Professor Bann visits the Center as a Senior Visiting Scholar to pursue his research focused on the milieu of architectural history and practice in Britain in the early nineteenth century, which will form the subject of his plenary lecture at the Pugin bicentennial conference in Canterbury in July. He will also work on American/English little magazines and visual poetics in the 1960s as part of his ongoing research on the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Senior Visiting Scholars are invited to spend one month at the Center annually for a term of three years, pursuing their research and participating in the intellectual life of the Center and Yale University. This is Professor Bann's first year at the Center.
The research Lucinda Lax plans to undertake at Yale will center on the three exhibition works—known as The Virtuous Comforted, The Proligate Punished, and The Generosity of Johnny Pearmain—that Edward Penny produced for the Royal Academy in 1774 and 1782. Lax is particularly interested in exploring how these pieces promoted what can be described as a new mode of “genre” painting and how, as such, they departed from traditional pictorial models while still responding to and closely corresponding with the other exhibition productions on display. Apart from devoting time to studying these pieces first hand, she also intends to use her visit as an opportunity to view any additional material, such as drawings or preliminary sketches, which may relate to these works, as well as to explore the Center’s broader collection of British paintings and its eighteenth-century archive in considerable detail.
Jocelyn Anderson will be in residence to conduct research for a dissertation entitled “Remaking the Country House: Country-House Guidebooks from 1770 to 1815.” This project aims to explore how the public image of famous country houses (those which had their own guidebooks) evolved in relation to country-house tourism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Center’s paintings, prints, rare books (particularly the Abbey Collection) and manuscripts will be explored.
Professor Julie Codell’s project is to deploy recent studies of material culture to understand the profuse images of material objects in nineteenth-century painting when painting suddenly competed with an expanding visual culture in shops, advertising, world’s fairs, museums, photography, and exhibitions, and in sales of colonial objects flooding the market. Codell hypothesizes that artists deployed disruptive narrative strategies and temporal discontinuities to construct a criticism of popular taste in material culture spectating venues and an alternate virtual world of goods. Through this critique artists struggled to express conditions of modern life through radical representations of things, space, and time. She addresses the role of “high” culture in an age dominated by commercial venues, a mass public, and the virtual image, also relevant to our own culture of virtuality and simulacra.
The Duchy of Cornwall, the most southwesterly peninsula of Britain, has been an artistic hub for well over 150 years. It is famous for the Newlyn and St. Ives “art schools” and has been home to such internationally recognized creative people as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Sir Terry Frost, and Dame Laura Knight. Patrick Laviolette will look at the works of Cornish-based artists in the Center’s collection; he is particularly interested in examining these pieces in terms of the landscape depictions and spatial representations that occur within them. Conceptually, the idea is to consider the ways in which these artworks act as diasporic objects of identity for this peripheral rural region which has been a well-known land of labor emigration and exile.
Geoff Belknap’s research involves the investigation of books illustrated with photographic positives between 1840 and 1880, and their concomitant use in the Victorian periodical press. In particular he will be looking at William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844), a presentation copy of the Reports by the Juries of the 1851 Great Exhibition, and Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion (1887). Belknap will then look at the ways in which images from these three books moved into the American and British periodical print press. In doing so, he hopes to gain a better understanding of the ways in which different visual epistemologies were constructed dependent on the print space in which a photograph was reproduced.
Professor Matthew Reeve’s research project concerns the construction of the Gothic in England between 1624 and 1820, with a particular focus on the eighteenth century. Exploring the Gothic as a poetics of otherness rather than a formal style, he is concerned with the themes of nature, sexuality, and politics. While at the Center he will be pursuing English patrons and designers of the Gothic during the eighteenth century, particularly William Stukeley, John Carter, and Horace Walpole.
Georgina Cole’s “The Senses in Eighteenth-Century Art and Thought” is a study of the five senses in eighteenth-century French and British visual culture in the context of the science and philosophy of the period. The objects of this study will be a range of eighteenth-century paintings, prints, and architectural designs that deal with the senses and the process of sensation. Through these visual sources, Cole intends to explore how art and architecture, as peculiarly sensual forms of communication, were used as a forum to investigate sensation and to engage the viewer in a dialogue about perception, sensuality, and knowledge.
