Enfilade

J.M.W. Turner, The Arch of the Old Abbey, Evesham, 1793, brush and wash, watercolor, and pen and ink over graphite on paper
(Providence: RISD Museum, 69.154.60).

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Upcoming lectures from the York Georgian Society:

Jane Grenville | Revisiting Pevsner’s Yorkshire, North Riding: Updating a Classic
York Medical Society, Saturday, 21 October 2023, 2.30pm

Dr Jane Grenville will discuss Pevsner’s research methods and show how the explosion of architectural historical research in the intervening half century and the appearance of the internet have enabled a hugely expanded second edition. She will then present selected highlights of Georgian architecture in the county, including a discussion of Forcett Park, whose mysteries remain, to some extent, intact—and the pleasures and pains of updating Pevsner’s entry on Castle Howard in the light of so much subsequent research.

Jane Grenville’s transition from dirt archaeologist to buildings research was inspired by working as a teenager with Dr Harold Taylor (Anglo-Saxon Architecture). After research on churches and parish formation in pre-Conquest Lincolnshire (unfinished), she joined the Listed Buildings Re-Survey for Yorkshire in 1984, and her knowledge expanded to all periods. Like Pevsner, she became a ‘GP’ in the field. She worked in professional conservation until joining the Archaeology Department at York, where she initiated undergraduate standing buildings modules and an MA—and then ensured the continuation of the famous MA in Conservation Studies after the demise of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies. She retired in 2015 after a spell in senior management. Pevsner was the perfect retirement project.

Registration is available here»

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Nicholas Tromans | ‘Put Up a Picture in Your Room’: Art at Home in Earlier 19th-Century Britain
York Medical Society, Saturday, 11 November 2023, 2.30pm

The early nineteenth century saw the opening up of a fabulous array of collections of paintings to the public—both in dedicated museums and in galleries attached to grand private residences. But what about pictures in more modest homes? This lecture asks about the theory and practice of displaying pictorial art in middle-class domestic settings, taking its cue and title from an 1834 essay by the Romantic writer Leigh Hunt. What was the purpose of the domestic picture? Who was it for? How should it be hung and in which rooms of the house? By opening up the private lives of pictures, and considering relationships between paintings, prints and urban interiors, it becomes possible to gain a new perspective on the everyday experience of art.

Nicholas Tromans in an independent art historian based in London. He has worked in universities, museums and auction houses. A specialist in nineteenth-century British art, he has written or edited books on David Wilkie, Orientalist painting, Richard Dadd, G. F. Watts and (with Susan Owens) Christina Rossetti. His most recent book, on which this lecture is based, is The Private Lives of Pictures: Art at Home in Britain 1800–1940 (Reaktion, 2022). His current project is a book about the relationship of art to psychiatry since the late eighteenth century.

Registration is available here»

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Bennett Zon | ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’: A Musical Mystery Tour
York Medical Society, Saturday, 25 November 2023, 2.30pm

Beloved by Christians and non-Christians alike, Christmas carols are amongst the few musical genres to transcend religious and cultural differences. Uniting people through the magic of seasonal song, carols help us share our feelings and communicate the true meaning of Christmas. But what is the true meaning of Christmas? And what was the true meaning of Christmas when Christmas carols became popular in the eighteenth century? This paper tries to find out by telling the true but shocking story of the meaning behind Britain’s most popular carol “Adeste Fideles,” otherwise known as “O Come All Ye Faithful.” Join Bennett Zon for a ‘Musical Mystery Tour’ tracing its history from the 1740s to the present, through London Embassy chapels, recusant houses, Protestant churches, and Catholic cathedrals.

Bennett Zon is Professor of Music at Durham University, and Director of the International Network for Music Theology. He is also Director of Durham’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International, and was recently elected President of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. He is general editor of Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge) and the book series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Routledge), and editor of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. Zon researches music, religion, and science in the long nineteenth-century. Recent publications include Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (2017) and the co-edited volume Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines (2019). Zon is one of two general editors of the forthcoming five-volume Oxford Handbook of Music and Christian Theology, and is currently writing No God, No Science, No Music, a history using music to explore the relationship between religion and science from the Big Bang to the present.

Registration is available here»

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David Adshead | The History, Role, and Future of the Georgian Group
York Medical Society, Saturday, 13 January 2024, 2.30pm

The lecture will explore the history, role, and future goals of The Georgian Group, including its objectives to preserve Georgian buildings and landscapes and encourage public understanding and appreciation of Georgian architecture, town planning, and taste as demonstrated in the applied arts, design, and craftsmanship.

David Adshead is Director of The Georgian Group. Formerly Head Curator and Architectural Historian of the National Trust, he is a past chairman of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and has published widely on British architecture and historic houses and their collections.

Registration is available here»

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Adam Bowett | Mapping the Mahogany Trade in the 18th and 19th Centuries
York Medical Society, Saturday, 10 February 2024, 2.30pm

This lecture charts the growth of the mahogany trade from its small beginnings in the early 18th century to its global peak in the late 19th. The trade was shaped both by British colonial policy and by Britain’s relations with the other European colonial powers, with successive wars against France and Spain being the most potent drivers of change. It was initially centred on the British Caribbean islands, especially Jamaica, but rapidly expanded to encompass Central America, Cuba, and Hispaniola. In the process, furniture making in Britain was transformed, and in the 19th century mahogany was the world’s most commercially important high-class furniture wood. By the early 20th century the mahogany stocks of most Caribbean islands and large parts of Central America were dangerously depleted, and all three species are now protected under the CITES agreements.

Adam Bowett is an independent furniture historian and chairman of the Chippendale Society. Since 1992 he has also worked as an advisor on historic English furniture to public institutions and private clients in both Britain and North America, including The National Trust, English Heritage, Arts Council England, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Strawberry Hill Trust, The Wallace Collection, and numerous British regional museums. Dr Bowett lectures widely and teaches furniture history at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He publishes work in both popular and academic journals and is the author of several books on English furniture and furniture-making.

Registration is available here»

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Hannah Rose Woods | Reflections on Decayed Magnificence: Nostalgia in Georgian Britain
York Medical Society, Saturday, 9 March 2024, 2.30pm

This talk will explore the ways in which people in Georgian Britain looked back to the past. While we might look back today with our own retrospect and picture the Georgian era as an elegant heyday of stateliness and stability, people throughout the long eighteenth century often characterised the age in which they were living as one of disorienting transformation. From yearning for a vanished ‘Merry England’ of rural community, to landscaping Arcadian idylls inside the grounds of stately homes, or else dreaming about the grandeur of the Roman Empire, nostalgia could be a profoundly reassuring coping mechanism. The ways in which they created these idealised or imagined pasts gives us a unique insight into how people viewed the changes that were defining their own age, and how they felt about the societies in which they lived.

Hannah Rose Woods is a cultural historian who is particularly interested in the history of people’s emotional lives. Her first book Rule, Nostalgia: a Backwards History of Britain (Penguin, 2022) explored nostalgia for a rose-tinted national past over five centuries of British history, from the present day to the Reformation of the sixteenth century. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British history, and is now an independent writer and researcher. She is a columnist for The New Statesman, and has written on history, politics and culture for publications including The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and History Today.

Registration is available here»

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All are welcome to YGS lectures. Admission is free to members and students, and a suggested donation from non-members of £5.