Enfilade

King’s Concordance, C.23.e.4. f.34r (London: The British Library).

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Felicity Myrone | Prints and Drawings at the British Library: Revealing Hidden Collections
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collectin
Online, Monday, 25 July 2022, 17.30 (BST)

It is our pleasure to invite you to the next Wallace Collection Seminar in the History of Collecting. Viewing options are provided below.

The British Library’s collections contain extensive visual materials, much originating from its foundation as part of the British Museum. While the collections that remained at the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum have now been fully catalogued, there is currently no index or catalogue to the British Library’s far more extensive holdings of prints and drawings. Valuable and diverse collections and materials are usually unlisted and undescribed, found in collective records and in items categorised as other formats.

A project to make more of the Library’s collections accessible is now underway. With the support of a Getty Paper Project grant and building on a Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship, this involves writing the first handbook to the prints and drawings collections. What do we hold and why? How are our prints and drawings currently described, or more commonly, not? How can archival research into the collections—including historic acquisitions and Library/Museum duplication and transfers—help us to question the long-held assumption that art found its natural place at the Print Room? This paper explores how the perceived purpose and status of prints and drawings has varied and developed in the context of library collections in the 18th and 19th centuries, using case studies drawn from the history of the British Museum and Library.

Felicity Myrone is Lead Curator of Western Prints and Drawings at the British Library in London.

Register now (via Zoom) or watch online (via YouTube)