HBA Publication Grant
Historians of British Art Publication Grant
Proposals due by 15 January 2012
The Historians of British Art (HBA) invites applications for its 2012 publication grant. The society will award up to $750 to offset publication costs for a book manuscript in the field of British art or visual culture that has been accepted by a publisher. Applicants must be current members of HBA. To apply, send a 500-word project description, publication information (name of journal or press and projected publication date), budget, and CV to Renate Dohmen, Prize Committee Chair, HBA, brd4231@louisiana.edu.
The East India Company at Home
As noted by Emile de Bruijn at Treasure Hunt (and he includes terrific images), a new program developed at Warwick University aims to explore the routes by which Asian luxury goods arrived in Britain’s country houses. From the program’s website:
The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 is a 3-year research project (beginning in September 2011 and ending in August 2014) funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project is one of the many externally-funded research programmes developed under the aegis of Warwick University’s Global History & Culture Centre.
This new project is led by Margot Finn, a professor of modern British History at Warwick. Dr Helen Clifford will play a leading role in orchestrating the project’s engagement with local and family historians, working together with the project’s full-time postdoctoral research fellow, Dr Kate Smith. Ms Ellen Filor will be funded by the grant to complete a doctoral dissertation on East India Company family networks and identities in Roxburghshire, Scotland (c. 1780-1857) as an integral part of the larger research team.
The project seeks to enhance historical understanding of the form and function of British country house culture by situating changes in elite domestic interiors within wider global contexts. Specifically, it explores the regional, national and imperial routes by which Asian luxury goods – ceramics, textiles, metal-ware, furniture, fine art and the like – found their way into the homes of Britain’s governing elite in the Georgian and early Victorian periods, and examines what these exotic objects meant in these domestic settings and in wider national and international contexts. The project builds upon recent developments in the study of consumer culture, gender studies, globalisation, and material culture.
The project also capitalises upon the recent explosion of historical research conducted by community-based family historians. The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857 seeks to integrate the findings produced by family and local historians, curators, academics and other researchers into a wider collaborative research project that illuminates Britain’s global material culture from the eighteenth century to the present.
For more information, visit the program’s website or click here to download a brochure.
Early Dutch Books Online
Hélène Bremer usefully draws our attention to Early Dutch Books Online, which provides free access to more than 10,000 books from the Dutch-speaking region from 1781-1800. The website is available in English, and the texts cover not only Dutch books but also French ones as this was the language of the court. As noted at the site . . .
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James Cook, "Reize rondom de waereld," translated by J.D. Pasteur, 15 vols. + atlas (Leiden, Amsterdam, and The Hague: Honkoop, Allart en Van Cleef, 1799-1803)
Early Dutch Books Online gives full-text access to more than 2 million pages in 10,000 books from the Dutch-speaking region from the period 1781-1800.The project is a collaboration between the Royal Library of the Netherlands and the university libraries of Amsterdam and Leiden. Books from the Special Collections of these libraries have been digitized and made available on word level via this website.
The Amsterdam (UB UVA) and Leiden (UBL) university libraries and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) possess a large number of similar and complementary Special Collections, which partially overlap (where printed materials are concerned). The expression “Special Collections” is used for a wide variety of materials that are, for any reason whatsoever, rare, expensive and often fragile. Materials from Special Collections are kept in depots equipped with security measures and climate control. They consist of old, printed publications in a wide array of languages from various countries. In addition to printed works, there are also large collections of written materials in the libraries, varying from mediaeval manuscripts, later manuscripts, including scholars’ and artists’ archives, to over a million letters. There are also collections of maps and atlases, prints, photographs, decorated paper, bindings and typographic materials.
Online Library
The Special Collections departments of UB UVA, UBL and the KB launched the initiative “National Infrastructure for Digital Access to Special Collections” in October 2005. This is a plan for an online library for Humanities consisting of fully digitized items from the Special Collections of the institutions involved. Digitizing the various Special Collections from these three libraries, and in time also from other libraries, makes a large quantity of previously mostly inaccessible texts accessible to scholars and for education. Early Dutch Books Online is the first step toward this online library.The importance of digitization of scientific sources is evident. Without source material, research in the Humanities is impossible. Electronic access contributes to the efficiency, effectiveness and reliability of the research and provides opportunities for entirely new types of research. Digitization makes new scientific breakthroughs possible. Te availability of large text corpora is necessary for this. Early Dutch Books Online makes such large files accessible.
