Call for Papers | The Roman Art World and the Academy in Britain
From the Call for Papers:
The Roman Art World in the 18th Century and the Birth of the Art Academy in Britain
The Accademia di San Luca and the British School at Rome, Rome, 10–11 December 2018
Proposals due by 12 March 2018
The Accademia di San Luca and the British School at Rome (BSR) invite submissions for papers for the conference The Roman Art World in the 18th Century and the Birth of the Art Academy in Britain, to be held in Rome between 10 and 11 December 2018. The conference will focus on the role of the Roman pedagogical model in the formation of the British academic art world in the long 18th century.
Joseph Wright of Derby, Academy by Lamplight, 1769, oil on canvas (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).
Even as Paris progressively dominated the modern art world during the 18th century, Rome retained its status as the ‘academy’ of Europe, attracting a vibrant international community of artists and architects. Their exposure to the Antique and the Renaissance masters was supported by a complex pedagogical system. The Accademia di San Luca, the Capitoline Accademia del Nudo, the Concorsi Clementini, and numerous studios and offices, provided a network of institutions and a whole theoretical and educational model for the relatively young British art world, which was still striving to create its own modern system for the arts. Reverberations of the Roman academy system were felt back in Britain through initiatives in London such as the Great Queen Street Academy, the Duke of Richmond’s Academy, the Saint Martin’s Lane Academy, and the Royal Society of Arts. But it was a broader national phenomenon too, inspiring the likes of the Foulis Academy in Glasgow and the Liverpool Society of Artists. The foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1768 officially sanctioned the affirmation of the Roman model.
If past scholarship has concentrated mainly on the activities of British artists while in Rome, this conference wishes to address the process of intellectual migration, adaptation and reinterpretation of academic, theoretical and pedagogical principles from Rome back into 18th-century Britain. It responds to the rise of intellectual history, building on prevalent trends in the genealogy of knowledge and the history of disciplines, as well as the mobility and exchange of ideas and cultural translation across borders.
The conference welcomes diverse approaches to investigating the dissemination of the academic ideal from Rome to Britain. These might address, but are by no means limited to, the following topics:
• The impact of the Roman academic structure, theory and pedagogy on British art academies, artists’ studios and architects’ offices.
• The impact of art and architectural theory in Rome on the formation of a public discourse on art and architecture in Britain.
• The process of adaptation and reinterpretation of Roman theoretical and pedagogical principles to the British artistic and architectural context, and the extent to which British art academies developed new principles, absorbed the Roman model, or derived them from elsewhere.
• The role played by Roman and Italian artists and architects in the formation and structuring of the 18th-century British art academies and, in particular, of the Royal Academy of Arts.
• The presence and activities of British artists and architects in Roman studios, offices and academies and the presence of Italian artists in British academies.
• The role played by other relevant academies—such as those at Parma and Florence—on the formation of British artists and architects in relationship/opposition to the Roman model.
This conference will conclude a series of events celebrating the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It will also be part of a series of conferences and exhibitions focusing on the role of the Accademia di San Luca in the spread of the academic ideal in Europe and beyond, inaugurated in 2016 with an exhibition and conference on the relationship between Rome and the French academy, held at the Accademia di San Luca and at the Académie de France à Rome.
Please provide a concise title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper. Send your proposal, with a current CV of no more than two pages, to humanities@bsrome.it. Proposals must be received by midnight, Monday 12 March 2018. Speakers will be notified of the committee’s decision in mid-April 2018. Travel grants will be available.
Adriano Aymonino
Carolina Brook
Gian Paolo Consoli
Thomas-Leo True
PhD Research Placements at the British Library
From the BL:
William Blake at the British Library: PhD Research Placement
3 months during the period from June until December 2018
Applications due by 19 February 2018
PhD students are invited to apply to undertake one of our forthcoming research placements. These are specially-selected projects that have been developed by the Library to support current doctoral researchers to develop and apply transferrable skills and expertise. Amongst the opportunities being offered in the current Call is a placement on William Blake, focused on the Library’s large collection of prints by Blake. Further details and profiles for each of the other placements are available here.