Roberto Ferrari will spend his time at the Yale Center for British Art conducting research for his doctoral dissertation on the British sculptor John Gibson (1790–1866), who based his studio in Rome. Ferrari’s dissertation is the first monographic study on the sculptor and will discuss his work in the context of contemporary issues as diverse as studio practice, reproductive media, homoeroticism, and the revival of polychrome sculpture, ultimately demonstrating how for Gibson the classical body was modern and not an outdated mode of representation. The Center’s sculpture collection includes three busts by Gibson which Ferrari will have the opportunity to study, and the library, in conjunction with other Yale libraries, holds related material on Gibson, including correspondence, information regarding the Great Exhibition of 1851, and periodicals published in Rome in the 1830s and 1840s which discuss Gibson’s life and work.
Clarissa Campbell Orr visited the Center as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Senior Visiting Scholar to pursue her research for a study of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, and a biography of Mary Granville Delany, 1700–1788, for Yale University Press. Senior Visiting Scholars are invited to spend one month at the Center annually for a term of three years, pursuing their research and participating in the intellectual life of the Center and Yale University. This was Clarissa's first year at the Center.
Eriko Yamaguchi’s research project at the Center focuses on Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a designer of the applied arts and examines his decorative design in relation to medievalism. Since Rossetti was not only a founding member of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co., but was perhaps the first to produce an Aesthetic or Anglo-Japanese design of the kind usually associated with Whistler and Godwin, Yamaguchi’s research further investigates the development of his interest in medieval decoration into an “aesthetic” decoration via Japonisme.
Jonny Yarker will research the attitude of British artists and critics towards copying and imitation, from the publication of Richardson’s “Essay on the Theory of Painting” in 1715 to the foundation of the painting school of the Royal Academy in 1816. He is interested in the apparent conflict between the official antipathy towards copying—Reynolds called it “a delusive kind of industry”—and the evidence of widespread copying by painters. Yarker’s work focuses on both the practice of copying Old Masters and replication of contemporary canvases and their contemporary appreciation. He is also interested in the related rise of connoisseurship in Britain.
Michael Rosenthal, Professor Emeritus, Department of the History of Art, University of Warwick, will carry out research on the numerous watercolors and drawings generated during the first fifty years of the British colonization of Australia, as part of a book project entitled "The Artless Landscape."
Arnika Schmidt’s dissertation project, “Giovanni ‘Nino’ Costa (1826–1903): The national and international context of a Roman landscape painter,” examines the artist’s pivotal role in translating German, French, and English landscape traditions into a nineteenth-century Italian idiom while concentrating on the aspect of intercultural exchange. At the Yale Center for British Art, Schmidt will focus on the cultural and personal background of artists associated with the Etruscan School of Painters, a circle formed by Costa and primarily British artists in the winter of 1883–84, including William Blake Richmond, Edith and Matthew Ridley Corbett, George Howard (9th Earl of Carlisle), Edgar Barclay, and Walter MacLaren. Object-based research and an in-depth analysis of the group’s cultural context will allow Schmidt to find new ways of reading the “Etruscan landscapes” and to draw her conclusions as to what constitutes the unifying elements of this transnational artistic circle.
Patricia Mainardi is in the last stages of completing a book manuscript on the beginnings of illustrated print culture in France from 1800 to the 1850s. Since the two capitals of London and Paris each intently watched what the other was doing, copied it and even plagiarized it, Mainardi will be studying contemporaneous British illustration in order to integrate her French research with British precedents during her stay at the Center. Mainardi’s book focuses on early lithographic imagery (caricature and genre prints), book illustration, the illustrated press, comic books, and popular prints.
Professor Matthew Reeve’s research project concerns the construction of the Gothic in England from 1624 to 1820, with a particular focus on the eighteenth century. Exploring the Gothic as a poetics of otherness rather than a formal style, he is concerned with the themes of nature, sexuality, and politics. While at the Center he will be pursuing English patrons and designers of the Gothic during the eighteenth century, particularly William Stukeley, John Carter, and Horace Walpole.
While in residence at the Yale Center for British Art, Crystal Lake will be working on a book project titled Curious Things: Artifacts in British Literature and Culture, 1660–1830. It takes as its central concern eighteenth-century antiquarianism (an early form of archaeology) and examines the ways writers, artists, and collectors used artifacts to imagine and encode controversial narratives about the history of Britain’s political institutions. Chapters are organized thematically around the period’s most popularly collected artifacts: coins, manuscripts, weapons, jewels, and relics. Lake plans to spend most of her time in residence studying eighteenth-century depictions of military antiquities and histories of war in order to complete her chapter on weapons.