Selection Criteria
For Early Dutch Books Online a selection was made of old books from the period 1781 to1800. This selection has been based on the content and practical criteria. For example, books printed in Gothic letters are left out of the selection, because the Optical Character Recognition of this letter doesn’t have the desired result.When the project started, some criteria were established. Not only was the period between 1781 and 1800 very interesting from a Dutch historic standpoint, the books are also very suitable for digitization as regards to their typography. The point in time when books were no longer printed in Gothic typeface but in Roman typeface lies roughly in the final quarter of the seventeenth century for the Netherlands. In the eighteenth century, the ‘modern’ (Roman) type gradually became more predominant. Material printed in Roman is much more suitable for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) than the Gothic material. This is why material printed in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century was selected for this project. Within the eighteenth century, the project limits itself to the period 1781-1800 for the time being. The change to Roman script was as good as completed by then.
Categories
Books categorized in the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN) consist for a third of governmental publications, academic publications (mainly in Latin) and occasional poems. The interest in these categories is normally not very large. The remaining part, the so called regular works, consists of historical, political, theological, and literary works. This is where this project concentrates on. The majority of the searches by scientist in the STCN focuses on these works.
Language
The emphasis lies on ‘Dutch material’, in other words, printed in the Netherlands or treating of the Netherlands. The Dutch language cannot be employed as a strict selection criterion. Before 1800 books weren’t always printed in Dutch. Universities used Latin, the court spoke French. That is why the project includes both Dutch and French materials.
Video: Electronic Enlightenment Project
This video shows advances made by the Electronic Enlightenment’s Mapping the Republic of Letters Project, a fascinating collaboration between various institutions and scholars, which aims to investigate the ‘social network’ of the eighteenth century. Using new technologies such as geographical imaging, the project has created numerous maps of the correspondence of the Republic of Letters, which can be analysed, compared and contrasted. – FG
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From the Electronic Enlightenment Website:
Digging into Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters
An exciting collaboration between the Electronic Enlightenment Project (University of Oxford) and the Mapping the Republic of LettersProject (Stanford University) with participation of Chris Weaver at the University of Oklahoma.
This initiative involves mining and interpreting details relating to locations drawn from Electronic Enlightenment‘s corpus of 58,776 letters and documents from the long 18th century. The international project team will explore ways to visualize and annotate these relationships, developing sophisticated new tools to map and explore the complex geographical interconnections between these tens of thousands of letters to and from forty countries across Europe, Asia, and North and South America that can be found in the EE collection.
AAH Oral Histories Project
The Association of Art Historians Oral Histories Project represents a ground-breaking attempt to record the history of art history. Via a series of interviews with luminary scholars, the AAH has begun to answer questions such as: What prompted the formation of the Association of Art Historians? Why was such an Association needed? How did it take shape? And what of its impact on the discipline, nationally and internationally, both then and now? For HECAA members, interviews with leading 18th-century and early modern scholars such as Luke Hermann, Marcia Pointon, Alison Yarrington and Evelyn Welch will likely be of interest. -FG
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From the Association of Art Historians:
Over the past two years, the AAH conducted a series of audio interviews conducted with art historians involved with AAH during its founding era. Excerpts from the recordings are now available to listen to on our website. 
The Association of Art Historians held its first official meeting at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in 1974. It was open to “all of those who are directly concerned with the advancement of the study of the history of art,” and within one year over 500 art historians had joined the newly formed AAH.
AAH Oral Histories explores these questions through a series of audio interviews conducted with art historians involved with AAH during its founding era. Highlights of these recordings can be heard by clicking on the link below. The complete recording from the AAH Oral Histories collection will soon to be accessible to researchers through the Archive of Art and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The interviews will also form the basis of the Voices in Art History podcast soon to be made available for download on this site.
Sixteen people were interviewed as part of the project, including art historians specializing in a variety of subject areas, former members of the AAH Executive Committee, editors of its journal Art History, a former administrator, and a publicity and marketing professional – each of whom played a role in the development of the AAH. The interviews complement the written archive of the Association of Art Historians located at the Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and were undertaken by Liz Bruchet between 2009 and 2011.
