1,721,019 research outputs found
The topography of the conversation piece: a walk around Wanstead
No full textBook synopsis: This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces – the closet, the gallery, the library – and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses
Placing faces: the portrait and the English country house in the long Eighteenth Century
No full textBook synopsis: This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces – the closet, the gallery, the library – and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses
'"A Wild and Unruly Youth": Charles Philips's The 'Henry the Fifth' Club, or 'The Gang''
No full textBook synopsis: This unique collection of essays and images explores a series of objects in the Royal Collection as a means of assessing the interrelated histories of the British royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife across four centuries. Between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the late twentieth, Shakespeare became entrenched as the English national poet. Over the same period, the monarchy sought repeatedly to demonstrate its centrality to British nationhood. By way of close analysis of a selection of objects from the Royal Collection, this volume argues that the royal family and the Shakespearean afterlife were far more closely interwoven than has previously been realized. The chapters map the mutual development over time of the relationship between members of the British royal family and Shakespeare, demonstrating the extent to which each has gained sustained value from association with the other and showing how members of the royal family have individually and collectively constructed their identities and performed their roles by way of Shakespearean models. Each chapter is inspired by an object in (or formerly in) the Royal Collection and explores two interconnected questions: what has Shakespeare done for the royal family, and what has the royal family done for Shakespeare? The chapters range across the fields of art, theatre history, literary criticism, literary history, court studies and cultural history, showing how the shared history of Shakespeare and the royal family has been cultivated across media and across disciplines
Light incidents: jokes in Eighteenth-Century British portraiture
No full textWe often think of portraiture as a very serious, self-promotional business, but a number of small ‘conversation piece’ portraits from the eighteenth century engaged with the lighter side of life. Sitters often liked to express their good humour, and required artists to engage with the ‘in jokes’ they shared with family and friends. Kate Retford, author of The Conversation Piece, recently published by Yale University Press (2017) will explore the humour to be found in these paintings, from puns through to pratfalls
Recommended from our members
‘Life in the library’
No full textThe country house library in the long eighteenth century was an important resource for the creation and maintenance of cultural life. Libraries have been noted for their non-book collections, particularly assemblages of antiquarian curiosities and fine art groups of coins, medals and small bronzes. Little attention has been paid to portraiture within the library, beyond the antique tradition of author portraits above the bookcases. The uses of portraiture within this distinctive type of room are shown to relate closely to the design scheme for the room, and its evolving place within the country house plan. Narford Hall, Norfolk, has an interior scheme created from 1718 enhanced by a portrait scheme c. 1725, commissioned by Sir Andrew Fountaine. There is a biographical logic in the way in which portraits are paired and opposed. Read with the ceiling paintings, and portraits at vary scales in miniatures, intaglios and as statuary, the library room suggests representations of an English cultural dominance, in opposition to that of France or Italy. Sir Andrew was a gentleman scholar of the Palladian revival, an associate of Lord Burlington, and his library represents a new direction in the presentation of book rooms. In the context of Palladian libraries, the Narford room is exceptional in its iconographic complexity
“At least 18 or 20 persons. setting at Cards & Tea”: William Hogarth’s Wollaston Family and the British conversation piece
No full textEarlier this year, the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery was able to purchase William Hogarth’s important painting of the Wollaston family (1730), thanks to a crowdfunding campaign and crucial support from the Art Fund. This was a major acquisition, securing one of the most important examples of a conversation piece painted in Britain in the early eighteenth century.
In this lecture, Professor Kate Retford, author of The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017), will explore the emergence of the conversation piece as a distinctive form of portraiture in Britain at this historical moment, and the place of The Wollaston Family within that genre. With its depiction of a large group of diminutive figures, absorbed in various activities around tea and card tables, positioned in an elaborate setting, Hogarth’s painting was an early and highly significant exercise in this new mode of small group portraiture.
Kate Retford joined the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck in 2003 where she researches eighteenth century British art especially the portraiture of that period, with issues of gender and the country house art collection, Her first book, ‘The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth – Century England’, was runner up for the Longman History Book Award in 2006
‘The refurbishment of Northumberland House: Craftsmen and Interior Decoration in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London Town Houses’
No full textBased on the authors' longstanding interest in Northumberland House, this essay develops out of a recent study on its mid-eighteenth-century refurbishment. Starting from a summary analysis of the team of craftsmen involved at the house, it suggests how they were involved at other contemporary aristocratic London palaces. The question is whether these craftsmen represent a circle that met the demand for a new French taste in interior decoration, fashionable among Francophile patrons of the likes of the Northumberlands and indeed de rigeur with Frederick, Prince of Wales. This essay relies on an appendix thematically organised - based on previously unpublished material - of all craftsmen, builders and architects involved at Northumberland House, where biographical information as well as cross references between all figures involved with our examples are given in full
- …
