Online Talk | Conserving Paper with Live Demonstration
From The Linnean Society:
John Abbott | How to Conserve 18th- and 19th-Century Paper with Live Demonstration
Online and in-person, The Linnean Society, Burlington House, 5 March 2025, 2pm
The Linnean Society takes the preservation of its collections seriously. The Society has a full-time conservator, Janet Ashdown, and an adopt-an-item programme (AdoptLINN). The Society is also incredibly fortunate in having had an experienced volunteer and retired paper conservator, John Abbott, who has been working with Janet since 2018. In the past seven years, John has conserved many illustrations within the Society Papers Collection, and in this talk, he will demonstrate how to conserve loose 18th- and early 19th-century papers. By showcasing papers in need of conservation, John will reveal the decision-making process even before the start of conservation, and then undertake a live conservation demonstration. The demonstration will cover cleaning as well as repairing paper. We will send the link for this online event two hours before it starts.
Registration is available here»
John Abbott is a retired archive conservator who worked for the National Archives and its predecessor The Public Record Office for 43 years. He was involved in the conservation and preservation of archival material including paper and parchment manuscripts, maps, plans, designs, posters, photographs, and seals. Between 1984 and 1986 John was part of a team of three (two archive conservators and one book conservator) involved in the conservation and rebinding of Great and Little Domesday books.
Call for Papers | Creating the Museum, 1600–2025
From ArtHist.net:
Creating the Museum: Exploring the Museum Impulse in Local, Regional, and National Contexts
Conference of the National Gallery and the Museums and Galleries History Group
London, 26–27 September 2025 (dates still to be confirmed)
Proposals due by 14 March 2025
While the birth of the concept of the museum has attracted lots of scholarly attention and the desire to create new museums is now a global phenomenon, the question of how individual museums, their collections, buildings, and personnel come into being has not been widely considered. As complex organisations, museums have been created through multifaceted sets of initiatives, practices, and activities—raising money, sourcing or commissioning buildings and storage, assembling, organising and interpreting collections, developing expertise, engaging communities, fulfilling a purpose which some groups were more able to prosecute than others. Various periods have seen the flourishing of local, regional, national museums, of large or smaller scale, and of different specialisms and audiences, with varying models of governance. Some passionately wished for museums ultimately stalled, and some proposed museums never quite appeared. Some museums were created for particular audiences, at particular moments, while others evolved from earlier forms of collecting; some required particular buildings in order to begin; some have taken up residence like hermit crabs in whichever spaces were available.
To develop our understanding of the reasons for creating museums and to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the creation of the National Gallery in London, we invite proposals for a conference hosted by the National Gallery and the Museums C Galleries History Group (MGHG). The conference will focus on why and how galleries and museums internationally/globally have emerged and evolved. It will explore the different ways in which museums and public art galleries come into existence and the impulses, rationales, and objectives for ‘creating’ museums, foregrounding the wide range and variety of museum creation and exploring core questions of purpose, meaning, and context, whilst also drawing attention to the specificity of the National Gallery, reflecting on the contexts for its founding impulses and exploring the future roles, purpose, and functions of (inter)national galleries.
We seek papers covering any aspect of museum creation between about 1600 and the present day, for any type of museum, anywhere in the world. Papers should be 15–20 minutes in length; we invite individual proposals as well as proposals for a panel of papers (maximum 4 papers for a panel).
Papers may respond to these questions:
• What impulses led to the creation of museums?
• Under what circumstances have completely new types of museum been created?
• What can museums that never quite came into being, or museums that came and went, tell us?
• What role do collections (if any) play in the creation of museums?
• What role do museum buildings play in acts of creating the museum, or how has the need for physical space of various kinds impacted on the creation of museums?
• What has it taken to create a museum from public funds such as local or national taxes?
• Which individuals have created museums, out of philanthropy, passion, memorialisation or other motivations, and how?
• Is the creation of museums distinctive by specialism (natural history, art gallery, social history, etc)?