Working women have often been invisible to art historians. Sometimes they appear in paintings as mere staffage, as foils to set off the youth and beauty of elite women, or as a stereotypical type, such as the lazy servant. Diane Wolfthal’s research, by contrast, will examine a small group of images that reveal a strikingly different attitude towards one segment of the working poor. Wolfthal plans to explore English portraits of domestic servants by John Riley, William Sonmans, and Charles Beale II, all dating from 1680 to 1700. These paintings and drawings are quite remarkable in that, unlike most other images of servants, the name of the sitter is often known, she is represented without denigration, and, at times, even with great dignity, and we sometimes know something about the circumstances of the portrait’s production.
Geoff Snell's thesis, “A Forest of Masts: The Image of the River Thames in the Eighteenth Century,” explores how the visual representation of the Thames evolved to reflect the changes in London as the city grew into a major port and the center of a commercial empire. In addition to the development of the river view in fine art, Snell is exploring the emergence of images of the “working” Thames below London Bridge, the alternative representation of the river in satirical prints, and the artistic interpretation of the rationalization of the river in terms of bridge and dock building. Snell's research to date has focused primarily on the collection held at National Maritime Museum in London, and so it is his intention to spend his time at Yale undertaking a comparative study of Thames-related works by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artists, including topographical prints and caricatures.
Geoff Snell's thesis, “A Forest of Masts: The Image of the River Thames in the Eighteenth Century,” explores how the visual representation of the Thames evolved to reflect the changes in London as the city grew into a major port and the center of a commercial empire. In addition to the development of the river view in fine art, Snell is exploring the emergence of images of the “working” Thames below London Bridge, the alternative representation of the river in satirical prints and the artistic interpretation of the rationalization of the river in terms of bridge- and dock-building. Snell's research to date has focused primarily on the collection held at National Maritime Museum in London and so it is his intention to spend his time at Yale undertaking a comparative study of Thames-related works by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artists, including topographical prints and caricatures.
Olga Zoller will visit the Yale Center for British Art to study ninety-eight drawings of the Piedmontese architect Giovanni Battista Borra (1713–1770), who accompanied Robert Wood, James Dawkins, and John Bouverie on their archaeological expedition to Asia Minor in 1750 and 1751. These drawings confirm what Robert Wood (1717–1771) had announced in his introduction to The Ruins of Balbec, published four years after the similarly successful book on The Ruins of Palmyra (1753): an edition of a third book on the “more classical part” of the journey, which, however, never appeared. It is Zoller’s ambition to publish the most relevant, instructive, and aesthetically convincing part of this widely unknown group of Borra drawings as a significant, coherent work, which will be of interest as much to art and architectural historians as to archaeologists and museum curators of relevant collections.
Dr. David Lawrence is researching urban militarism and civic military performance in provincial English towns in the period 1620 to 1642. He is exploring the formation of private military societies in eleven towns and the role military affairs played in local governance in the years leading up the War of the Three Kingdoms. His work at the Center will focus primarily on representations of militarized urban space in this period.
David Hansen will conduct research for a book project on the portraitist John Dempsey. Materials to be consulted include cartoons and caricatures in the Center’s Prints and Drawings collection, specialist reference books and sales catalogues containing portrait miniatures and silhouettes of the 1820s, and travel books, costume books, and local histories in the Abbey collection.
Claudia Hucke will conduct research for a project entitled "Restoring the Academy: British Influence on Jamaica’s Postcolonial Artistic Identity." The resources at the Center, including the portrait paintings and the archival and manuscript materials relating to Sir Joshua Reynolds and John Constable, will be examined with the aim of investigating the relationship of Barrington Watson (born 1931) to the British portrait and history painting tradition.
Nicholas Grindle will be conducting research for a project entitled “Reconceiving Landscape Imagery in England, 1640–1730.” The Center’s collection of printed and landscape imagery from the mid- to late Stuart and early Georgian periods will be examined, with particular emphasis on groups of drawings and paintings.
Anne-Françoise Morel is conducting research for a project entitled "Cross-confessional Cultural Exchanges between England and Italy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: religious architecture, ethics, and aesthetics." The Center’s rich collection of early work on aesthetics, ethics, and emotions will be examined to explore their impact on the dissemination of architectural theory and building styles.
