to the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett. The purchase of Piranesi’s works is only one example of the extensive and selective acquisitions of Roman printmaking that were made at the time. Piranesi’s lifespan covers roughly the same time frame as the exhibited works, which concentrate on panoramas of the ancient and modern Rome as well as unreal spaces. To this day, most of these sheets are bound in so-called collector’s albums—large format volumes that were preferred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the storage and presentation of print collections.
Additionally, with caricatures by Pier Leone Ghezzi the exhibition offers insights into who populated the streets of the Eternal City in the eighteenth century. Numerous Ghezzi drawings were etched by order of the Saxon Royal Court. Today these sheets are presented as a particularly charming witness of the intensive relationship between Rome and Dresden at that time.
A catalog of the same name published by Sandstein-Verlag Dresden will accompany the exhibition.
New Book | Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History
From Penn Press:
Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 440 pages, (cloth) ISBN: 978-0812248326 / (ebook) ISBN: 978-0812293043, $65 / £42.
Historical Style connects the birth of eighteenth-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. As fashion fads came in and out of style, and as fashion texts circulated and obsolesced, Britons were forced to confront the material persistence of out-of-date fashions. Timothy Campbell argues that these fashion texts and objects shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past, as well as a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood.
In a panoptic sweep, Historical Style brings together art history, philosophy, and literary history to portray an era increasingly aware of itself. Burgeoning consumer society, Campbell contends, highlighted the distinction between the past and the present, created an expectation of continual change, and forged a sense of history as something that could be tracked through material objects. Campbell assembles a wide range of writings, images, and objects to render this eighteenth-century landscape: commercial dress displays and David Hume’s ideas of novelty as historical form; popular illustrations of recent fashion trends and Sir Joshua Reynolds’s aesthetic precepts; fashion periodicals and Sir Walter Scott’s costume-saturated historical fiction. In foregrounding fashion to trace eighteenth-century historicism, Historical Style draws upon the interdisciplinary, multimedia archival impressions that fashionable dress has left behind, as well as the historical and conceptual resources within the field of fashion studies that literary and cultural historians of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain have often neglected.
Timothy Campbell teaches English at the University of Chicago.
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C O N T E N T S
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Fashions Past
I | The Dress of the Year
1 Modern Fashion and Comparative Contemporaneity
2 Portrait Historicism and the Dress of the Times
II | The Fictions of Serial History
3 Hume, Historical Succession, and the Dress of Rousseau
4 Historical Novelty and Serial Form
5 Walter Scott’s Fashion Systems
6 William Godwin and the Objects of Historical Fiction
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Exhibition | Canova and the Dance
Opening in October at the Bode-Museum:
Canova and the Dance / Canova und der Tanz
Bode-Museum, Berlin, 21 October 2016 — 22 January 2017
Antonio Canova, Dancer with Cymbals (Tänzerin), marble, 1809/1812 (Berlin: Bode-Museum; photo by Andreas Praefcke, Wikimedia Commons, 2007)
Dancer with Cymbals by Antonio Canova (1757–1822) numbers among the most significant and popular of the Bode-Museum’s works of art. The most important sculptor of Italian Neoclassicism was to explore the theme of dance three times in life-size sculptures. On the occasion of the special exhibition, Canova and the Dance, the Berlin dancer is to be joined by her counterparts: Dancer with Hands on Hips, created for Napoleon’s first wife Josephine and held at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and Dancer with Finger on Chin, the model of which is kept at the Museo Canova in Passagno (the sculptor’s place of birth). Additionally, Hebe—a work from the Alte Nationalgalerie acquired for the Berlin collections in 1825—will for the first time be displayed alongside the Dancers. Artistically, Hebe is considered a precursor to Canova’s Dancers, and is the second major work by the Italian sculptor held by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The exhibition gives centre stage to these fascinating marble sculptures, along with a work known as the Berlin Dancer from the Antikensammlung (Collection of Classical Antiquities). Sculptures like this were to serve as a source of inspiration for Canova during the composition of the Dancer in the Bode-Museum’s collection. A key aspect of the exhibition is the way in which Canova, a master of materiality, applied himself to exploring one of his favourite themes—dance—through design sketches, then paintings and models, and finally in the completed marble artwork.
Canova and the Dance is a project undertaken in partnership with two museums in Veneto: the Museo Canova in Passagno and the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa—which in 2011 began work on reconstructing the plaster model of the Berlin Dancer (made in Passagno and damaged during World War I), featuring it as part of an exhibition entitled Canova e la danza. The model will now appear in a more advanced state of completion at the Bode-Museum. Paintings both in oil and tempera, created by Canova for his private home, drawings, illustrations, and sculptures—many of which have never previously been exhibited in Germany—will form a display around Canova’s unique suite of Dancers, tracing a visual account of the sensuousness and movement at play in the great Italian sculptor’s work.
