Enfilade

Now on view at The Walpole Library with a talk from Dr Roman on February 4:

Is It Any Good? Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library
The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 22 September 2023 — 28 June 2024

Curated by Cynthia Roman

Art historians, curators, and connoisseurs often pose the question, ‘Is it any good?’ evoking a sense of quality manifest in canonical works of art. By contrast, when building a collection of 18th-century prints that would become a cornerstone for research at the Lewis Walpole Library, W.S. and Annie Burr Lewis envisioned a visual collection that is essentially archival. Prints were valued foremost as documents that would improve their library dedicated to the life and times of Horace Walpole and to 18th-century studies. The Lewises’ iconographic approach, however, does not preclude the importance of assessing what is good. Aesthetic, material, and technical attributes are integral to understanding the power of visual art and artifacts to communicate the eighteenth-century histories they document. Asking Is it any good? this exhibition presents a selection of prints, drawings, and paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library to explore the intersections of quality and documentary value.

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Cynthia Roman, Curating the Caricature Collection at the Lewis Walpole Library
Sunday, 4 February 2024, 2.00pm

Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library will present the story of the library’s internationally recognized print collection. Often in W.S. Lewis’s own words, this talk will explore the commitment that he and Annie Burr Lewis shared to “make more use of political and personal caricatures” when building a research collection for 18th-century studies that included Annie Burr’s celebrated chronological and subject-based card catalog. Reflecting on more than twenty years of stewarding the print collection, Roman will present both the Lewises’ vision of caricature as archival documents and subsequent curatorial initiatives to acquire prints that more deliberately embrace material, technical, and aesthetic considerations; circumstances of production, marketing and circulation including prolific practices of copying; as well as the legacy of caricature today.

Cynthia E. Roman, PhD, is Curator of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. Her research focuses on 18th-century British art, particularly prints. She has published essays on graphic satire, collecting history, and ‘amateur’ artists, and has edited and co-edited collected volumes including Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Collection with Michael Snodin (2009–10), Hogarth’s Legacy (2016), Staging ‘The Mysterious Mother’ with Jill Campbell (2024), and Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700–1830, with Cristina Martinez (2024).