Enfilade

The Honourable Society of the Inner Temple is pleased to announce that its Calendars of Inner Temple Records, 1505 to 1845, are now available online and may be accessed via the Inner Temple’s website.

The Calendars detail the administrative decisions made by the Inn’s Bench Table and Parliament, and also publish many of the other series of documents contained in the Inn’s archive, including account books from 1682, account receipt books 1682 to 1870 and other miscellaneous documents. Genealogists will be able to search for ancestors admitted to the Inn and its Chambers as well as any that were called to the bar using a document wordsearch. The first volumes are edited by F.A. Inderwick Q.C. a former Treasurer of the Inn in 1898 and include his own excellent
introductions. This also contains the Register of Burials at the Temple Church from 1660 to 1715. The editorship is then taken over by R.A.Roberts in 1933 who continues with the introductions to each volume until 1800. More recently Celia Charlton has transcribed our records to produce the volume 1836 to 1845.

The volumes take some time to load due to their size and we thank you for your patience and hope that soon we will be able to split the size of the files and thereby speed up the process. Any enquiries should be addressed to the archivist Celia Pilkington, cpilkington@innertemple.org.uk

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

As noted at The History of Parliament:

As announced at the recent BSECS conference in Oxford, the winner of the BSECS Digital Prize 2013 is The History of Parliament. In the words of the judges:

“The History of Parliament Online is an immensely valuable new resource for scholars of the long eighteenth century. It makes their comprehensive survey of British political history freely available, and presented in a form that is easily navigable and visually attractive.”

The site can be found via the BSECS Links page or directly here»

The prize is funded by Adam Matthew Digital, and GALE Cengage Learning. It is judged and awarded by BSECS. Nominations close on 13 December in any year.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

From The History of Parliament:

This site contains all of the biographical, constituency and introductory survey articles published in The History of Parliament series. Work is still underway on checking and cleaning the data that has been transferred into the website from a number of sources, and the current version of the site is still provisional. In order to find out more about the articles produced by the History, click on the links in the ‘Research’ section above. Additional material – explanatory articles, and images of Members, Parliaments and elections – have been produced specially for the website, and can be found through the ‘Explore’ and ‘Gallery’ sections above. For more information on the History, see the About us section, follow us on Facebook and Twitter or read the HistoryOfParliament, Director and VictorianCommons blogs.

I should have noted this incredibly useful resource much, much earlier. As a compendium of primary materials, The Art World in Britain 1660 to 1735 is an ongoing project, with a completion date estimated at 2020. There’s a large team of people who deserve credit, but Dr. Richard Stephens stands out for his impressive work as editor. General information is provided below, and news of the latest additions are available here (details for having your name added to the update list are available at the website). -CH

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

The Art World in Britain 1660 to 1735

The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735 will create a searchable corpus of the principal primary materials relating to the arts in early modern Britain. It will present new research in the form of a biographical dictionary, a database of art sales, a topographical dictionary and a group of subject-based texts. It will provide tools for further research with a database of financial records and a large checklist of works of art. The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735 is a major initiative of Court, Country, City: British Art 1660-1735. It is a long-term project, based at the University of York, which collaborates with other scholars and institutions and welcomes the involvement of its users. The website will be published as a developing work in progress: substantial additions of data will be uploaded every three months, and functional enhancements will keep pace with the growing body of material. The project aims to reach completion in October 2020.

Recently announced by the BGC:

The Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant of $1 million by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts to establish the Center’s first named institute.

“The study of American material culture and art has always been a cornerstone of the BGC academic mission,” said Dean Peter N. Miller. “This magnificent commitment from the Horowitz Foundation will not only enhance the BGC’s existing program and provide essential financial support to our students, but also enable us to think big.”