Historical Paint, Part II
For anyone especially interested in yesterday’s interview of Patrick Baty by Courtney Barnes, you might have a look at the website of The Traditional Paint Forum. In addition to publishing a journal and a newsletter entitled Smudge (reason alone to learn more!), the TPF hosts an annual workshop/conference. This year’s took place in May at the newly restored Strawberry Hill. Talks addressed topics such as ‘Historic, Exotic and Imported Pigments’, ‘Modern Manufacturing Methods and the Appearance of Paint’, ‘Raw Earth to Pigments: Vernacular Paints’, and ‘The Impact of Artificial Light on the Historic Interior’. From the TPF website:
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The Traditional Paint Forum (TPF) is interested in the influences, personalities and circumstances that gave rise to particular decorative schemes in an architectural context. But, very importantly, we also believe the only way informed judgements can be made about the significance and future of existing or lost schemes is to also understand what materials were used to create them and how they were executed. The why is not the whole story … how can be just as vital!
The holistic nature of the organisation is perhaps best reflected in its Annual Workshop/Conference where the papers given on the architectural and historical significance of particular decorative schemes are given greater depth by contributions on: paint-analysis; conservation techniques; cleaning and redecoration. This is usually supplemented by practical demonstrations of the original techniques and materials used and possible new alternative paint materials that might be worth considering.
The Annual Conference is reinforced by an annual journal containing articles on a disparate number of topics, but often including papers delivered at the conference, and a newsletter, Smudge. The TPF have also organised some very successful Technical Days (‘Paint Day’) which give an introductory overview to traditional paint technology and, through popular demand, have been repeated on a number of occasions in different United Kingdom locations.
Acces to French Theses
This free resource, theses.fr indexes some 6000 theses defended since 2006 with direct access to the texts in many cases. It seems that in most instances, there’s also an English summary.
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As noted at Le Blog ApAhAu:
L’ABES (Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement supérieur) a ouvert le 11 juillet 2011 theses.fr . Ce portail des thèses françaises inventorie environ 6000 thèses de doctorat soutenues depuis 2006 dans les établissements français, voire en collaboration avec des institutions étrangères. L’accès au texte intégral est disponible pour plus de 4000 thèses. Dans les prochains mois, theses.fr s’enrichira des données sur les thèses de doctorat en préparation, notamment celles disponibles dans le Fichier central des thèses ainsi que de la bibliographie nationale des thèses, répertoire exhaustif de toutes les thèses soutenues en France depuis 1985, disponible aujourd’hui au sein du catalogue Sudoc. Il a donc l’ambition d’être un portail d’accès unique aux thèses pour en améliorer la visibilité.
Les mots clés s’affichent lors de la recherche ; les réponses peuvent être triées par dates, établissements, écoles doctorales, disciplines, langues, directeurs de thèse, domaines. La recherche peut aussi cibler uniquement les thèses en ligne. Il n’y a pas de recherche experte disponible. On peut s’abonner à une requête effectuée via l’icône « s’abonner ». Chaque référence comprend un résumé français et anglais ainsi que des mot-clés.
Quelques efforts restent encore à faire pour l’indexation. Il est, en effet, très difficile d’obtenir des réponses cohérentes pour les thèses soutenues en histoire de l’art. D’une part, la discipline fait l’objet de plusieurs entrées ; d’autre part, « histoire de l’art » utilisée comme mot-clé renvoie aux titres des thèses comprenant les termes « histoire » « de » « l’art » avec des résultats pour le moins curieux (par exemple : « Histoire et épistémiologie de l’art dentaire »).
Understanding British Portraits Research Network
The Understanding British Portraits Research Network is an active network with free membership for professionals working with British portraits including curators, museum learning professionals, researchers, academics, and conservators. Having come across the network via its exciting 2012 bursary announcement, I was really impressed with the project’s promotion of, and research into, the British portrait. The maximum funding of £500 is intended to cover five days of research, along with accommodations and travel expenses. With news, an annual seminar, and several bursaries, the network is a resource many will find useful. –FG
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The Understanding British Portraits Network Bursary for 2012
Applications due by 8 September 2011
The Understanding British Portraits network is led by the National Portrait Gallery, the National Trust, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Renaissance North East and Renaissance South West. It aims to enhance the knowledge and understanding of portraits in all media in British collections, and to facilitate future dialogue and debate around research methodologies, interpretation, display and learning programmes. The network has a particular interest in promoting the research and interpretation of regional collections. More information can be found on the UBP website: www.portraits.specialistnetwork.org.uk.
