The National Portrait Gallery has begun a project to catalogue its collection of papers relating to the nineteenth-century British artist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). A grant from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives is funding a project to describe the Watts Collection, which contains approximately 3,000 letters written to, or received by, the artist. […]
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts’s exhibition Close to the Heart (1 February – 5 May 2013) features around fifty mostly British miniatures dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Half of them are on loan from an eminent UK private collection largely assembled around 1890-1920 on the advice of George C. Williamson (1858-1942), […]
Marketing staff based at Heelis (National Trust’s head office) are mostly preoccupied with attracting and retaining members, fundraising campaigns and looking after the NT brand. So I am delighted and privileged to be awarded one of the Understanding British Portraits network’s NT staff bursaries this year, and will be sharing my findings with marketing colleagues […]
The first illustrated scholarly work devoted to the reception and reputation of Edinburgh’s premier Enlightenment portrait painter. Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) is especially well known in Scotland as the portrait painter of members of the Scottish Enlightenment. However, outside Scotland, the artist rarely makes more than a fleeting appearance in survey books about portraiture. Ten […]
In Portrayal and the Search for Identity, Marcia Pointon investigates how we view and understand portraiture as a genre, and how portraits function as artworks within social and political networks. Likeness is never a straightforward matter as we rarely have the subject of a portrait as a point of comparison. Featuring familiar canonical portraits as […]
How can we use visual and material culture to shed light on the past? Ludmilla Jordanova offers a fascinating and thoughtful introduction to the role of images, objects and buildings in the study of past times. Through a combination of thematic chapters and essays on specific artefacts – a building, a piece of sculpture, a […]
During my second term as Hon Secretary, when The Lace Guild was working towards museum registration, the Museums’ Association Journal appeared regularly in my pigeon-hole at The Hollies. As with any such journal there were good months and bad months, but in most issues I found plenty of general interest, in addition to specific information […]
Gemma Dymond, Learning & Visitor Experience Officer, Dinefwr Park and Castle (National Trust) Llandeilo, South Wales received a Bursary from Understanding British Portraits in October 2012. All the current Bursary recipients will be posting blogs on their chosen projects in the coming weeks. Isn’t it amazing what we don’t know about the things we are […]
I am the Exhibitions and Collections Curator at Torre Abbey in Torquay. I was lucky enough to attend the Understanding British Portraits network Annual Seminar on 27th November last year with a bursary from the network. Attendance at the Understanding British Portraits is, I feel, essential and I have attended nearly all of the conferences […]
Amy Marquis, Study Room Supervisor (Paintings, Drawings and Prints), The Fitzwilliam Museum, received a Bursary from Understanding British Portraits in October 2012. Here she reflects on the aims of her chosen project. The Fitzwilliam Museum‘s collection, like all collections, is constantly changing, whether this be through high profile acquisitions like our recent successful appeal to save […]