Over the past several years, the Horowitz Foundation has generously supported the BGC through grants for exhibitions on topics of American material culture presented by the BGC Gallery. This latest award will provide a firm foundation to sustain and grow a key aspect of the Center’s academic program. Among the Horowitz Institute’s teaching, research, and scholarship components will be:

• A fellowship awarded to a PhD student with an approved dissertation topic focusing on an aspect of American material culture

• The Materials of American Art program to provide MA students with first-hand exposure to materials and techniques used to create objects and opportunities to engage with artists and artisans working in a variety of media

• A prize for the best Qualifying Paper on a topic in American art

• The establishment of the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Seminars for advanced discussion of a wide range of topics and issues in architecture, decorative arts, design, and collecting involving American material culture

• The creation of a book prize for the best manuscript in the field of American art and culture to be awarded in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz

“I founded the BGC in 1993 with the conviction that the aspirations and habits of civilization are revealed through art and objects, which are fundamental to our lives,” said Dr. Susan Weber, BGC Founder and Director. “The Horowitz Institute will benefit future professors, curators, and authors who will one day be making valuable contributions to the scholarship in the field. We extend our deepest gratitude to the directors of the Horowitz Foundation for this significant commitment that will serve both student need and the wider academic community.”

The Raymond and Margaret Horowitz Foundation was established by an extraordinary couple. New Yorkers to the core, they collected American Impressionist art avidly, beginning in the early 1960s, when there were few others interested in this genre. Mr. and Mrs. Horowitz scoured galleries in New York and Boston, and bought singular examples in oil, watercolor, pastel, charcoal, and print media. In 1999, forty-nine Impressionist and Realist paintings and works on paper from the collection were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the response was resounding.

“The Horowitz Foundation was formed to better the education, exhibition, and scholarship in the field of American art. Thus far grants have been made to many institutions, museum and university alike. We are proud to assist the Bard Graduate Center in their work, which has been consistently thoughtful in approach and brilliant in execution,” commented Warren Adelson, Director of the Horowitz Foundation.

American Material Culture at the BGC

From its inception in 1993, the BGC has seen the study of American decorative arts and material culture as a cornerstone of the graduate program. Several members of the faculty specialize or teach in areas pertaining to American art, design, and cultural history. Among them are Ken Ames, one of this country’s leading authorities on American silver; Catherine Whalen, a specialist in American craft; and David Jaffee, a specialist in the material culture of early America. An anthropologist, Aaron Glass focuses his research on the material culture of Native American cultures, particularly those found in the Northwest Coast. Ivan Gaskell, Pat Kirkham, Michele Majer, and Amy Ogata teach and publish in aspects of American material culture ranging from costumes and textiles to architecture, design, film, and history.

Organized by the academic programs department and open to the general public, BGC’s Seminar Series is a venue for advanced intellectual discussion in New York City and an expression of the range of methods and approaches for studying the cultural history of the material world. In 2007, the BGC inaugurated a special series focused on New York and American Material Culture. Since then leading scholars of American history from such venerable institutions as Yale, Brown, Winterthur, the University of Virginia, and the Getty Institute have come to the BGC to examine a wide range of topics related to architecture, decorative arts, design, and collecting.

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of five of Blake’s tempera paintings on biblical subjects, eleven of his water color illustrations to the Bible, and one of his large color printed drawings, Hecate, or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy. These works have been added to groups previously published. In addition, we have republished all the biblical temperas and water colors to add illustration descriptions and make their designs and inscriptions fully searchable.

William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, © Brooklyn Museum

The Bible had an enormous influence on Blake’s work as both artist and poet. His tempera paintings and water colors of biblical subjects, mostly created for his patron Thomas Butts beginning in 1799, are among Blake’s most important responses to that text. The tempera paintings now published are based on passages in the New Testament concerning the life of Jesus and his family. We are particularly pleased to include Christ Raising Jairus’s Daughter, a well preserved but little known work recently acquired by the Mead Art Museum of Amherst College. The new group of water colors ranges from Numbers (Moses Striking the Rock) to two of Blake’s most powerful explorations of the apocalyptic sublime, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun andThe Number of the Beast is 666, both based on Revelation. The Great Red Dragon from the Brooklyn Museum has received a good deal of contemporary attention because of its central role in Thomas Harris’s bestselling 1981 novel, Red Dragon, and the films of 1986 and 2002 based on it. The Archive now includes twenty-four tempera paintings and sixty-four water colors based on the Bible. All of Blake’s extant water color illustrations to Revelation are available.

