Enfilade

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Old Man and Death, 1773, oil on canvas
(Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum)

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This Newberry seminar is hosted by Alicia Caticha, with Meredith Gamer providing a response:

Douglas Fordham | Joseph Wright of Derby and the Metaphysical Image

Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar

The Newberry Library, Chicago, Friday, 20 February 2026, 3–5pm

In a recent monograph on Joseph Wright of Derby, Matthew Craske locates the artist in a genteel Midlands culture where he cultivated a melancholic temperament and a preference for seclusion. Craske describes Wright as a “painter of darkness” who sought to “stimulate sympathetic emotions” and produce a pleasurable discomfort in viewers through sublime contrasts of light and shade. Drawing on Craske’s insights, this talk raises metaphysical questions about Wright’s representation of life, death, and afterlife. Was it possible in Georgian England for painting to serve as “a catalyst of focused attention and a source of open-ended reflection”? That is how Thomas Pfau defines the metaphysical image, and we will consider just how fitting that phrase may be in relation to Wright. Were Wright’s paintings able, and were Georgian viewers willing, to grasp a radical alterity separate from oneself?

Douglas Fordham is a historian of British art and the chair of the Art Department at the University of Virginia. He co-edited Art and the British Empire (2007), which helped to place empire at the center of the study of British art. His first monograph, British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010) examined the relationship between imperial politics and artistic organization in eighteenth-century London. His second monograph, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019) considered how the newly discovered medium of aquatint printmaking conditioned the representation of cultures beyond Europe. Douglas is currently working on a book about metaphysics and Georgian painting.

This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend. Register and request paper»

The Eighteenth-Century Seminar is designed to foster research and inquiry across the scholarly disciplines in eighteenth-century studies. It aims to provide a methodologically diverse forum for work that engages ongoing discussions and debates along this historical and critical terrain. Each year the seminar sponsors one public lecture followed by questions and discussion, and two works-in-progress sessions featuring pre-circulated papers.

In March at BGC:

Laura Beltrán-Rubio | Indigenizing Fashion in the Colonial Andes

Bard Graduate Center, New York, 25 March 2026, 6.00pm

Unidentified artist from Cusco, The Virgin with Tailors, ca. 1750, oil and gold on canvas, 58 × 40 inches (Lima: Museo Pedro de Osma).

Textiles have been central to the material culture of the Andes since time immemorial. With the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the textile primacy of the Andes adapted: rather than a straightforward imposition of European trends, Indigenous fashion and textile practices have undergone complex processes of ‘cultural authentication’ and ‘survivance’. This lecture unravels evidence from archival and pictorial sources from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century to recenter the Indigenous agents, materialities, techniques, technologies, and systems of knowledge that have shaped Indigenous fashion practices in the Andes. It thus offers a reevaluation of the history of fashion and textiles in the colonial Andes to demonstrate that Native American and Euro-American histories of fashion and textiles are inevitably intertwined, complex, and mutually influential.

Registration is available here»

Laura Beltrán-Rubio is a researcher, curator, and educator, specializing in the history of art and fashion. Her research explores the construction and performance of identities through artistic expression, with a broad interest in Native American and Indigenous fashion and textiles. Her first book, Empire of Fashion: Luxury, Consumption and Identity in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, is under contract with the University of Texas Press. Beltrán-Rubio completed her PhD at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA) and holds an MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons School of Design (New York). She has previously taught at Parsons, William and Mary, Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), and De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). She is senior researcher and managing editor at the Fashion and Race Database and hosts the podcast Redressing Fashion. As a public-facing scholar, her mission is to expand the narratives of fashion to create more diverse, equitable, and socially just societies.

Moor Park, Hertfordshire, England. The estate has housed the Moor Park Golf Club since the 1920s. The 17th-century house was remodelled in the 1720s (with South Sea wealth) to designs by James Thornhill. Jacopo Amigoni was subsequently commissioned to paint the four pictures in the Great Hall. Shown here is Jupiter and Io with Cupid and Attendant Putti.

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From the Venice in Peril Fund:

James Stourton and Hannah Kaye | The British Love Affair with Venice:

Four Centuries of Collecting and Connoisseurship

The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, London, 16 March 2026

James Stourton joins Hannah Kaye for a lively conversation exploring the enduring British fascination with Venice and its profound impact on taste and culture. From King Charles I to the present day, they will examine how British connoisseurs, collectors and architects have both shaped—and been shaped by—Venetian art, uncovering the themes and ideas that define this centuries-long cultural exchange.

