Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 25 February – 7 June Sculpture Victorious 25 February – 25 May With its fabulous permanent collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Tate Britain always has an embarrassment of riches to offer the Victorian enthusiast, but its latest exhibitions are a further inducement to make the trip to Millbank if you can. Salt and Silver provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of early Victorian photography, bringing together ninety rare salted paper photographs from the mid-nineteenth
Read moreTag: Exhibition Review
Maho Sakoda, The Exhibition Report: ‘Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends’
Maho Sakoda is a fourth year PhD student at the University of Sussex in Brighton. Her thesis explores the relationship between literature and art in the nineteenth century. It especially focuses on works of George Eliot in relation to her contemporaries in the world of art such as by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon and Julia Margaret Cameron. It aims to reveal the ways in which the different genres of art collaborated and addressed similar topics relating to
Read moreVictoriana: The Art of Revival
by Helen Goodman (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Emma Curry (Birkbeck, University of London) EC: Reinventing the Victorian period in film and literature has become something of a trend in recent years, from the multiple new versions of Sherlock Holmes to Sarah Waters’s fantastic Neo-Victorian novels. In response to this repeated reimagining and reshaping, the Guildhall Art Gallery has put together a wonderful new collection of work inspired by the nineteenth century, entitled, appropriately, ‘Victoriana: The Art of Revival’.
Read moreThe Lure of the Underground: London Transport Museum and the Tube at 150
It won’t have escaped the notice of readers of this blog that January saw the 150 year anniversary of the London Underground: the first underground line running from Paddington to Farringdon opened on 9th January 1863, marking the beginning of London’s expansive subterranean network of railway lines. Having studied Victorian mobilities for some years now, it came as some surprise to me to realise that I hadn’t yet visited the London Transport Museum, and with a range of new events
Read moreSlums, Shopping and Spectacle: The Kirkgate Victorian Street
I have always relished stepping onto Kirkgate, the replica, indoor Victorian street at York Castle Museum. When I first visited six years ago, the street had recently undergone its first major redevelopment project. Last year, it received a further £300,000 reworking, focussing on creating more authentic shop spaces, a new slum area, and incorporating more of the city’s chocolate heritage. Fig. 1. The grocer’s shop at the updated Kirkgate street, York Museums Trust. The street was originally created by and
Read moreThe Work of Art in the Age of Steampunk: A Review of the Tate Britain’s ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Avant-Garde’ show
Gillian Piggott (Middlesex University) In our image-obsessed world, where versions of paintings are infinitely reproduced on cards, fridge magnets and coffee coasters, how is it possible to comport ourselves productively towards the great originals on display at an exhibition – such as those in the recent Pre-Raphaelites: Avant-Garde show at Tate Britain? In his late essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin outlines the phenomenon so descriptive of the experience one has nowadays of
Read moreYou Say You Want a Revolution: ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’, Tate Britain
Beatrice Bazell (Birkbeck College, University of London) Figure One: John Everett Millais,The Blind Girl (1856) My mother stood in front of Millais’ The Blind Girl and marvelled: ‘You think you know these paintings, but actually you don’t.’ This will always be the major stumbling block, as well as the major strength of any exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite work: in being so familiar with these beautiful, fascinating works we risk thinking of them as kitsch souvenirs of a bygone age, when in
Read moreA Man of Charms: Edward Lovett Exhibition at the Wellcome Collection
Edward Lovett (1852-1933) was an amateur folklorist who, from the age of 8, was an avid collector of charms and amulets. Despite his ‘amateur’ status, Lovett was widely considered to be a leading authority in British folklore and superstitious tradition. Lovett’s reputation was borne out of the many excursions he made to working-class districts of London. He visited shops, dockyards and costmongers looking for discarded or lost objects. It seems only fitting that nearly a hundred years later, his rather
Read more