• How has the orientation of museums towards particular audiences promoted museum creation in particular ways?
• How do museums’ links with other organisations such as libraries impact on their creation?
• Are there museums whose creation is inexplicable?
• How has the National Gallery positioned itself in relation to other London, UK, and international museums in the past?
• What are the aims and objectives, benefits and drawbacks of branch museums emerging from the ‘centre’ (e.g. VCA, Tate, Guggenheim)?
• How have partnerships developed and what have been the fruits of such partnerships in diverse areas of museum life including Research, Conservation, and Education/Learning?
• What are the funding models currently available which ensure openness and parity within the sector which are worth highlighting for future reference?
• Are there any historical or actual international collaborations which offer particularly positive models for current and future practice (e.g. ICOM)?
• How should an institution like the National Gallery relate to other institutions today?
• How and in what ways is a museum like the National Gallery representative of ‘national’ art?
Please send proposals (200–300 words) with an indication of affiliation and job title to contact@mghg.info by Friday, 14 March 2025. Successful proposals will be informed by 30 April 2025. We welcome proposals from researchers at all career stages. As the conference will be exclusively ‘in person’, please note that successful speakers will be responsible for their own expenses. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
New Book | The Revolutionary Self
From Norton:
Lynn Hunt, The Revolutionary Self: Social Change and the Emergence of the Modern Individual, 1770–1800 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2025), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1324079033, $35.
An illuminating exploration of the tensions between self and society in the age of revolutions.
The eighteenth century was a time of cultural friction: individuals began to assert greater independence and there was a new emphasis on social equality. In this surprising history, Lynn Hunt examines women’s expanding societal roles, such as using tea to facilitate conversation between the sexes in Britain. In France, women also pushed boundaries by becoming artists, and printmakers’ satiric takes on the elite gave the lower classes a chance to laugh at the upper classes and imagine the potential of political upheaval. Hunt also explores how promotion in French revolutionary armies was based on men’s singular capabilities, rather than noble blood, and how the invention of financial instruments such as life insurance and national debt related to a changing idea of national identity. Wide-ranging and thought-provoking, The Revolutionary Self is a fascinating exploration of the conflict between individualism and the group ties that continues to shape our lives today.
Lynn Hunt is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author of numerous works, including Inventing Human Rights and Writing History in the Global Era and former president of the American Historical Association, she lives in Los Angeles.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: How the Smallest Things Lead to Big Changes
1 Tea and How Women Became ‘Civilized’
2 Revolutionary Imagery and the Uncovering of Society
3 Art, Fashion, and One Woman’s Experience
4 Revolutionary Armies and the Strategies of War
5 Money, Self-Interest, and Making a Republic
Epilogue: Self Society and Equality
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Exhibition | Get to Work! The Work and Toil of Women
.
Francisco Muntaner, The Spinners, detail, 1796, engraving
(Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Dietmar Katz)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin:
Get to Work! The Work and Toil of Women
An die Arbeit! Vom Schaffen und Schuften der Frauen
Kupferstichkabinett, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin 18 February — 18 May 2025
Curated by Dagmar Korbacher, Mailena Mallach, and Christien Melzer
Women’s contributions to society are often unseen and seldom considered in art. Many women’s names and their stories have long since been forgotten. Using French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch works on paper, this exhibition looks behind the allegorical scenes to shed light on women’s work in early modern Europe.
Louise Madeleine Cochin, after Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger, Le Chanteur de Cantiques, 1742, engraving and etching, 38 × 28 cm (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett / Dietmar Katz).