Andrew Walkling is conducting research for a project entitled "Instruments of Absolutism: Restoration Court Culture and the Epideictic Mode." Materials to be consulted include several portraits of James II, works by portrait painter Willem Wissing, a group of allegorical prints by Gerard de Lairesse, Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of the statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, Sir William Jennens’s advertisement for the King’s Bath, and the plans and elevations of Monmouth House, Soho Square.
Christiane Hille conducted research for a book project entitled In Britainne’s Glorious Eye: Changing Displays of the Courtly Body in the Stuart Masque and Portrait, paying particular attention to two chapters entitled “Scopic Relations of Social Identity in Early-Modern England” and “The Duke of Buckingham and the Triumph of Painting at the Court of Charles I.”
Christopher Baker conducted research for a project entitled A Catalogue of the English and American Paintings in the Collection of the National Gallery of Scotland. A study of the Center’s resources contributed to the preparation of a systematic, scholarly catalogue of the eighty-six English and American oil paintings in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland.
Angela McShane investigated literary and visual materials relating to a major research project on the "Material Cultures of Drinking in Early Modern Europe." Concurrently engaged in a book project entitled Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth Century England. A Critical Bibliography (forthcoming, 2011), Angela also studied the significant collections of ballads held at Yale, many of which are drinking songs.
James Fox conducted research for a book project entitled Business Unusual: British Art and the First World War, 1914–1920. Materials consulted include the Cave of the Golden Calf archive; rare exhibition catalogues; and works in various media by Walter Sickert, Henri Gaudier-Brezska, Duncan Grant, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Augustus John, Eric Gill, Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, Jacob Epstein, David Bomberg, and C. R. W. Nevinson.
Steffen Egle conducted research for a project entitled “Teaching Landscape Painting in Great Britain and Germany 1760–1830: A Comparative Study.” Teaching practices and methods in Britain and Germany will be compared with the aim of acquiring a better understanding of national facets in the notion and conception of landscape painting in both countries.
David Jacques conducted research for a project entitled "Country House Portraits 1660–1740," concentrating upon the circumstances and context of country house portraits.
Ruth Kenny conducted research for a book project entitled The Craze for Pastel: the rise and fall of a medium 1650–1800. Works by artists such as John Greenhill, Edmund Ashfield, William Faithorne, Jonathan Richardson, William Hoare, James Sharples, Robert Healy, Thomas Hickey, and Hugh Douglas Hamilton were examined to trace pastel’s trajectory over the hundred and fifty years of its greatest significance.
Peter Lindfield conducted research for a project entitled "Rococo, antiquarianism, and the medieval: reconstruction of the Gothic aesthetic in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British furniture." The Center’s Grand Tour diaries, furniture pattern books, and drawings by cabinetmakers were consulted to examine the development of “the Gothic” as an intellectual concept and establish how advances in the understanding of its characteristics were expressed in the form and ornament of furniture during the period 1740 to 1850.
Dipti Khera conducted research for a dissertation entitled “Picturing India’s ‘Land of Princes’ in between the Mughal and British Empires: Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and its Environs.” The extensive collection of topographical views of India by British artists, as well as engravings by Edward Finden and select watercolors by Thomas Stothard, were examined to illuminate the larger visual context of Captain Patrick Waugh’s artistic ambitions.
Nathaniel Stein conducted research for a project entitled "Colonial Encounter and Corporeal Vulnerability: British Masculinity and the Representation of India, 1857–1879." Materials consulted include representations of the Indian Uprising of 1857 and the photography of Major Robert Gill.
Jennifer Ferng conducted research for a project entitled "On Stone: Constructing Architecture, Materiality, and Victorian Representations of the Geological Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Britain." Pictorial representations of the structure of the British landscape were examined in order to explore how aesthetic knowledge about the natural world was either shared or transferred between British architects and geologists during the nineteenth century.
Denis Longchamps conducted research for a project entitled “Mary Anne Burges's scientific and literary achievements,” based on the Center’s recently acquired five-volume set of albums of lepidoptera and flora by Mary Anne Burges (1763–1813). The contents of the albums were examined in detail, and in relation to other materials in the Center’s collections, in order to situate Burges’s work within traditions of “scientific” illustration in the late eighteenth century.