New Book | Ancients and Moderns in Europe
From the Voltaire Foundation:
Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié, eds., Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2016), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-0729411776, £60 / €74 / $85.
The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, or Battle of the Books as it was known in England, famously pitted the Ancients on the one side and the Moderns on the other. This book presents a new intellectual history of the dispute, in which authors explore its manifestations across Europe in the arts and sciences, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. By paying close attention to local institutional contexts for the Querelle, contributors yield a complex picture of the larger debate. In intellectual life, authors uncover how the debate affected the publication of antiquarian scholarship, and how it became part of discussions in London coffee houses and the periodical press. Authors also position the Low Countries as the true pivot for a modernistic realignment of intellectual method, with concomitant rather than centralised developments in England and France. The volume is particularly concerned with the realisation of the Querelle in the realm of artistic and technical practice. Marrying modern approaches with ancient sympathies was fraught with difficulties, as contributors attest in analyses on musical writing, painting and the querelle du coloris, architectural practice and medical rhetorics. Tracing the deeper cultural resonances of the dispute, authors conclude by revealing how it fostered a new tendency to cultural self-reflection throughout Europe. Together, these contributions demonstrate how the Querelle acted as a leading principle for the configuration of knowledge across the arts and sciences throughout the early modern period, and also emphasise the links between historical debates and our contemporary understanding of what it means to be ‘modern’.
Paddy Bullard is Associate Professor of English literature and book history at the University of Reading. He has published books on Burke and Swift, and his research encompasses material culture studies, intellectual history and political thought.
Alexis Tadié is Professor of English literature, University of Paris-Sorbonne and Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. He works on eighteenth-century literature and intellectual history, and has published books on Bacon, Locke, and Sterne.
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C O N T E N T S
Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié, Introduction
I | Ancient Knowledge and Modern Mediations
1 Vittoria Feola, The Ancients with the Moderns: Oxford’s Approaches to Publishing Ancient Science
2 Alexis Tadié, Ancients, Moderns, and the Language of Criticism
3 Stéphane Van Damme, Digging Authority: Archaeological Controversies and the Recognition of the Metropolitan Past in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris
II | Logic and Criticism across Borders
4 Martine Pécharman, From Lockean Logic to Cartesian(ised) Logic: The Case of Locke’s Essay and Its Contemporary Controversial Reception
5 Marcus Walsh, Scholarly Documentation in the Enlightenment: Validation and Interpretation
6 Karen Collis, Reading the Ancients at the Turn of the Century: The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736)
III | Conversing with the Ancients: Arts and Practices
7 Théodora Psychoyou, Ancients and Moderns, Italians and French: The Seventeenth-Century Quarrel over Music, Its Status, and Transformations
8 Elisabeth Lavezzi, Painting and the Tripartite Model in Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes
9 Paddy Bullard, John Evelyn as Modern Architect and Ancient Gardener: ‘Lessons of Perpetual Practice’
10 Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, Ancient Medicine, Modern Quackery: Bernard Mandeville and the Rhetoric of Healing
IV | The Persistence of the Quarrel
11 Amedeo Quondam, Petrarch and the Invention of Synchrony
12 Karin Kukkonen, Samuel Richardson among the Ancients and Moderns
13 Ourida Mostefai, Finding Ancient Men in Modern Times: Anachronism and the Critique of Modernity in Rousseau
14 Ritchie Robertson, Ancients, Moderns, and the Future: The Querelle in Germany from Winckelmann to Schiller
Summaries
Biographies of contributors
Bibliography
Index
Sean Moore Appointed Editor of ECS
Over the weekend (20 August 2016), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies announced the appointment of the next editor of ECS. Starting next summer, Sean Moore will succeed Steven Pincus, who has filled the position since July 2012.
Sean Moore (University of New Hampshire) has been appointed as the next Editor of Eighteenth-Century Studies for a five-year term beginning July 1, 2017.