This bursary will give the successful candidate the opportunity to devote five working days, over a period of almost six months, to a portrait-focused project of their choosing. Projects can involve a particular portrait, artist, collection, pattern of collecting, method of display, interpretation, or learning programme. The UBP network will provide a maximum budget of £500 to offset expenses such as travel and accommodation. The successful candidate is free to determine the best means of using their budget in order to complete their project; this might include a visit to the National Portrait Gallery’s Heinz Archive and Library to conduct research and meet with relevant members of staff. Applications should take the form of a concise outline (max. 500 words) of the proposed project. The proposal should include:
- a description of the project and clear objectives
- proposed activities involved in your project
- specific partners expected to be involved in your research (e.g. local libraries, private collections, auction houses, museums, etc.)
- desired outcomes and target audience
- CPD benefits
- timescale of research (all projects must be completed by 23 March 2012)
- estimated use of funds
- how the outcomes of the bursary will be disseminated among professional colleagues within the successful candidate’s organisation and region.
Applications must be accompanied by a brief nomination from line managers.
Advice for applicants:
- Please begin your application by stating that you are applying for the UBP network bursary, followed by your name, job title, and details of your nominee.
- Past applicants to the UBP bursary and placement schemes are welcome to apply again.
- The project should be realistically achievable in the limited budget and timescale.
- The bursary cannot be spent on conference fees or training courses.
The deadline for applications and nominations is 12 noon on Friday 9 September 2011; please email both applications and nominations to ssnportraiture@npg.org.uk. Applications received after this time will not be considered. In the meantime, any queries should be sent to the same address. Applications will be assessed by the Understanding British Portraits Steering Group, and all applicants contacted before the end of September.
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P R E V I O U S R E C I P I E N T S
Paul Holden, House and Collections Manager, Lanhydrock
Studio of Godfrey Kneller, "John Robartes, later 1st Earl of Radnor, Dressed in his Lord Privy Seal Robes," ca. 1680 (Lanhydrock, Cornwall)
My aim was to assess the connoisseurship and collecting habits of the first four Earls of Radnor and perhaps in the process recognise the provenance of our collections at Lanhydrock. Looking predominantly at portraiture my two trips to London took me to the NPG Heinz archive, the V&A art library to look at auction records and the British Library to look through remnants of Radnor correspondence. My aim is to write this research up for future publication and incorporate some of the findings as house presentation in our ‘Bringing Properties to Life’ project. I will also use the information in a lecture entitled ”The Earls of Radnor as Connoisseurs (1679-1758)’ to be held at Lanhydrock on 25 November 2011 (for further details or booking call 01208 265950). Furthermore, in putting these details together our Collections Management database will benefit from more detailed entries. I have wanted to do this research for some time now and the bursary has, at last, made it possible. The bursary programme worked extremely well and facilitated research which may not have been possible through the daily work pattern. I
fully applaud the scheme and am grateful for the opportunity to participate. Thank you
for giving me the opportunity to pursue this line of research. It was an experience that I
found very enriching both personally, academically and culturally.
Jo Cairns, Museum Assistant, Mount Edgcumbe House
Girl in a green dress, English School, early 17th century
The project set out to enhance our understanding of several seventeenth-century portraits in the Mount Edgcumbe collection, hopefully shedding new light on the story of the Edgcumbe family and therefore improving our ability to interpret these portraits for the public.
The four portraits chosen for the project were of unidentified sitters and were by unidentified artists. They had all been ‘cleaned’ and ‘retouched’ at various intervals in the past making them all the more difficult to decipher. Research was undertaken into the inscriptions, symbols and heraldry shown in some of the portraits, the costume worn by the sitters and the Edgcumbe family history. This all helped to date the portraits more accurately and narrow down the possible identities of the sitters. In one instance it enabled me to positively identify one of the portraits as Sir Richard Edgcumbe (1565-1639).
This project has benefitted me personally in a number of ways. It significantly increased my confidence in researching and working with the portrait collection at Mount Edgcumbe, and has also increased my understanding of many subjects I had not foreseen, for example costume, heraldry and painting conservation techniques. I believe the project has also been extremely beneficial to Mount Edgcumbe, allowing me to dedicate time on research which would otherwise not have been done.