This small thematic exhibition presents 25 French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Dutch prints from the 16th to 18th centuries preserved in the Kupferstichkabinett’s (Museum of Prints and Drawings) rich holdings. Works have been selected that show women in everyday activities, working as peasants, farmhands, teachers, maids, midwives and courtesans. One focus provide insight into the professions practised by women, including attending to births as midwives; another shows those areas of society where men and women went about their daily tasks side by side (as equals?). Beneath the allegorical layers of meaning, the viewer often discovers self-confident women going about their lives, yet the hardship of everyday travail is evident. To this day, so-called care work for children and the elderly receives little recognition; efforts are being made to reconcile work and family life and to achieve equality between women and men, including in financial matters, but these goals have yet to be fully attained. At the same time, it becomes clear that many of the depictions displayed were created by men—Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Rembrandt—to name just a few. Their (male) view of women characterised societal perspectives for centuries. Also represented, however, are two women artists, Louise Magdeleine Horthemels (1686–1767) and Marguerite Ponce (1745–1800), who earned their livings creating art.
An die Arbeit! Vom Schaffen und Schuften der Frauen is the Kupferstichkabinett’s contribution to Women’s Month in March, as well as to Equal Pay Day (7 March) and Labour Day (1 May in Europe). The exhibition is curated by Dagmar Korbacher, director; Mailena Mallach, curator of German art before 1800; and Christien Melzer, curator of Dutch and English art before 1800, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
Call for Papers | Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England, 1600–1900
From the Call for Papers:
Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England, 1600–1900
Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 12–13 September 2025
Organized by Lauren Whitley
Proposals due by 3 May 2025
Fashion has garnered great interest in recent decades, and research into the history of clothing has yielded new insights into culturally embedded ideas around self-styling and the body. Understanding the mechanisms of stylish dress was the subject of several publications including Extreme Beauty (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), Fashioning the Body (Bard Museum, 2015), and Structuring Fashion: Foundation Garments through History (Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, 2019). Yet, few studies have explored New England’s relationship with styling the body and fashionable dress.
In conjunction with the exhibition Body by Design: Fashionable Silhouettes from the Ideal to the Real, opening 3 May 2025, Historic Deerfield will host a Fall Forum, Fashioning the Body: Dress in New England 1600–1900, that aims to examine men’s and women’s fashion through a specific New England lens by convening a group of experts in the field to explore the rich history of dressing the body in this region. The Forum seeks to explore the following questions:
• What was distinctive about dress in New England, 1600–1900?
• How did aspirational fashion silhouettes form an aspect of New England dress?
• Was the cold weather of New England a factor in attaining stylishness?
• What were the connections between the clothing practices of indigenous people and English Colonists?
• What was the connection between religion and clothing in New England?
• How did attitudes around the body in New England influence self-styling?
• How were foundation garments a factor in New England clothing?
• What was the role of homespun in New England clothing?
• What can we say about either agency or subjugation in the dress of enslaved New Englanders?
• How was New England a place of innovation in fashion?
• If not aligned with prevailing fashions, how did New Englanders express anti-fashion?
• How was New England’s past revisited in Colonial Revival fancy dress?
• What is the role of painted portraits in documenting clothing styles or presenting an aspirational ideal? Does the representation of clothing in photography play a different role?
Historic Deerfield invites paper proposals for its two-day forum. Priority will be given to paper submissions that present new research and examine topics in non-traditional ways. Submissions beyond the geographical scope of New England but informative to this area are also encouraged. Topics and themes might include but are not limited to:
• Object Studies
• Artisan/Artist Biographies
• Analysis and Conservation
• Collectors and Collections
• Social and Cultural Meanings
To submit a proposal, please send (as a single email attachment) a lecture title, a 250-word abstract that describes the lecture, and a one-page vita or biography to Lauren Whitley, Curator of Historic Textiles and Clothing and Forum organizer, at lwhitley@historic-deerfield.org. Papers should be 25 minutes in length and must be object/image based. Proposals will be accepted until 3 May 2025. You will be notified of the status of your proposal no later than 24 May 2025. Speakers whose papers are accepted will be given complimentary registration to the symposium, lodging, and meals. The forum will convene in Deerfield, Massachusetts, as a hybrid program, with both on-site and virtual registration options for attendees. Speakers are expected to present their papers on site at Historic Deerfield.
