Online Lecture | Charles O’Brien and Simon Bradley on Pevsner
From the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art:
Charles O’Brien and Simon Bradley | Celebrating Pevsner: Reflections on the Completion of the Buildings of England
Online, 14 November 2024, 6.00pm (London time)
The editors of the Pevsner Architectural Guides will be in conversation, reflecting on the revision of the Buildings of England series from 1983 to 2024, lately completed with the new Staffordshire volume. Simon Bradley and Charles O’Brien will consider the development and updating of the guides over forty years, the expansion of their content and the challenges both of research and writing and of maintaining the spirit and ambition of Pevsner’s original vision for the books. They will also reflect on their own contributions as authors of the new and revised editions, spanning their time with Penguin Books and Yale University Press. The event will be chaired by Jeremy Musson.
Book tickets here»
Jeremy Musson is an architectural historian; he studied at UCL and the Warburg Institute and was an assistant curator for the National Trust and architectural editor at Country Life, 1998–2007. He is the author of a number of books on the country house, including English Country House Interiors (2011) and The Drawing Room (2014), and was co-writer and presenter of BBC2’s The Curious House Guest. A heritage consultant since 2007, Jeremy has worked on projects including Hardwick Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral. He is editor of The Victorian and teaches on the building history masters course at the University of Cambridge; a senior research fellow of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Buckingham; and a supervisor of students at New York University (NYU) in London. He is also a trustee of the Historic Houses Foundation. He was a contributing author to the revision of the Buildings of England: Sussex West with Elizabeth Williamson, Tim Hudson, and Ian Narin.
Charles O’Brien FSA is Listing and Architectural Research Director at Historic England. Until 2022 he was joint Series Editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides. He joined the series in 1997, where he worked full time on the research, writing, and editing of the new editions. As author and co-author he has written the revised volumes London 5: East; Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Peterborough; Hampshire: South; and Surrey. He is a former Commissioner of Historic England and former Chair of their London Advisory Committee.
Simon Bradley FSA joined the Pevsner series in 1994. His own revised volumes include London 1: The City of London; London 6: Westminster; Cambridgeshire; and Oxfordshire: Oxford and the South East. He has also published on the Gothic Revival, drawing on his PhD thesis, and on railways and railway buildings including St Pancras Station (2006), The Railways: Nation, Network, and People (2015), and Bradley’s Railway Guide: A Journey Through Two Centuries of British Railway History, 1825–2025 (2024).
Online Course | British Furniture Abroad in the 18th Century
From British and Irish Furniture Makers Online and The Furniture History Society:
British Furniture Abroad in the Eighteenth Century: Impacts and Influence
BIFMO-FHS Online Autumn Course: 12, 19, and 26 November 2024
Side chair, attributed to Benjamin Randolph, possibly carved by Hercules Courtenay, ca. 1769 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974.325).
Join us online on three consecutive Tuesdays this November, when curators and historians will explore the influence of British furniture abroad and the ways furniture makers in other countries both copied and transformed these models to suit local traditions and tastes. This series of specialist lectures will look at the diaspora of British furniture in the eighteenth century, providing insights into the traditions of design and furniture making in other countries. Each session will deal with a slightly different stylistic phase in the eighteenth century with three expert speakers dealing with the impact of British furniture design on different countries.
Tickets may be purchased for individual sessions or for the entire course, but you will benefit from a discount if all three sessions are bought together. Don’t worry if you cannot attend the sessions live because they will be recorded and links to the recording will be sent to ticketholders. These recordings will not be available to purchase after the course has ended. FHS members and ECD members will receive a discount on all tickets. For further information and to purchase tickets, please go to the Eventbrite listing. If you have any questions, please email bifmo@furniturehistorysociety.org.
Times each week: 5.30–8pm (GMT) / 12.30–3pm (EST)
Week 1 | Tuesday, 12 November
British Furniture Abroad in the Early Eighteenth Century
• Amy Lim — Daniel Marot and the Influence of His Design
• Henriette Graf — Furniture Design in Germany, 1700–1760
• Alyce Englund — The Influence of Chippendale’s Designs in the Americas
Week 2 | Tuesday, 19 November
British Furniture in Germany, Portugal, and Spain
• Wolfram Koeppe — Abraham and David Roentgen: The Chippendale Connection
• João Magalhães — Portugal and English Furniture
• Mario Mateos Martín — English Influences in Spain: The Royal Collections as a Case Study
Week 3 | Tuesday, 26 November
The Influence of British Furniture in Germany and Italy
• Enrico Colle — British Models for Italian Craftsmen during the Eighteenth Century
• Ulrich Leben — Molitor and English Design
• Daniel Ackermann — Title forthcoming
Lecture | Margaret Grasselli on Neoclassical Drawings
Upcoming at the AIC:
Margaret Morgan Grasselli | Neoclassical Drawings—What’s Old Is New Again
Art Institute of Chicago, Saturday, 2 November 2024, 2pm
Adrien Victor Auger after Jacques-Louis David, Fainting Young Girl (Wilmington: Horvitz Collection).