Forvo — You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato
Note from the Editor
One of the challenges of ‘doing’ art history, whether at the introductory, student level or as an established scholar, is knowing how to pronounce lots of unfamiliar words and names. That making sense of the eighteenth century requires such a wide range of international knowledge just compounds the difficulties. A working knowledge of French and Italian go a long way, but they hardly solve all of one’s problems (and incidentally just reinforce how large the gaps are in what often counts as the field’s dominant terrain). The important addition of German helps a lot, but there’s still plenty of room for serious gaffes. Latin is always useful with languages, though sometimes it can hurt with pronunciations. And names can be tough even in one’s native language. At least for American speakers, British names like Albemarle, Derby, and Leicester are tricky enough without the likes of Featherstonhaugh (which is sometimes, maybe all the time?, pronounced Fanshaw).
The digital revolution has transformed lots of what we do, but until recently, the usage model depended upon reading as an exclusively visual (and thus silent) experience. How often have I heard fine presentations from my students, marred by their serious mispronunciation of some crucial term or person in their paper? How often have I done the same thing, realizing only a few moments before giving a talk that I’ve never actually heard that name pronounced before?
One indication of the expanding sensory dimensions of the web comes from a source that I stumbled across several months ago, Forvo. The site’s tagline is clear enough: All the words in the world. Pronounced. Well, they’re not there yet (at least as of today, no Featherstonhaugh), but what is included is impressive. This past May, the site passed the million mark, with 267 languages represented . . .
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We are celebrating these days our third year online and coinciding with this anniversary we have reached an amazing number of pronunciations: 1,000,000. We have no words to thank you for making this possible but we have a graphic instead : )
Our friend Asier has created this nice infographic where you can see the evolution of Forvo and also the key data in our way.
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The site allows users to see how the same word would be pronounced in multiple locations. The proper pronunciation, for instance, of the British surname, Albemarle, would be a mispronunciation of the eponymous town in North Carolina. Forvo gives you both.
I still have questions. Is it affectation for an American to pronounce the city Bath with a British accent? Or in fact a mispronunciation of the city’s name not to do so? It also is often quite useful to know how names were pronounced in the eighteenth century (sometimes the shifts have been substantial), and at least currently Forvo appears to deal only with the present. Still, I think it’s a really valuable tool. I’ll be pointing students to it and also checking words myself (likely much more often than I would care to confess). -CH.
Resources Offered at the Irish Georgian Society Website
In addition to providing news about numerous events and various programmes, the website for the Irish Georgian Society includes two interesting resources: 1) A Register of Traditional Building Skills and 2) A Catalogue of Irish Theses and Dissertations Relating to Architecture and the Allied Arts. The following information comes from the IGS site:
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Traditional Building Skills Register
The needs of historic buildings and structures differ to those of new buildings. In dealing with a historic building professional input is vital and craftsmen with traditional skills are a necessity. Those involved need to understand the principles and practices of conservation, as using incorrect, inappropriate or unnecessary methods can do a great deal of irreversible damage. The Register was established to ensure that those undertaking conservation work can identify craftspeople and professionals with good conservation expertise.
Users of the register should be mindful that the register has been complied from information given by those listed and no responsibility is accepted by the Irish Georgian Society for the accuracy of the information, or for any fault or accident arising from the workmanship of anyone listed, or from materials used or supplied by them. Descriptions of conservation work undertaken was requested, and is listed under each entry, so that the skills and achievements of each individual or firm can be assessed by the user of the register. Inclusion should not be regarded as either a recommendation or an endorsement by the Society. The Register is not comprehensive and no criticism is implied or intended of an individual or firm not included. Every reasonable care has been taken in the compiling of the register but no responsibility is accepted for errors and omissions. . . .
More information and access is available here»
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A Catalogue of Irish Theses and Dissertations Relating to Architecture and the Allied Arts
This catalogue is an academic resource tool that has been compiled by the Irish Georgian Society in collaboration with Ireland’s academic institutions. It provides a centralised database of Irish theses and dissertations relating to architecture and the allied arts, which have been submitted as part of an academic qualification awarded on the island of Ireland. . . .
More information and access is available here»
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