The publication of Hecate from the National Gallery of Scotland completes our presentation of Blake’s large color printed drawings, considered by some to be his greatest achievements as a pictorial artist. The Archive now contains all thirty traced impressions of the twelve subjects portrayed in the large color prints.

This publication includes works from several collections not previously represented in the Archive. Accordingly, we are also publishing Blake collection lists for the Brooklyn Museum, Mead Art Museum (Amherst College), National Gallery of Scotland, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and Rosenbach Museum and Library. These lists include all original works by Blake in their respective collections, not just those published in the Archive.

With this publication we have also implemented a technical improvement that reflects the Archive’s commitment to open-source digital humanities principles. By clicking on the “View XML Source File” link on Electronic Edition Information pages, users can now view the XML source code for any work in the Archive.

As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive

The YCBA’s complete art collection, including nearly 50,000 works on paper, is now accessible online

The Yale Center for British Art is pleased to announce that its entire art collection is now available online. Visitors to the website can search the Center’s collection of more than two thousand paintings, two hundred sculptures, and nearly fifty thousand prints and drawings from the Elizabethan period to the present. This is the first time the Center’s complete holdings of works on paper, the most important and comprehensive collection of its kind outside the United Kingdom, have been are searchable online. The Center has also made available more than thirteen hundred records of its historic frame collection, among the first museums in the world to do so. These frames join other collections at the Center that have been made available online, including a sizable portion of the rare books and manuscripts collection, and the entire Reference Library.

More than one-third of the new prints and drawings records include high-resolution images, and the Center offers free downloads of works that are in the public domain as high-resolution TIFs. This update to the online collection also includes the release of expanded data, such as bibliographic citations, for the records of specific works of art. More than six thousand citations, including books, journals, newspaper articles, auction catalogues, and online resources, have been added to four hundred objects to date, with more being added daily.

Aside from making its collections accessible online, the Center has partnered with Google Art Project and is working with other platforms to allow broader audiences to discover British art. It has also created a data provider that allows third parties to harvest the Center’s collections for use in their own content platforms. Those interested in harvesting the collections as either extensible mark-up language (XML) or linked open data can now find simple instructions for how to do so at britishart.yale.edu/collections/usingcollections/ technology. The Center is particularly focused on the potential of linked open data to disseminate its collections, to expand the possibilities of integration between related collections, and to support
opportunities for developing new technologies for research in the realm of
cultural heritage.

Good news for anyone planning to make use of the YCBA in 2014, but for the summer and fall of 2013, a bit of extra planning is in order. -CH

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Summer and Fall 2013

The first phase of a refurbishment project at the Yale Center for British Art has been scheduled for summer and fall 2013, and there will be limited availability of some services and partial closures on the second and third floors, as noted below. The permanent collection on the fourth floor will remain on view throughout this period. It is expected that the project will be completed by early January 2014.

The Departments of Prints & Drawings and Rare Books & Manuscripts will be temporarily relocating their offices within the building, and the Study Room will be closed from June through December 2013. The collections will be transferred to other parts of the building over the summer of 2013.

As soon as these transfers are completed, staff will make every effort to accommodate the needs of faculty, students, and scholars. However, access to the collections will be limited during the fall term and by appointment only. Requests for materials will require at least two weeks advance notice (ycba.prints@yale.edu). The Center will continue to accommodate classes using works from the Prints & Drawings and Rare Books & Manuscripts collections by special arrangement with the staff; to discuss your requirements, please contact Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints & Drawings, and Elisabeth Fairman, Senior Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts.

The Center will be unable to host Visiting Scholars during the refurbishment project. Please note that during this period, the second- and third-floor galleries will be closed, as will the Library Court. The second-floor classroom will remain accessible for teaching; please contact Jane Nowosadko, Senior Manager of Programs, to check availablity. The Reference Library will keep normal hours, although there may be some disruptions over the summer. Details will be circulated as they become known. Tours of the collection will be offered as normal, although requests need to be made two weeks in advance (ycba.education@yale.edu).

There will be a regular roster of programs in the Center’s Lecture Hall throughout the refurbishment project. It is expected that normal services in the Study Room will resume by early January 2014.