Discover the defining features of Neoclassicism in this exploration of the origins and characteristics of the ‘new classical’ style that dominated Europe, especially France, in the late-18th century. With an eye towards the drawings featured in Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from the Horvitz Collection, Margaret Morgan Grasselli, a leading expert in the field of French drawings, documents the movement’s roots: the careful study of Roman antiquities, the development of an austerely dramatic, visually striking pictorial style, and the depiction of subjects from both ancient and modern history.
Margaret Morgan Grasselli worked for 40 years in the department of graphic arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, 30 of them as curator of Old Master drawings. An expert on French drawings, especially those of the 18th century, she organized many major exhibitions, most notably Watteau, 1684–1721 in 1984; Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800 in 2009; and Hubert Robert in 2016. After retiring from the National Gallery in 2020, Meg spent three years as visiting senior scholar for drawings at the Harvard Art Museums, where she also served as visiting lecturer in the department of history of art in the faculty of arts and sciences.
Lecture | Black Genius: The Extraordinary Portrait of Francis Williams
From the V&A:
Fara Dabhoiwala | Black Genius: Science, Race, and the Extraordinary Portrait of Francis Williams
Online and in-person, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 16 October 2024, 7pm (2pm ET)
Unidentified painter, Portrait of Francis Williams of Jamaica, ca. 1740, oil on canvas, 76 × 64 cm (London: V&A).
Join historian Fara Dabhoiwala for the captivating story behind one of the V&A’s most fascinating portraits.
In 1928, the V&A acquired a previously unknown portrait. It shows the Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams (c. 1690–1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. In all of the previous history of Western art, there is no other image like this: a man who had been born into slavery, shown as a gentleman and scholar. The museum presumed it was a satire—but who had made it, when, where, and why, has remained a puzzle ever since. Join Fara Dabhoiwala as he reveals the astonishing story of the painting’s true meaning, its connections to the greatest scientists of the Enlightenment—and Francis Williams’s extraordinary message to posterity. This talk will be streamed on Zoom, and all ticketholders will receive a link to view the morning of the event.
The talk is in association with the London Review of Books.
Lecture | Jean-Baptiste Boiston (1734–1814): Sculpteur ornemaniste
Upcoming at the Institut culturel italien de Paris:
Brice Leibundgut et Maxime Georges Métraux | Jean-Baptiste Boiston (1734–1814): Sculpteur ornemaniste de l’hôtel de Gallifet
Institut culturel italien de Paris / Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Parigi, 24 October 2024, 6.30pm
Né en 1734 à Morteau, dans le Doubs, Jean-Baptiste Boiston est un sculpteur ornemaniste de premier plan durant la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Il est principalement actif à Paris de 1760 à 1792, avant d’émigrer au moment de la Révolution. En 1814, au lendemain de la Restauration, il revient s’établir dans la capitale française où il s’éteint cette même année. Cette conférence se propose d’étudier son œuvre et d’inventorier sa production connue à ce jour. Les créations de Jean-Baptiste Boiston sont principalement à destination de nombreux hôtels particuliers parisiens, mais aussi au service du prince de Condé (Palais Bourbon, château de Chantilly). Ses différents chantiers auprès de l’architecte Étienne François Legrand feront l’objet d’une analyse détaillée, au premier rang desquels le chantier de l’hôtel de Galliffet, actuel Institut culturel italien de Paris. Cette conférence sera l’occasion de plonger dans l’univers de cet entrepreneur en ornements sous le règne de Louis XVI, de découvrir son métier et ses spécificités, mais aussi d’évoquer sa relation avec l’Italie.
Brice Leibundgut, historien de l’art, trésorier et administrateur de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, spécialiste de l’art en Franche-Comté, expert UFE de trois peintres de cette région : Gustave Courtois, Dagnan-Bouveret, Robert Fernier.
Maxime Georges Métraux, historien de l’art, membre de l’équipe de la galerie Hubert Duchemin et chargé d’enseignement à l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, administrateur de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français.
Online Talk | Rachel Jacobs on Ornament Prints at the Cooper Hewitt
From the Cooper Hewitt:
Rachel Jacobs | A Dictionary of Ornament: Highlights from Cooper Hewitt’s Print Collection
Online (via Zoom), 24 October 2024, 1.00pm ET
Title page and Frieze Designs, plate 7 from IIe Cahier d’Ornements et Frises (2nd Book of Ornaments and Friezes), 1777; Jacques Juillet after Henri Sallembier, published by Le Père et Avaulez (Paris); etching and engraving in red ink on laid paper (Cooper Hewitt).
