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 […]
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 […]
Throughout the history of the Western world, countless attempts have been made to define beauty in art and life, especially with regard to women’s bodies and faces. Facing Beauty examines concepts of female beauty in terms of the ideal and the real, investigating paradigms of beauty as represented in art and literature and how beauty […]
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 […]
Further details on the publisher’s website.
Disability is no respecter of person. Those represented on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery and in its collections are among the most celebrated members of British society but among them are many with disabilities. Some are celebrated in literature: Richard III was famously depicted by Shakespeare as ‘Crookback’, while the poet Byron who […]
A small online exhibition of PRB portrait drawings in the collection of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool.