Amanda Herbert studied the spaces, cultures, and geographies of early modern British spas as part of the development of her dissertation, entitled “Female Alliances: Gender, Identity and Friendship in Britain, 1640–1714,” for publication. City plans, topographical surveys, and visual representations of the baths were examined alongside literary sources to explore female sociability and the practices of bathers in the period.
Nicholas Mayhew conducted research for an exhibition project entitled The Art of Banking. Scheduled for 2011 or 2012, this exhibition will explore the history of banking and the nature of money in the modern world.
Rebecca Stern conducted research for a book project entitled Conjugating Victorians: Meditations on Grammar, Time, and Other Living Forms. With a particular emphasis upon the relationship between material culture and narrative, the book analyzes Victorian reconceptualizations of time. A. W. N. Pugin’s architectural drawings, books, and papers, topographies in the Nathan collection, illustrations of clocks, and works by Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, and William Morris were examined.
Jennifer Van Horn studied the Center’s collections of topographical views, maps, and English portraiture of the second half of the eighteenth century, as part of the development of her dissertation, entitled “The Object of Civility and the Art of Politeness in British America, 1740–1780,” for publication. The book will examine the ways in which elite British colonists in North America used objects—including portraits, engraved city views, and dressing tables—to create and maintain their civility.
Dame Gillian Beer visited the Center as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Senior Visiting Scholar to pursue her research on the interconnections of art and science. Senior Visiting Scholars are invited to spend one month at the Center annually for a term of three years, pursuing their research and participating in the intellectual life of the Center and the University. This was Dame Gillian’s second year at the Center.
Mark Crosby conducted research for a project entitled "William Blake’s Apprenticeship and the Engraving Studio of James Basire." Prints originating from Basire’s studio, including the prints and other material relating to Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments and Vetusta Monumenta, were examined alongside other original graphic works by Blake in the Center’s collections, such as the colored copy of Jerusalem.
Romita Ray conducted research for a book project entitled Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India, 1700–1947. Maps, drawings, photographs, prints, paintings, rare books, letters, and memos in the Center’s collections were studied to develop two chapters in particular: “Paradise at the Taj Mahal,” which will analyze the gardens of the Taj Mahal, and “Maharajas, Nabobery and Jewels in the Crown.”
Luisa Calè studied William Blake’s watercolor extra-illustrations of Thomas Gray’s Poems in the Center’s collection, comparing them with his extra-illustrations of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, and setting them in the context of the visual cultures of books, exhibitions, and collecting practices in the late eighteenth century. This research will contribute to a number of publication projects, including a book entitled Blake Unbound: Collecting, Extra-illustration, Re-membering the Corpus.
William Pressly carried out research for a book project entitled Writing the Vision for a New Public Art: James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts. Eighteenth-century books and maps in the Center’s collections were studied alongside Barry’s works, including prints and the painting Chiron and Achilles.
Zirwat Chowdhury studied works by British artists in India for a dissertation entitled “The Impossibility of India in British Art and Architecture, 1780–1836.” This project examines visual representations of India in British landscape painting, architecture, portraiture, and caricature from 1780 to 1836 in the midst of efforts to consolidate and legitimize the British Empire in India. Works by William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, and George Dance the Younger were of particular interest.
Margaretta Frederick conducted research for a publication and exhibition project entitled The Landscape Watercolors of George Wilson (1848–1890). With the aim of contextualizing Wilson’s work, she examined examples by Wilson’s predecessors David Cox, John Linnell, Alexander and Patrick Nasmyth; by his contemporaries Joseph Noel Paton, Alfred William Hunt, John Brett, and John William North; and by those who followed, including Joseph Crawhall, Sir James Guthrie, George Henry, and E. A. Walton.
Ralph Hyde studied and catalogued the Center’s collection of mechanical screen fans for a project entitled “Fans for the Fireplace: A Closer Look at Mechanical Screen Fans.” Protean views in the Center’s collections were also examined as part of a broader project on paper panoramas, peepshows, and other optical toys.
Francesca Vanke studied pattern and ornament books and prints, particularly with reference to Chinese design, as part of a project to develop the research and teaching resources relating to the Norwich Castle Museum’s collections and, especially, to explore the links between British and Chinese artifacts in the period 1650–1837. Relevant texts included A New Book of Chinese Designs (1755) by Jean Pillement and Chinese Architecture, Civil and Ornamental (1759) by Paul Decker.
