REMINDER: RIN 4: The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery. Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm, The House of Illustration, London

Posted on May 29, 2015 by marylshannon

The Art of Quotation and the Miniaturized Gallery.
Saturday 6 June 2015, 10 – 5pm
The House of Illustration, London
Peter Otto (Melbourne), David Worrall (Roehampton/Nottingham Trent), Kate Heard (Royal Collection), Susan Matthews (Roehampton), Bethan Stevens (Sussex).
Supported by the University of Roehampton and the Bibliographical Society. Organised with the assistance of House of Illustration.

This session follows two themes:
1.Miniaturization: Drawing on Peter Otto’s work on virtual culture in the Romantic period, is the illustration a form of virtual gallery? How does visual meaning change when an image is resized?
2.The Art of Quotation: How were literary quotations used to conceptualise visual images? How important are framing devices to the meaning of an image?

…and other related questions.

Registration is free, and includes free entry to the main exhibition. You can download the full programme here.

To register, please email Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk, giving your name, job title, and institution (if applicable).

Birkbeck Arts Week Starts: Monday, 18 May

Posted on May 14, 2015 by marylshannon

Birkbeck Arts Week Starts: Monday, 18 May

We start on Monday 18 May with sessions on Curiosity (with Marina Warner and others), Coffee and Commonwealth, illustrator and caricaturist Chris Riddell‘s reflecting on Gulliver’s Travels and Diderot on Monday, to discussions of Ruins, productions of S.T.Coleridge‘s Ancient Mariner and Blake‘s Illuminated manuscript Vala or the Four Zoas, Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner with members of the film team, and we end on Friday with sessions on the enlightenment art of Shadow Portraits and a Magic Lantern Show. And this is just a couple of examples.

Do visit the Birkbeck Arts Week’s webpage, choose your events, and book seats. It’s all free. And please spread the word.
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/events/arts-week

British Museum: Napoleon Exhibition and Events

Posted on February 9, 2015 by marylshannon

©The Trustees of the British Museum

Bonaparte and the British: prints and propaganda in the age of Napoleon

5 February – 16 August 2015

Venue: British Museum
Entry: Free
Address: Great Russell Street, London, Greater London, England. WC1B 3DG

This exhibition will focus on the printed propaganda that either reviled or glorified Napoleon Bonaparte, on both sides of the English Channel. It explores how his formidable career coincided with the peak of political satire as an art form. 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo – the final undoing of brilliant French general and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821). The exhibition will include works by British and French satirists who were inspired by political and military tensions to exploit a new visual language combining caricature and traditional satire with the vigorous narrative introduced by Hogarth earlier in the century. This exhibition includes work by James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Richard Newton and George Cruikshank.

Download a list of exhibition-related events at the British Museum here.

Ashmolean Blake Exhibition: Lectures and Conferences

Posted on January 7, 2015 by marylshannon

Members of the Illustration Network might be interested in the upcoming events associated with the Blake exhibition at the Ashmolean.

LECTURES

Towards a New Era in Printmaking: Innovation in the 18th Century With Dr Ad Stijnman FRHistS, private researcher, Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Friday 16 January, 2-3pm £5/£4 concessions. Printmaking changed dramatically after 1700 with the introduction of new plate-making and plate-printing processes, coloured inks and state of the art print presses. Dr Stijnman looks at this era in which artists, printers, engravers and publishers produced work that astonished audiences. BOOK NOW AT http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/whatsontickets/

Reading in the Spirit of Blake With Saree Makdisi, Professor of English and Comparative Studies at UCLA Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Friday 23 January, 4.30-5.30pm £5/£4 concessions. This lecture explores the relationship between William Blake’s words and the images in his illustrated books and hopes to show you how to read ‘in the spirit of Blake’. Part of the ‘Inspired by Blake’ Festival. BOOK NOW AT http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/whatsontickets/

Italian Old Master Prints Through the Eyes of Blake and His Friends With Michael Bury, University of Edinburgh. Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Thursday 19 February, 2-3pm £5/£4 concessions. In the late 18th century, Blake and his contemporaries developed a distinctive approach to the study of Italian Renaissance prints. They paid attention to printmakers whose work has been largely ignored or disparaged in preceding years. This talk examines these artworks and identifies why Blake admired them so much. BOOK NOW AT http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/whatsontickets/

CONFERENCE

Apprentice & Master: Conference With the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English and the Birkbeck Centre for 19th-century Studies. Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Saturday 24 January, 10am-8pm £30/£25 concessions. Leading academics in the study of Blake will explore a variety of perspectives on the exhibition. The conference includes lunch and is followed by a reception and private viewing of the exhibition. BOOK NOW AT http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/

CFP: ‘James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience?’ Oxford, March 2015

Posted on October 17, 2014 by marylshannon

http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/james-gillray200-caricaturist-without-conscience

James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience?

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford & New College, Oxford present:
A one-day symposium to be held at the Ashmolean Museum
Saturday 28 March 2015

CFP deadline: 15 November 2014

Programme will be announced: 21 November 2014

James Gillray’s reputation in the two centuries since his death has been as varied and layered as his prints. Trained at the Royal Academy, he failed at reproductive printmaking, yet became, according to the late-eighteenth-century Weimar journal London und Paris, one of the greatest European artists of the era. Napoleon, from his exile on St Helena, allegedly remarked that Gillray’s prints did more to run him out of power than all the armies of Europe. In England, patriots had hired him to propagandize against the French and touted him as a great national voice, but he was an unreliable gun-for-hire. At a large public banquet, during the heat of anti-Revolutionary war fever, he even raised a toast to his fellow artist, the regicide, Jacques-Louis David. Gillray produced a highly individual, highly schooled, and often outlandish body of work with no clear moral compass that undermines the legend of the caricaturist as the voice and heart of the people, so that the late Richard Godfrey described him as a caricaturist without a conscience. Following 2001 and 2004 retrospectives in London and New York, and fuelled by scholarship of a new generation of thinkers, our era’s Gillray is just now coming into focus.

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death, and in conjunction with the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, Love Bites: Caricatures of James Gillray (26 March-21 June 2015), based on New College’s outstanding collection, we are organising a one-day conference at the Ashmolean Museum to hear and see the latest Gillray scholarship.

We seek proposals for papers that address any aspect of Gillray’s work or that consider artistic duty or purposeful negligence of duty in the period around 1800. Comparative, formal, contextual, and theoretical approaches to Gillray and our theme are all welcome. Proposals should be a maximum of 200 words and be accompanied by a short biographical statement.

Organised by Todd Porterfield, Université de Montréal; Martin Myrone, Tate Britain; and Michael Burden, New College, Oxford; with Ersy Contogouris, Université de Montréal.

All enquiries should be addressed initially to the New College Dean’s Secretary, Jacqui Julier, jacqui.julier@new.ox.ac.uk, to whom all abstracts should be submitted by:
15 November 2014

The programme will be announced on 21 November 2014.

Romantic Illustration Network