Contact Details

• Requests for materials from Prints and Drawings and Rare Books and Manuscripts should be made at least two weeks in advance by e-mailing ycba.prints@yale.edu.
• To discuss requirements for classes contact the curators: Gillian Forrester, Curator of Prints & Drawings, gillian.forrester@yale.edu, Elisabeth Fairman, Senior Curator of Rare Books & Manuscripts, elisabeth.fairman@yale.edu
• Inquiries about the availability of the second-floor classroom and the Docent Room should be e-mailed to Jane Nowosadko, Senior Manager of Programs, jane.nowosadko@yale.edu
• Inquiries about the Reference Library can be addressed to Kraig Binkowski, Chief Librarian, kraig.binkowski@yale.edu
• For information about the Visiting Scholar program for 2013–14, please visit britishart.yale.edu/research/visiting-scholars, or contact Lisa Ford, Associate Head of Research, lisa.ford@yale.edu.

In 2013 the Attingham Trust for the Study of Historic Houses and Collections will offer three courses: the three-week Summer School (5-22 July), the nine-day Royal Collection Studies (1-10 September), and the nine-day Study Programme (12-20 September). Whereas the first two courses follow similar itineraries each year, the Study Week is set in a different location each year, and its timing varies as well. 2013 will offer an in-depth study of the Norfolk Country House, corresponding with the upcoming William Kent exhibition (at the Bard Graduate Center in the fall of 2013 before appearing at the V&A in 2014) and taking advantage of the summer exhibition Houghton Revisited: The Walpole Masterpieces from Catherine the Great’s Hermitage, which will reassemble the collection of Sir Robert Walpole in its eighteenth-century home of Houghton Hall (it’s a safe bet that the course will include special, private viewing opportunities for a show that’s sure to be crowded much of the summer). The Study Week will be directed by Andrew Moore, the former Keeper of Art at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, and the co-editor of A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage (Yale UP, 2002). -CH

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

From the Attingham Trust:

Attingham Trust Course Offerings for 2013
Application due dates vary according to the programme, starting 31 January 2013

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Attingham Study Programme — The Norfolk Country House: Collections and Networks

THE ATTINGHAM STUDY PROGRAMME is a strenuous and stimulating nine-day course studying historic houses and their collections. Based in specific regions of Britain and often abroad, a wide range of houses, many of them private, are visited in the company of tutors. The architecture, gardens and interiors, including collections of paintings, furniture and other decorative arts, are studied within a context of social and cultural history. It is intended for museum curators, lecturers, architects, conservationists and others with a keen interest in the fine and decorative arts. Accommodation is in modest hotels where lectures are also given. Some full and partial scholarships are available.

The eastern wetlands and broad skies of Norfolk boast a landscape which was the inspiration behind the first regional School of painting in Britain, together with an array of classic country houses that few other English regions can equal. The county’s close proximity to London placed it in the pole position of England’s second city from the medieval period, until the coming of the railways reduced the centrality of its agrarian economy. The 15th-century origins of the moated manor house of OXBURGH HALL and the privately owned Tudor pile of EAST BARSHAM survive today as testimony of the earlier period.

The focus of the 2013 programme will be two great Palladian houses still in private hands, both with magnificent interiors and furnishings by William Kent. The quintessential Grand Tour house, HOLKHAM HALL will feature seminars on the library, archive, silver, textiles and sculpture. We also visit HOUGHTON HALL, the country palace that Sir Robert Walpole controversially built to house his great collection of European master paintings and classical sculpture while based at 10 Downing Street as first minister successively to both George I and George II. This visit will also include seminars on paintings and textiles, visits to the private Picture Gallery and the contemporary sculpture within the park, together with the newly established gardens in memory of Sybil Cholmondeley.

The programme, based in the heart of the medieval market town and seaport of KING’S LYNN in West Norfolk, will also visit the city of NORWICH, and will include tours of the historic built environment of both centres, with their merchant houses and guildhalls. Seminars in NORWICH CASTLE will focus on Norwich Silver and the redisplayed Colman galleries featuring the paintings of Norwich School of Artists. The course plans to feature significant private houses, including RAYNHAM HALL, seat of the Townshend family, which also features the work of William Kent, and NARFORD HALL, home to successive generations of the Fountaine family.

Additional information about all three courses is available here»