Historic Deerfield is home to one of the finest collections of New England architecture, interiors, and decorative arts, including clothing. Historic dress was a particular interest of Historic Deerfield’s founder, Helen Flynt (1895–1986), who in the 1940s actively acquired high-style European dress as well as clothing made and worn locally in New England. The textile and clothing collection now boasts 8,000 objects including important examples of fashionable 18th– and 19th-century European, English, and American dresses and suits, the undergarments that were worn with them, and stylish accessories such as shoes, hats, gloves, purses, and aprons. Over the course of the last fifty years, Historic Deerfield has also amassed related materials, from fashion plates to original account books, that document the role of fashion in the lives of New Englanders.
Exhibition | Body by Design: Fashionable Silhouettes
Opening in May at Historic Deerfield:
Body by Design: Fashionable Silhouettes from the Ideal to the Real
Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 3 May 2025 — 22 February 2026
Gown or robe à la française, made in France or Amsterdam, ca. 1765; blue and white brocade weave silk (paduasoy?, bleached plain weave linen lining, and silk knotted fringe (Historic Deerfield, F.355).
This exhibition explores the enduring interest in clothing our bodies to achieve fashionable shapes. It will feature twenty-five ensembles from the 18th to 21st centuries drawn predominantly from Historic Deerfield’s renowned clothing collection. Displayed along with the historical garments will be the understructures—stays, corsets, hoops skirts, and bustles—that helped shape, exaggerate, or reduce bodies to fit fashionable ideals. The show follows a loose chronological organization starting with two garments from the 1760s: a woman’s formal dress with exaggerated wide skirt supported by hooped petticoats and a man’s pink and gold brocaded suit. Fashions from the 19th century highlight huge sleeves, corseted torsos, and skirts that were supported by crinolines and bustles. Fashion plates from the museum’s collection will help contextualize styles within their time while select modern fashions, juxtaposed with historical garments, offer interesting connections between the past and today.
Call for Papers | Luxury in Fabrics and Fashion
From ArtHist.net:
Luxury in Fabrics and Fashion: 5th Colloquium of Textile and Fashion Researchers
El luxe en els teixits i la moda / El lujo en los tejidos y la moda
Barcelona Design Museum, 6–7 November 2025
Organized by Sílvia Rosés and Sílvia Ventosa
Proposals due by 31 March 2025
The Design History Foundation and Catalonia’s textile museums announce their 5th Colloquium of Textile and Fashion Researchers, to be held at the Barcelona Design Museum on 6 and 7 November 2025. This year’s theme is textiles and fashion as powerful instruments of social stratification and distinction. On the one hand, luxury has positioned itself at the service of the ruling classes by consolidating established, imposed hierarchies, although, on the other hand, it has also helped to blur and rewrite them. This is why the concept of luxury has been one of the best-guarded bastions by the privileged sectors, given that it is one of the most powerful resources of social significance, the legitimation of power and the recognition of the elites. What is understood as luxury has consequently changed its semantics in order to adapt to the various facets that power has assumed.
In the past, colours such as purple or black, the quality of fabrics or jewellery were major indicators of status. Items of clothing such as ruffles, chopines, corsets, togas or crinoline indicated the high social class of those who did not have to work. Today, more subtle aspects such as hygiene, the cut of suits, the concept of good taste or the recent obsession with brands have become intangible added values that distinguish those who have political or economic power from those who do not.
This congress aims to examine the various facets of luxury, both in the field of fabrics and clothing and the changes in meaning that this concept has undergone at different times throughout history and in various cultures. It intends to provide an in-depth analysis from a historical and sociological perspective (through its role in shaping societies), from a technical perspective (through the tradition and innovation of crafts and their adaptation to the industrial paradigm), from an anthropological perspective (through the analysis of multiple cultural realities), and from an economic perspective (through the study of the implications of luxury in the configuration of fashion systems).
