The Garrick Club in London holds a remarkable collection of art works representing the history of the theatre, much of which is displayed throughout the building. There are over 1,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures, a fascinating selection of theatrical memorabilia, and thousands of prints. The new Collections Online Catalogue has just been launched, and can […]
The British country house has long been regarded as the jewel in the nation’s heritage crown. But the country house is also an expression of wealth and power, and as scholars reconsider the nation’s colonial past, new questions are being posed about these great houses and their links to Atlantic slavery. This book, authored by […]
The Profiles of the Past initiative is focused on British portrait silhouette history, a story that developed over the last 250 years and which is still an intriguing part of life today. The project is being developed by The Brunswick Town Charitable Trust and The Regency Town House Heritage Centre, in co-operation with members of […]
Regular high quality blog posts by Lynn Roberts on the history of picture frames and their iconography - also active on Twitter @TheFrameBlog. Link to The Frame Blog.
The Bowes Museum and historical costume specialist Luca Costigliolo dress a female model in an exact replica 1870s dress, made by his students at the National School of Cinema in Rome. Link to video.
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 Walpole Society’s guide to freely available online resources for the study of the history of British art and architecture from earliest times to the 20th century.
A collaboration between the artist Nicky Bird and art historian Lara Perry, Knowing the Unknown Sitter brought together writers from a range of disciplines to explore the problem of the unknown sitter, and the value of their portraits, once identity has been lost.
This film from the V&A Channel features author Eleri Lynn as she leads us on a tour of a long hidden world. Eleri’s brief history of shapewear starts with the hourglass and S-bend forms - and steel and whalebone engineering - of Victorian and Edwardian corsets carries on through the breast-flattening bandeau bras worn by […]
The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735 publishes primary sources and research tools for the study of the arts in Britain between the restoration of Charles II and the opening of Hogarth’s St Martin’s Lane Academy. Launched in October 2011, this long-term project is creating a large body of transcribed sources that underpin secondary […]