A PhD research placement at the British Library provides the chance to experience research in a different environment to that of a university, to engage with a range of research users and audiences, to gain insights into different potential postdoctoral career paths, and to make a tangible contribution to the purposes and programmes of a national library and major cultural organisation. A broad range of research placement opportunities have been identified by the Library for 2018–19.
To Apply
Application Guidelines and the application form are available here. Please refer to the guidelines and email the completed application form and a CV to Research.Development@bl.uk. Please note that all applications must be approved by the applicant’s PhD supervisor and Graduate Tutor (or equivalent senior academic manager). The application deadline is 4pm on 19 February 2018.
Eligibility
This scheme is open to all PhD students, as long as they have the support of their PhD supervisor and their Graduate Tutor (or equivalent). International students are eligible if they have the right to study in the UK.
Funding
The research placements offered through the scheme are opportunities for current PhD students to apply and enhance research skills and expertise outside of Higher Education as part of their wider research training and professional development. They are training and development opportunities to be undertaken within this specific context—and are therefore different to the paid internships or other fixed-term posts that the Library may occasionally make available. See the Application Guidelines for further details and background. Please note that—unlike for an internship or a fixed-term post—the British Library is unable to provide stipends or payment to PhD placement students. It is therefore essential that applicants to the placement scheme obtain the support of their PhD supervisor and Graduate Tutor (or someone in an equivalent senior academic management role) in advance and that, as part of their process, they consult their HEI to ascertain what funding is available to support them. To support self-funded and part-time students, most placements can be done on a part-time basis, with some remote working also sometimes possible—see the individual projects for details.
Jonny Yarker Joins Lowell Libson
Press release (January 2017) from Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd:
Lowell Libson Ltd is delighted to announce that from January 2018 it will be trading as Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd. Lowell Libson is one of the great names in the world of London dealing: for the last seventeen years his gallery has been synonymous with British paintings, drawings, and sculpture of the highest quality. It is unusual for a gallery owner, with over forty years’ experience and his name above the door to embrace such a radical transformation, and it signals an important change for the future.
“Jonny joined the business five years ago and during that time we have worked very happily and successfully together. Jonny has made a huge impact on the gallery, and he has played an extremely significant role in developing the business with me; now is the right time to recognize this working partnership in a tangible way,” Lowell Libson commented. “I am very excited about the future, Jonny is a talented dealer, a leading scholar and a good friend and I look forward to our new venture together.”
Jonny Yarker had recently finished his PhD when Lowell approached him to come and work at the gallery. “I admired Lowell long before I met him. He had this amazing reputation for supporting scholarship and exhibitions of British art; I remember when I was a student seeing his name everywhere,” says Yarker, “Little did I think I would end up working with him.” Libson has a reputation for supporting innovative scholarship in British art and the gallery has sponsored major exhibitions at the Royal Academy, British Museum, Courtauld, Ashmolean, and Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
With Jonny on board, the company’s outlook became more routed in research and their projects were able to become more ambitious. For example, in 2014 they mounted the largest selling exhibition of drawings by Gainsborough for a century. Lowell and Jonny have also recently made a number of notable discoveries including newly identified works by Samuel Palmer, John Constable, Johan Zoffany as well uncovering a previously unknown cache of drawings by Sir Peter Lely.
Each brings complimentary talents to the business (as Libson says, “It’s not particularly constructive working with a clone of oneself”). They see their great strength as a willingness to embrace change and think laterally. “We operate in an apparently narrow field, but Lowell has an amazing ability to reinvent what we do, at the same time preserving a continuity of taste,” Yarker observes.
In March, the gallery will be exhibiting at the Salon du dessin in Paris for the first time and in July they will mount a major exhibition of drawings made in Britain before 1730. Libson has been collecting for the exhibition for over a decade but observes: “Jonny has really made the project his own, he has brought an academic rigour and flair to my initial idea; it is going to be a truly groundbreaking exhibition, I can’t wait!”
This is the essence of what Libson and Yarker do: bring high levels of scholarship and their own personal taste to British art. It is a formula that has won them an international group of clients, both institutional and private.
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