Tag: museum

Commemorating the Crimean War: The Provenance and Symbolism of a British Medal of 1856

Exhibitions, Other, Victorians on Display

With the exception of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and its long ‘afterlife’ following the relocation at Sydenham of the glass-and-iron Crystal Palace which housed it, perhaps no other event during the Victorian era engendered such an extensive and varied material culture as the Crimean War (1854-6).[1] Medallists, ceramists, artists, and others commemorated the age-defining conflict fought by the allies – Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Piedmont-Sardinia – against Russia in a cornucopia of objects, many of which survive

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Lady Clementina Hawarden: the silhouette motif in photographic art

Other, Victorians on Display

1st June 2022 marked the bicentenary of the birth of pioneering photographer Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865), one of the most significant women to contribute to early photography. In this blog I highlight a specific genre within the extensive Hawarden photographic collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, concentrating on use of the silhouette as a stylistic motif in her photographic portraiture. Viscountess Clementina Hawarden, née Fleeming, left an extensive oeuvre of collodion photographic images marking her brief embrace of the

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Edwin Moxon’s Embroidered Trunks

Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

Costumes are powerful objects, which carry multiple meanings and memories in their fibres. Through three connected blog posts, I will highlight the importance of costume for performance: revealing the insights costumes offer into the lives of the people who designed, made, wore and saw them. Commencing with Ellen Terry’s ‘Beetlewing Dress’, moving on to Edwin Moxon’s embroidered ‘shorts’ (this post), and concluding with Kitty Lord’s carefully padded ‘Symmetricals’, I will showcase the information which these unique garments offer about the

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