Join Cooper Hewitt for an illustrated talk exploring the Decloux collection of ornament and architecture prints. The museum is home to the premier collection of ornament prints in the United States, consisting of over 13,000 European prints from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The lecture will include highlights from the collection by some of the most celebrated artists and designers of the period, as well a discovery of more hidden treasures by many forgotten or lesser-known artists and printmakers.
Ornament prints were produced with the purpose of illustrating designs, patterns, or motifs of decorative ornament for use by craftsman and applicable to all aspects of applied arts from ceramic vases to furniture, from wall paneling to wrought-iron gates. This illustrated talk will introduce the Decloux collection of ornament and architecture prints by exploring the language of ornament. How do these printmakers and publishers describe and title their works? What are the most common terms and motifs found in this broad genre and why? And how do these two-dimensional intaglio prints translate to real three-dimensional objects and interiors?
The talk is free with registration. It will also be recorded and posted on Cooper Hewitt’s YouTube channel within two weeks.
Rachel Jacobs is an independent curator specializing in French 17th-and 18th-century books and prints, based in Toronto, Canada. Since 2021, she is the Remote Senior Research Cataloguer for the Decloux collection of ornament and architecture prints in the Department of Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She was previously Curator of Books and Manuscripts at Waddesdon Manor (Rothschild Collections) National Trust in England, where she continues to work remotely part-time. She has curated several exhibitions at Waddesdon Manor including most recently Alice’s Wonderlands: Life, Collections, and Legacy of Alice de Rothschild (1847–1922) (2022–23, co-curated).
Caitlin Condell is the associate curator and head of the Department of Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, where she oversees a collection of nearly 147,000 works on paper dating from the 14th century to the present. She has organized and contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications. Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Condell held positions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and The Museum of Modern Art.
Research Lunch | London’s Periodical Architecture, 1700–1750
Thomas Archer, St John Smith Square, London, completed in 1728
(Photo: © Matthew Lloyd Roberts)
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Next month at the Mellon Centre:
Matthew Lloyd Roberts | London’s Periodical Architecture: Digital Humanities and the Built Environment, 1700–1750
Paul Mellon Centre, London, 15 November 2024, 1pm
In recent years, large-scale digitisation of early modern periodicals has revolutionised the searchability of collections of ephemeral print culture. Enabled by optical character recognition technology, this shift has transformed the way scholars use databases of primary material, introducing new quantitative approaches to these vast collections. However, this shift also poses epistemological questions within new digital humanities frameworks. The paper will explore this shift by presenting material newly discovered by these methods relating to church building in London in the first half of the eighteenth century. Firstly, looking at the way that the work of the New Churches Commission was represented and debated by the politically factional newspaper culture in the first years of Hanoverian rule, and then recognising the effect this discourse may have had in shaping the way that people experienced the city. By incorporating periodical culture as an important context of the work of the Commission, for the first time this study proposes a substantive media and reception history of these iconic buildings of the English Baroque.
Furthermore, this paper will consider the explosion of architectural publishing in the periodical press of the mid-1730s, in the context of James Ralph’s Critical Review, examining the way that architectural practitioners such as John James were increasingly forced to foray into periodical culture to defend their expertise and reputations. These events will be read towards the political and social meanings of church building and church restoration, and the growing anxiety about the need to disambiguate the meanings of the built environment to the urban public in an age of print culture.
Matthew Lloyd Roberts is a history of art PhD candidate at Downing College, Cambridge and member of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture. His PhD research is concerned with the cultural reception of the changing built environment of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He studied ancient and modern history at Keble College, Oxford and has an MA in architectural history from the Bartlett, UCL. Complementing his academic work, he is also interested in disseminating academic research to broader audiences and produces and hosts two podcasts concerned with architectural history and culture, the independent About Buildings and Cities and the official podcast of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. His architectural criticism has also appeared in Tribune (magazine), The New Statesman, and The Critic, and he leads architectural walking tours for a variety of organisations including Open City.
Lecture | Jussi Nuorteva on August Philip Armfelt in England, 1790–91
From the Society of Antiquaries:
Jussi Nuorteva | A Swedish-Finnish Antiquarian and Military Officer in England
Online (via YouTube), Society of Antiquaries of London, 14 October 2024, 1.30pm
August Philip Armfelt, ca. 1830 (Wiurila Manor, Halikko, Finland).
Discover the life of Baron August Philip Armfelt (1768–1839), Aide-de-Camp of the Swedish King Gustaf, and hear about his adventures during a trip to England in 1790–1791.