Sean Moore is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, where he served as Director of the UNH Honors Program from 2011 to 2014. He has been a member of ASECS for 17 years, served for many years as the Chair of the Irish Studies Caucus of ASECS and as the North American Correspondent for the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society, and has given papers at ASECS panels sponsored by the SHARP caucus and Race and Empire caucus. His first monograph, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution, won the Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies, and he edited a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies on the Irish Enlightenment in 2012. His new work, “Slavery and the Making of the Early American Library,” is in a transatlantic and early American direction, focusing on how slave capitalism financed the transatlantic book trade in British texts. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the NEH, American Antiquarian Society, Newport Mansions, New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, Library Company of Philadelphia/Historical Society of Pennsylvania, John Carter Brown Library, Folger Library, and Fulbright Scholarship Board.
Exhibition | Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination
Press release for the exhibition on view now at Sir John Soane’s Museum:
‘The Cloud-Capped Towers’: Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 21 April – 8 October 2016
Curated by Alison Shell
Louis-François Roubiliac, Bust of William Shakespeare (modern replica), 1742 (London: The Garrick Club).
A new exhibition coinciding with the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare will open at Sir John Soane’s Museum on 21st April. ‘The Cloud-Capped Towers’: Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination focuses on Soane’s extensive Shakespeare collections, including his ownership of the first four Folios of Shakespeare’s collected works, the way Soane and his family participated in the eighteenth-century Shakespearean revival, and the influence of the Bard on Soane’s architecture. Guest-curated by Dr Alison Shell of UCL, the exhibition will largely consist of Soane’s own collection, supplemented by important loans from The Garrick Club. Whilst Soane’s fascination with Shakespeare is evident throughout his house-museum, this is the first time the elements have been drawn together to provide a cohesive study of the way Shakespeare influenced Soane. It is also a rare opportunity to see Shakespeare’s first our Folios displayed together in one exhibition.
Robert Adam, Adam’s interior of the Drury Lane Theatre from Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1779.
The first room of the exhibition introduces the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, setting it in the context of the 200th anniversary celebrations in 1816, and discusses the intersection between literature and architecture with a particular focus on David Garrick, the celebrated actor-manager of the Drury Lane Theatre who was so instrumental in the popularisation of Shakespeare in Georgian London.
The Garrick Club has loaned two paintings: David Garrick between the Muses of Tragedy and Comedy, after Sir Joshua Reynolds, and John Philip Kemble as Hamlet, from the studio of Sir Thomas Lawrence. These are instantly recognisable portraits of two of the greatest actors of the eighteenth century, famed for their interpretations of Shakespeare. The Adam brothers’ designs for Drury Lane Theatre will also be on display, as well as a rare coloured edition of The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam.
The second room in the gallery goes on to consider Shakespeare in Soane’s architectural imagination. In 1788–89 ‘The Shakespeare Gallery’, only the second purpose-built art gallery in England, was built in Pall Mall to designs by George Dance the Younger, Soane’s first architectural teacher and mentor. These in turn influenced Soane’s later designs for the Dulwich Picture Gallery—itself the first public art gallery in Britain.
The exhibition closes with a selection of Soane’s large-scale Royal Academy lecture drawings, allowing access to these appealing and striking images which can usually be viewed only by appointment.
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Catalogue available through Sir John Soane’s Museum:
Frances Sands, Alison Shell, Stephanie Coane, and Emmeline Leary, ‘The Cloud-Capped Towers’: Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2016), 48 pages, ISBN: 978-0993204128, £10.
This book of essays, ‘The cloud-capped towers:’ Shakespeare in Soane’s Architectural Imagination, is published to coincide with an exhibition with the same title to be shown at Sir John Soane’s Museum in 2016 as part of the nationwide commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the death of the great English playwright William Shakespeare.
Sir John Soane (1753–1837) was a highly literary architect, who appears to have valued Shakespeare for the architectural pictures he conjured up, and also as a moral teacher. He had a deep knowledge of Shakespeare’s work, quoting (and misquoting) it often, notably in his Royal Academy lectures. His fascination with Shakespeare is evident both in his library and in the Shakespearian references throughout his house-museum, the most obvious being the Shakespeare Recess, a shrine to the Bard on the staircase.
The four essays in this volume look at the influence of Shakespeare on Soane’s architecture, against the wider background of the eighteenth-century Shakespearean revival; at Soane as a ‘bardolator’ and bibliophile; and at contemporary performance and theatre-going, with a particular focus on the plays seen by Soane and his wife Eliza. The essays are illustrated by a number of illustrations in full colour, the majority drawn from Soane’s own collection.
Frances Sands is Curator of Drawings and Books at Sir John Soane’s Museum. Alison Shell is a professor in the Department of English, University College London. Emmeline Leary is an independent scholar. Stephanie Coane is Senior Librarian is Senior Librarian, College Library, Eton College and Honorary Librarian to Sir John Soane’s Museum.
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