Films I produced in 2010 for Tate while working on the ‘Art and the Sublime’ project are now online. See link below for ‘Turner and Staffa’, ‘Turner and Glencoe’, ‘Constable and Salisbury’ parts 1 and 2, ‘James Ward and Gordale Scar’ and ‘Bill Viola’:
Viva passed!
Last Wednesday (28th November) I passed my viva. Many thanks to my examiners Dr Kate Retford (Birkbeck College) and Dr Alison O’Byrne (York) for a rigorous, exhausting and enjoyable examination. Thanks to the Paul Mellon Centre for hosting it and my supervisor Prof. Mark Hallett who wrote notes during the entire 2 1/2 hours. Minor corrections and then the book…
PhD thesis submitted
Weighing in at an eye-watering 7 kilos I am delighted [relieved] to announce the delivery of my PhD thesis. Now awaiting the VIVA.
University of York and Tate Britain Conference, Histories of British Art 1660-1735: Reconstruction & Transformation
20-22 September 2012, The King’s Manor, York
Paper: Joseph Highmore’s The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee 1736
This paper will analyse the role of ancestry – both familial and artistic – within Highmore’s life-sized group painting The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee his most ambitious portrait. It will argue that the portrait is at once a physiological record of a family, a metaphor of motherhood and the fruits of marriage, and an allegory of the perpetual cycle of life and death. And even as it marks the forward movement of time and the process of change and renewal, it pays self-conscious homage to the past through the use of particular pictorial and literary models. Finally, in the context of this conference and the CCC research project the paper will consider whether this portrait dated 1736 challenges the idea of transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and further how the demarcation of art production into arbitrary timescales has distorted our understanding of the early Georgian period.
Art History, the Journal of the Association of Art Historians
Article: ‘The mere relation of the sufferings of others’: Joseph Highmore, History Painting and the Foundling Hospital.
Online 8 March 2012, hard copy June 2012
British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, St Hugh’s College, Oxford.
Detail from Joseph Highmore, The Angel of Mercy, c.1746, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Paper: ‘Suitable to the Place for which they were designed’: Joseph Highmore’s Foundling Hospital paintings
Court Country City: British Art 1660-1735 ‘Close Readings’ Conference, Tate Britain
Paper: The City Candidate: Joseph Highmore’s David Le Marchand (1723) and the search for Sir Godfrey Kneller’s heir.
This paper will focus on the portrait of the ivory carver David Le Marchand (National Portrait Gallery) as a means of exploring Highmore’s early City-based practice, and the influence of Sir Godfrey Kneller on his portrait production and career strategy.
Charity on Display: The Foundling Hospital
Charity on Display: The Foundling Hospital and the Arts in the 18th Century. A symposium to coincide with the exhibition ‘Threads of Feeling: The Foundling Hospital’s Textile Tokens 1740-1770’, Foundling Museum.
Paper: ‘The mere relation of the sufferings of others’: Joseph Highmore and the Foundling Hospital.