Free poster display on the ground floor of the Society’s Burlington House premises, 10am–4pm each day:
Tuesday, 15 October
Wednesday, 16 October
Thursday, 17 October
Friday, 18 October
During this period, the connection between Sweden and France had been close, but those ties were broken in the French Revolution of 1789. Afterward, new connections arose between Britain and Sweden. Britain was concerned about the rising power of Russia in the Baltic Sea area, crucial for import of tar and iron—essential materials in shipbuilding. Sweden, where Finland had been part of since 12th century, was the most important producer of these goods. Thus, new relations were formed.
While in England, August Philip Armfelt met many interesting people, not only the royals. His autobiography, around which the exhibition is built, tells of his various meetings and conversations with many other areas of the society. Armfelt met people like Goodfellow, the Swedish artist Elias Martin (one of the early academicians of the Royal Academy of Arts), and abolitionists like John Wedgwood and Swedish Carl Bernhard Wadenström. Sadly, Armfelt’s travels lasted only until 1792, when Swedish King Gustaf III was murdered by his opponents and a block of noble men took the power.
Live-streamed and open to anyone to join online, the lecture forms part of a series of events organised by the Embassy of Sweden in London and the Embassy of Finland in London, with the support of Samfundet Ehrensvärd, Medical Counsellor Sakari Alhopuro, Stiftelsen Tre Smeder and the Kalevi Kuitusen Foundation.
The YouTube link is available here»
Jussi Nuorteva was National Archivist of Finland until his retirement in 2022. He is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, as well as Chancellor of the Orders of the White Rose of Finland and the Lion of Finland.
Artists in Conversation | Flora Yukhnovich
This evening from YCBA:
Artists in Conversation | Flora Yukhnovich
In-person and online, Hastings Hall, Yale School of Architecture, New Haven, 1 October 2025, 6pm
Flora Yukhnovich, photo by Kasia Bobula.
Flora Yukhnovich will talk to Eleanor Nairne, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Watch the livestream here.
The Artists in Conversation series brings together curators and artists to discuss artistic practices and insights into their work.
Born in 1990 in Norwich, UK, Flora Yukhnovich developed her characteristic painting language while studying at City and Guilds of London Art School, where she completed her MA in fine art in 2017. She also studied portraiture at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. Yukhnovich’s art boldly explores materiality and process as vehicles for meaning, with cascading and swirling forms that evoke rhythm and energy, flowing between representation and abstraction. Her immersive paintings splice historic styles, from French rococo and Italian baroque to abstract expressionism, with references drawn from contemporary films, music, literature, and consumer culture. Through her work, Yukhnovich addresses dynamics of power inherent in received readings of art-historical subjects and their associated hierarchies. She questions notions of femininity and gender that are hard-wired into the aesthetic language of color and form.
Yukhnovich received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award in 2013 and 2016. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions worldwide. Her work is included in many collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Roberts Institute of Art, London; and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. She lives and works in London.
Eleanor Nairne is the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and department head, modern and contemporary art, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Previously, she was the senior curator at Barbican Art Gallery, London, where her exhibitions included Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017), Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019), Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty (2021), Soheila Sokhanvari: Rebel Rebel (2022), Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle (2023), and Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight (2023–24). She also curated Erotic Abstraction: Eva Hesse / Hannah Wilke (2021) at Acquavella Galleries in New York.
Panel Discussion | Jeremy Bentham’s Books at UCL
From Eventbrite:
Jeremy Bentham’s Books in UCL’s Special Collections
UCL Object Based Learning Laboratory, London, 9 October 2024
An event exploring Jeremy Bentham’s book collection and ways in which it continues to shape UCL’s library holdings today.
It has long been known that the 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham bequeathed a number of his books to University College London (known at the time as the London University). But the contents of the bequest and the faith of the books had remained obscure. A recent discovery of an item-by-item list of the books in the UCL library archives by Colin Penman (UCL Head of Records) and a Bentham expert, Professor Tim Causer, sparked a project to uncover some of Bentham’s books in UCL’s rare book collections, overseen by Erika Delbecque (UCL’s Head of Rare Books). Join UCL Special Collections to hear Colin, Tim, and Erika talk about the project, the discoveries made so far, the process of identifying Bentham’s books, and their significance today. The original list of the Bentham’s bequest, along with some of the books from his library (many heavily annotated by Bentham himself), will be on display. The event is free and open to all, but booking is essential.
The UCL guide to the Bentham Book Collection offers a helpful introduction to our holdings as well as information about researching and accessing this collection. You can also read more about our ongoing research into Bentham’s bequest here.
Wednesday, 9 October 2024
3.00–4.00pm | Panel discussion and collections display
4.00–4.30pm | Collections display and refreshments
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