James Stourton is the award-winning author of thirteen books including Rogues and Scholars, The British as Art Collectors, and Kenneth Clark. He is a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research of London University and currently a visiting fellow at Oxford University. He started his career as an Old Master paintings specialist with Sotheby’s and rose to become UK Chairman until he stepped down in 2012. He writes regularly on art and architecture for national newspapers and has served on government heritage committees. His first visit abroad was to Venice. Hannah Kaye is a freelance producer and one of the founding creators of Intelligence Squared, the leading forum for agenda-setting debates and discussions around the world. She is a trustee of the World Monument Fund Britain.

Monday, 16 March 2026, 6.30pm. Tickets, £30 / lecture recording, £10. All proceeds will go directly towards the vital conservation work of Venice in Peril Fund.

From the Venice in Peril Fund:

Jane Glover | Mozart in Venice: A Crucial Encounter

The Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House, London, 9 February 2026

Pietro Longhi, A Fortune Teller at Venice, ca. 1756, oil on canvas, 59 × 49 cm (London: National Gallery, NG1334).

In December 1769, the 13-year-old Mozart and his father set out on their first journey to Italy. Over the next fifteen months they would visit all the main cities in the peninsula, absorbing Italian culture and garnering unprecedented attention and accolades. Their final stop, in the spring of 1771, was Venice. And although they came away with little immediate or evident reward, the impact of the city on the now 15-year-old boy was profound and extraordinarily consequential. In this talk, Jane Glover, acclaimed conductor and musician, explores this brief but crucial encounter between a unique prodigy and a unique city.

Jane Glover is currently enjoying her 50th season as a conductor, having made her professional debut at the Wexford Festival in 1975. She has since performed opera and concerts all over the world, including at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. A Mozart specialist, she has been Music Director of Glyndebourne Touring Opera, Artistic Director of the London Mozart Players, Director of Opera at the Royal Academy of Music, and, since 2002, Music Director of Chicago’s Music of the Baroque. She is the author of Mozart’s Women, Handel in London, and Mozart in Italy.

Monday, 9 February 2026, 6.30pm. Tickets, £30 / lecture recording, £10. All proceeds will go directly towards the vital conservation work of Venice in Peril Fund.

Presented by the Lewis Walpole Library:

Frédéric Ogée | Art and Truth: William Hogarth and the English Enlightenment

28th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 12 February 2026

William Hogarth, Self-Portrait, ca. 1735, oil on canvas (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.360).

William Hogarth was a pioneering painter and engraver of 18th-century Britain and is often considered as one of the most important figures in the rise of an English school of art. His art engaged in an unprecedented manner with the ideas, debates, and values of the English Enlightenment, translating them into accessible visual narratives, encouraging the development of active critical thinking. As such his art reflected and nourished the English Enlightenment’s empiricist agenda—the idea that knowledge comes from observation and experience—to which he gave accessible visibility by bringing art into the realm of popular culture and public discourse, and putting the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art under serious stress. His major contribution to the promotion of a ‘modern’ (and English) conception of art is the unflinching priority he always gave to truth over beauty in his representations, a feature, remarkably, that has remained characteristic of British art ever since.

Frédéric Ogée is Emeritus Professor of British Literature and Art History at Université Paris Cité and École du Louvre. His main period of research is the long eighteenth century, and his publications include two collections of essays on William Hogarth, as well as ‘Better in France?’ The Circulation of Ideas across the Channel in the Eighteenth Century (Lewisburg, 2005), Diderot and European Culture (Oxford, 2006; repr.2009), and J.M.W. Turner, Les paysages absolus (Paris, 2010). He also co-edited Jardins et civilisations (Valenciennes, 2019) following a conference at the European Institute for Gardens and Landscapes in Caen. In 2006–07, he curated the first-ever exhibition of Hogarth for the Louvre Museum. He is currently working on a series of four large monographs in French on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British artists. The first one, Thomas Lawrence: Le génie du portrait anglais was published in December 2022. The second one, on the landscape artist J.M.W. Turner, will be published early in 2026.

Thursday, 12 February 2026, 5.30pm
Yale University Art Gallery Auditorium