Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

The Hand-Colouring of Natural History Illustrations in Europe, 1600–1850
Online and in-person, University of Konstanz, 26–27 February 2025

Organized by Joyce Dixon and Giulia Simonini

This hybrid workshop will explore from different perspectives how and for what purposes printed illustrations of natural history books were hand-coloured. A special focus of the workshop will be the activities and practices of hand-colourers known also as ‘colourists’, ‘afzetters’ (in Dutch) and ‘Illuministen’ (in German), which remain until today understudied. To register, please email lea.stengel@tu-berlin.de.

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9.00  Registration

9.30  Introduction / Round table

10.15  Coffee break

10.30  Panel 1 | Colourists
• Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, Leah Karas, Mario Dominik Riedl (Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna) — The Role of Child Labour in Natural History Illustration
• Joyce Dixon (Independent) — ‘A School of Females’: Hand-Colourers in the Edinburgh Studio of William Home Lizars
• Luc Menapace (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) — The Hand-Colouring of Natural History Illustrations in Paris in the First Half of the 19th Century

12.45  Lunch

13.30  Panel 2 | Capturing Changeable Colours
• Cynthia Kok (Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Rijksmuseum) —Investigating Iridescence: Mother-of-Pearl in Early Modern Natural Illustrations
• Christine Kleiter (Deutsches Studienzentrum Venice) — How to Represent Iridescent Feathers in Hand-Coloured Prints? Colouring Practices in Pierre Belon’s L’Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (1555)
• Paul Martin (University of Bristol) — Accuracy and Consistency in Colouring of Antiquarian Ichthyology Engravings

15.30  Coffee break

15.45  Panel 3 | Colours in Botanical Illustrations
• Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) — Which Color Comes First? Hand-Colouring Gradations on Plants in the 16th and 17th Centuries
• Magdalena Grenda-Kurmanow (Academy of Fine Arts Warsaw) —Ultimate Documentation: Between a Plant Illustration and a Botanical Specimen
• Eszter Csillag (HKBU Jao Tsung I Academy of Sinology) — Michael Boym’s Hand-Coloured Images in Flora sinensis (Vienna, 1656)

19.30  Dinner

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9.00  Keynote Address
• Alexandra Loske (Curator of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton) — Botanical Illustrator, Flower Painter, and Colour Theorist: Mary Gartside’s Path from the Figurative to the Abstract in Her Early 19th-Century Illustrated Books

10.00  Coffee break

10.15  Panel 4 | Working Processes
• Katarzyna Pekacka-Falkowska (Poznan University of Medical Sciences) — The Colours of Nature in Early 18th-Century Danzig/Gdańsk: Johann Philipp Breyne, Jacob Theodor Klein, and the Hand-Coloured Illustrations
• Cam Sharp Jones (British Library) — Colouring Seba’s Thesaurus
• Giulia Simonini (Technische Universität Berlin) — The Master Plates for August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof’s Insecten-Belustigung: A Family Enterprise

12.15  Lunch

13.00  Closing remarks and discussion