This 5th Colloquium therefore proposes various strands to submit your papers:
• Luxury throughout History
• The Aesthetics of Luxury: Tastes and Ornaments
• Luxury and Elitism
• The Moral and Psychological Implications of Practicing Luxury
• The Semantics of Luxury
• The Production of Luxurious Objects
• Craftsmanship and Luxury: Tradition, Innovation, and Modernity
• Economy and Luxury
• Luxury and the Issue of Gender
• Luxury and Sustainability
With this fifth edition of the TFR Colloquium—prior editions were held in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023—the Design History Foundation and Catalonia’s textile museums have established themselves as a forum for exchange designed to promote top-level research and the dissemination of knowledge in the fields of textiles and fashion. These Colloquiums have showcased public and private archives and collections and have helped to place the spotlight on a group of historians and scholars who had previously worked in isolation. The TFR Colloquium brings together people of the highest academic level. The committee will not accept abstracts from artists and designers who come to promote their work.
The conference languages will be Catalan, Spanish, and English, and the papers to be presented in person during the conference will last a maximum of 15 minutes. Registered participants will receive a certificate, as will the researchers presenting the papers. The papers will be published in the conference proceedings. They will have a DOI if they are published online and an ISBN if they are published in paper form.
Proposals (maximum of 500 words) should address the general aims of the research, theoretical framework (reference authors), methodology, and the originality of research within context of textile and fashion history and studies. Proposals should also include a paper title and details of the researcher (full name, academic post, current occupation, and email address), as well as the strand in which the abstract belongs. Abstracts must be sent in Word format (absolutely not in PDF format) to coloquiotextil@gmail.com, with no images or citations, for subsequent processing on paper and/or in digital format.
Once the abstract has been accepted, the researcher will register through the website of the Design History Foundation. All researchers must register and pay the appropriate fee, which will be announced when the programme is published. Diplomas will be issued only to registered individuals in the case of group research. The organisation reserves the right to cancel the colloquium in the event of exceptional circumstances beyond its control.
Exhibition | Romney: Brilliant Contrasts in Georgian England
Opening next month at the Yale University Art Gallery:
Romney: Brilliant Contrasts in Georgian England
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 17 March — 14 September 2025
Organized by Brooke Krancer with the assistance of Martina Droth and Laurence Kanter
George Romney, A Conversation (or The Artist’s Brothers Peter and James Romney), 1766, oil on canvas (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).
Romney: Brilliant Contrasts in Georgian England, co-organized by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art to celebrate the YCBA’s reopening, features the work of the British portrait painter George Romney (1734–1802). Remembered today for his fashionable likenesses of wealthy patrons, Romney was rivaled in late eighteenth-century London only by the now better known artists Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. His aspirations to be a history painter were never realized, but his many drawings serve as a testament to those greater ambitions. These swiftly executed sketches reveal a mastery of form, line, and light, while his proficiency as a musician and early experience building musical instruments distinguish him among his polymath contemporaries. To fully explore the era’s subjects and sensibilities, paintings and drawings by Romney from both museums are shown alongside selections from the Morris Steinert Collection of Musical Instruments. Unveiling the contrasts in his artistic practice, the exhibition presents a forceful vision—one that has resonated with admirers through the centuries, from William Blake in Romney’s own time to the portraitist Kehinde Wiley today.
This exhibition is made possible by the Wolfe Family Exhibition and Publication Fund and is organized by Brooke Krancer, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Yale Center for British Art, with the assistance of Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art, and Laurence Kanter, Chief Curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art.
8th Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
From Master Drawings:
Eighth Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
Submissions due by 15 November 2025
George Romney, Lady Seated at a Table (recto); pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash (NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 11.66.3).
Master Drawings is now accepting submissions for the 8th Annual Ricciardi Prize of $5,000. The award is given for the best new and unpublished article on a drawing topic (of any period) by a scholar under the age of 40. Candidates are also eligible for a $1000 runner-up prize and publication. Prize winners are eligible for reimbursement of costs associated with obtaining image publication permissions. They will be invited to present their research at a symposium held during Master Drawings Week in New York (January 2026). Information about essay requirements and how to apply can be found here. Information about past winners and finalists is available here.