Connie Wan studied works in the Center’s collections by John Ruskin, David Cox, John Henry Mole, and George Arthur Fripp as part of a dissertation project entitled “Along Family Lines: the Role of the Lines Family in Birmingham’s Artistic Community, 1800–1888,” which focuses on a set of drawings by the Birmingham artist Samuel Lines and his sons. The family's drawings were compared with works on similar subjects by Ruskin, Cox, Mole, and Fripp.
Andrea Korda explored the Center’s Herkomer Archive alongside scrapbooks, portfolios, and paintings by Hubert von Herkomer for a dissertation entitled “The Graphic and Social Realism: Print Culture and Painting in Victorian London.” This project aims to interrogate the relationship between painting and print culture in the period. The Center’s holdings relating to the work of other major artists associated with the Graphic and the broader history of Social Realism in Victorian England were also examined.
Marcia Pointon visited Yale as a Senior Visiting Scholar to conduct research for a book project entitled The Persistence of Portraiture. Senior Visiting Scholars are invited to spend one month at the Center annually for a term of three years, pursuing their research and participating in the intellectual life of the Center and the University. This was Professor Pointon’s second year at the Center.
Leon Wainwright studied materials in the Center’s collections relating to transatlantic links between Britain and the Caribbean and histories of migration and diaspora, particularly works by contemporary artists such as Joy Gregory and Chris Ofili, for a book project entitled "Art and Time in the Transnational Caribbean." This book will examine the historical development of networks of visual practice linking Britain, Asia, Africa, and the Americas during the period of the end of Empire and its aftermath.
Petrina Dacres explored the Center’s holdings on memorial sculpture in the British Empire for a project to develop her PhD dissertation on monuments in the Jamaican public-historical sphere into a book that will contextualize Jamaican commemorative monuments in terms of larger trends in British memorial sculpture. Particular attention was given to Britain’s political public sculptures and investments in statues of Queen Victoria in its colonies. The project will also investigate public sculpture in twentieth-century Britain and Jamaica.
Jay Curley carried out research on the Center’s John McHale/Independent Group archive for a book project entitled The Art that Came in from the Cold: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cold War Visuality. This book aims to tackle the political agency and ambiguity of visual images during the conflict, particularly those disseminated by the mass press throughout America and Europe. New research into the London-based Independent Group’s interests in photography and the mass media transmission of images will form the basis of a chapter that will reformulate the Cold War era debates of abstraction versus figuration via photography.
Meredith Hale studied the Center’s collection of mezzotints alongside satires and caricatures by William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson for a project entitled “Print Cultures and Political Satires: Anglo-Dutch Exchange and the Birth of a Modern Genre.” She investigated the nature of the exchange in printed material between the Netherlands and England in the last decades of the seventeenth century and the impact that the earliest political satires had on the work of satirists such as Hogarth and Rowlandson.
Phillip Lindley conducted research for a book entitled The Golden Age and its Destruction: Sculpture in England from the Black Death to the Reformation. Early local history books such as Dugdale’s Warwickshire and St Paul’s and Thoroton’s Nottinghamshire were studied alongside eighteenth-century works such as Drake’s Eboracum and Topham’s St. Stephens. The Center’s topographical prints, architectural drawings, and Nottingham alabaster were also examined.
Bart Thurber researched and developed a future exhibition entitled Lord Dartmouth, Robert Clements, & the Grand Tour, focusing on the Grand Tour itineraries of William Legge, Second Earl of Dartmouth (1731–1801) and Robert Clements, later First Earl of Leitrim (1732–1804). The Center’s holdings of correspondence, manuscripts and works of art relating to the Grand Tour were examined.
Chris Coltrin studied the Center’s extensive collection of works on paper, particularly watercolors, by John Martin for a dissertation entitled “Destruction or Deliverance? The Politics of Catastrophe in the Art of John Martin.” This project explores how the work of Martin and his followers, including Francis Danby, David Roberts, and Samuel Colman, might have operated politically in nineteenth-century Britain, with particular emphasis on their “apocalyptic” paintings.
Amy Von Lintel carried out research for a dissertation entitled “Surveying the Field: Popular Illustrated Art Histories in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France.” The Center’s large holdings of nineteenth-century books illustrated with wood engravings were explored. British art’s role in nineteenth-century art-historical surveys was also investigated through the study of works in the Center’s collections by artists such as David Wilkie, Richard Wilson, Thomas Lawrence, Francis Chantry, Edwin Landseer, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner.