Enfilade

From St Mary’s University:

Text Artefact Identity: Horace Walpole and the Queer Eighteenth Century
Strawberry Hill, 15–16 February 2019

This conference will bring together scholars and curators from the disciplines of Literature, Cultural History, Art and Architectural History, and Heritage to investigate LGBTQ perspectives on the ‘long’ eighteenth century, and features keynotes from Walpole’s biographer, George Haggerty, and Matthew Reeve, who has written extensively on Gothic architecture, sexuality, and aesthetics.

Hosted in partnership with Horace Walpole’s Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in west London, the conference will complement a major exhibition taking place October 2018–February 2019, The Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill, which brings together, for the first time since 1842, masterpieces from Walpole’s collection. There will be an opportunity to visit the exhibition during the conference.

Booking is now available online via Strawberry Hill House’s website, with generous reductions for unfunded students. One and two-day tickets are available, in addition to reduced prices for those not funded by their employer or external body. The conference is a partnership between the National Trust, Strawberry Hill, and St Mary’s University. More information is available here.

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9.00  Registration and coffee

9.50  Welcome by Peter Howell, Nino Strachey, and Silvia Davoli

10.00  Keynote Lecture
• George Haggerty, Horace Walpole: ‘Queernesses’ in the Epistolary Mode

11.00  Break

11.10  Panel 1: Horace Walpole and His Network
• Eugenia Zuroski, ‘That you may show us what we have seen’: Bentley’s Drawings and the Archive of Queer Feeling
• Freya Gowrley, Inheriting Strawberry Hill: Shared Practices and Shared Spaces
• Andrew Rudd, Shut out of the Queer Family Romance: Thomas Chatterton’s Revenge on Walpole

12.40  Lunch

1.40  Keynote Lecture
• Maurice Howard, Resolving the Past without a Certain Future: Classical and Gothic in John Chute’s Ideas for The Vyne

2.40  Break

2.50  Panel 2: Queer Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century Culture (1)
• Gràinne O’Hare, Harmless Queerness: Eighteenth-Century Erasure of Female Sexual Experience
• Emily West, ‘A little play-thing-house’: Queer Childishness at Strawberry Hill
• Keiko Kimura, The Americanized Gothic Theatre: C. B. Brown’s Wieland

4.20  Break

4.30  Panel 3: Queer Perspectives on Eighteenth-Century Culture (2)
• Dominic Janes, Queer Eye for the Queer Guys?: Horace Walpole and the Macaronis
• Cameron MacDonell, Walpole’s Queer Passionometer: Britain’s Climate and Gothic Aesthetics

5.30  Tea and tours of the exhibition, The Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill

7.00  Drinks and dinner

S A T U R D A Y ,  1 6  F E B R U A R Y  2 0 1 9

9.30  Registration and coffee

10.00  Keynote Lecture
• Matthew Reeve, Queer Family Romance in the Strawberry Hill Collections

11.00  Break

11.10  Panel 4: Architecture, Display, and ‘Camp’
• Daniela Roberts, Framing Queer Identity: Gothic Revival Interior and Collection Display in Strawberry Hill
• Wojciech Szymański and Robert Kusek, Strawberry Hill and the Camp History of Architecture: The Case of Central Europe
• Luciana Colucci, ‘Well, I begin to be ashamed of my magnificence’: Horace Walpole and the Queer Eighteenth Century

12.40  Lunch

1.40  Keynote Lecture
• Daniel Orrells, Walpole, Neoclassicism, and the Erotics of Historical Debate in the Eighteenth Century

2.40  Panel 5: Neo-classicism and Sexual Identity
• Sarah Betzer, Aesthetic Antagonists? Walpole, Patch, and Queer Taste
• Caroline Gonda, Identity and the Classics in the Notebooks of Anne Damer (1748–1828)

3.40  Break

3.50  Keynote Lecture
• Ulf Hansson, ‘I Find I Cannot Live Without Stosch’s Intaglia of the Gladiator with the Vase’: The Museo Stoschiano, Male Homosociability, and the Cult of the Ancients

4.50  Panel 6: Strawberry Hill and LGBTQ Heritage
• Nino Strachey, Alison Oram, and Richard Sandell, Presentations and discussion reflecting on Strawberry Hill and the legacies of Prejudice & Pride (National Trust) and Pride of Place (Historic England)

6.00  Farewell drinks

From H-ArtHist:

Doing Connoisseurship: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Bielefeld University, 11 January 2019

It has become a historiographical commonplace to describe connoisseurship as the natural forerunner of the academic history of art and visual culture. However, connoisseurship did not just end at a certain point, but it is still part of scientific practices today, and in all likelihood, it will continue to do so in the future. Therefore, this workshop is dedicated to the impact—past, present, and future—which connoisseurship has on our understanding of artistic artifacts.

In order to analyze the preconditions, merits, and problems of connoisseurship, it is worth looking at how working routines, interest in particular questions, the way of perception, and its verbalization might result from an early eighteenth-century understanding of categorizing and comparing. Therefore, it appears necessary to discuss some aspects of connoisseurship in greater detail: its actors, its discourses, its modes of visual experience, and its objects.

It is remarkable that connoisseurship, from its beginnings, particularly benefited from an interdisciplinary orientation. The biographies of early connoisseurs span a wide range from individuals with a background in the natural sciences to artists or scholars of philosophy. In light of different interests, it is not trite to examine the different preconditions of working methods applied in these fields. How did a certain technical and empirical know-how form a certain epistemological interest? What kinds of questions and requirements arose from a culture where collectors, art dealers, philosophers, artists, or natural scientists were entangled in a complex discourse on the judgment of art? While it is common practice to start with a historiographical contextualization of the eighteenth-century discourse visible in a great number of treatises and early histories on art, it might also be enlightening to look at practices prior to those written works. Distinctive modes of visual and practical experiences, the negotiation of norms, and the learning of a ‘language’ of resemblance and difference, thus the argument, shaped a professional way of viewing up to the present day. The workshop aims to critically trace its formation and develop a future perspective on connoisseurship.

P R O G R A M

9.00  Introduction by Joris Heyder

9.30  Fabienne Brugère, Inventing the Audience in the Eighteenth Century: Taste in the Arts

10.30  Break

11.00  Pascal Griener, For a New History of Connoisseurship in the Nineteenth Century: Analysis of Some Connoisseurs’ Greatest Blunders in Context

12.00  Valérie Kobi, On Spectacles And Lorgnettes: The Connoisseur’s Vision Aids

13.00  Lunch

14.15  Ingrid Vermeulen, The Connoisseurship of Forging Relations Between School and Nation, 1650–1750

15.15  Stephan Kemperdick, Connoisseurship: Looking for Masters or Looking for Connections?

16.15  Closing Remarks