The average length is between 2,500 and 3,750 words, with five to twenty illustrations. Submissions should be no longer than 7,500 words and have no more than 75 footnotes. All submissions must be in article form, following the format of the journal. Please refer to our Submission Guidelines for additional information. We will not consider submissions of seminar papers, dissertation chapters, or other written material that has not been adapted into the format of a journal article. Written material that has been previously published, or is scheduled for future publication, will not be eligible. Articles may be submitted in any language. Please be sure to include a 100-word abstract outlining the scope of your article with your submission.
Exhibition | Sir William and Lady Hamilton
.
Installation of the exhibition Sir William and Lady Hamilton at the Gallerie d’Italia, Naples, with a view of Joshua Reynolds’s 1777 Portrait of Sir William Hamilton (London: NPG) and George Romney’s 1782 Portrait of Lady Hamilton as Circe (Waddesdon Manor). Photo by Roberto Della Noce.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Closing soon at the Gallerie d’Italia in Naples:
Sir William and Lady Hamilton
Gallerie d’Italia, Naples, 25 October 2024 — 2 March 2025
In the wake of the important studies by Carlo Knight (who recently passed away) and the great exhibition at the British Museum in 1996, the Gallerie d’Italia–Napoli dedicates its 2024 autumn exhibition to William Hamilton, the British royal ambassador at the court of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon and his wife Maria Carolina of Hapsburg. Diplomat, antiquarian and volcanologist, Hamilton, with his multifaceted personality, found fertile ground in the ‘Enlightened’ Naples of the second half of the 18th century to affirm and develop his great passions: antiquity and science.
Jakob Philipp Hackert, View of the English Garden at Caserta, 1793, oil on canvas, 93 × 130 cm (Madrid: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza).
The exhibition highlights Hamilton’s great interest in volcanology, landscape painting, music, and collecting, as well as the role he played in Neapolitan society of the time, amplified by the sometimes legendary figure of Lady Emma Hamilton. In reconsidering and promoting the extraordinary human, political, and intellectual story of a man who was undoubtedly one of the greatest interpreters of his time, leaving a profound mark on the city, the exhibition also traces the fruitful cultural and artistic exchanges that took place between Italy and the United Kingdom at a key moment in European history.
By virtue of its theme, the exhibition has the support of the Italian Embassy in the United Kingdom as well as the support of the British Embassy in Rome and boasts the presence on the scientific committee of Carlo Knight and Kim Sloan, curators of the important exhibition Vases and Volcanoes dedicated to Hamilton in 1996 by the British Museum, and Aidan Weston-Lewis, Chief Curator of European Art at the National Galleries of Scotland.
William Hamilton—cadet son of Lord Archibald Hamilton, the ‘milk brother’ of King George III of England, possessed of a solid cultural education and a rich network of social relations—moved to Naples as British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples in 1764, together with his first wife Catherine Barlow. In the Bourbon capital, where he stayed until 1798—when the French troops arrived—he was able to cultivate his greatest passions: Greco-Roman antiquities, of which he became one of the greatest collectors of all time, the scientific study of the eruptions of Vesuvius, collecting ancient and contemporary paintings, the sea, and hunting. His residences crammed with works of art and full of charm, Villa Emma in Posillipo, Villa Angelica near Torre del Greco, and especially Palazzo Sessa in Pizzofalcone with its famous view of the gulf, were the theatres of a refined and cosmopolitan worldliness for over thirty years. His extraordinary publishing ventures, his relationships with Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina—cultivated also thanks to his second wife Emma, the legend of whom has been nurtured in modern times by literature and film—and with great international travellers, such as Goethe, Mozart, William Beckford, and the Russian Tsar Paul I, made him one of the most influential figures in 18th-century European culture, as recognised by prestigious institutions such as the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of London.
Enfilade 
leave a comment