Enfilade

Stacey Sloboda and Meredith Gamer | Drawing in 18th-C. London: Academies and Entrepreneurs
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, Friday, 19 April 2024, 10.00–4.00

Applications due by 1 March 2024

Thomas Gainsborough, A Boy with a Book and a Spade, 1748, graphite with smudging on laid paper; squared for transfer with a numbered grid, 189 × 143mm (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, III, 59b).

Drawing was at the center of a range of artistic developments in the eighteenth-century London art world. It flourished with the development of drawing academies that culminated in the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768. It also played a key role in the careers of entrepreneurs such as John Vanderbank, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and Thomas Chippendale as the commercial market for printed images increased dramatically in this period. New opportunities for graphic expression encouraged artists and amateurs alike to pursue drawing as a polite and learned activity, and sketching became an increasingly innovative artistic practice. The Morgan Library & Museum has substantive holdings of drawings by British artists from this period, and this seminar offers a chance to study them as a group. Participants in this graduate seminar will engage in lively sessions addressing topics such as drawing academy practice and the use of models, the function of drawings in the studio and workshop, the role of prints, sketching as an artistic practice, and the art market and private patronage.

Stacey Sloboda is the Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art History at UMass, Boston.
Meredith Gamer is Assistant Professor of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University.

This seminar is open to graduate students of the history of art and the conservation of works on paper. Interested participants are kindly invited to submit a one paragraph statement which should include the following:
• Name and email
• Academic institution
• Class year
• Field of study
• Interest in British eighteenth-century drawings and relevance of the seminar to your research

Applications should be submitted electronically with the subject header ‘British Drawings Seminar’ to drawinginstitute@themorgan.org. Participants will be notified by 15 March 2024.