Gibson and the YCBA

I'm off to New Haven to begin my Visiting Scholar Award at the Yale Center for British Art, about which I posted back in April. This is not to be confused with the "Artist's Studio in Britain" seminar I attended there back in June (which I posted about here, here, here, and here). You'd think with all my traveling I would have packing down to a science, but it's not easy coordinating a wardrobe when the weather is moving from temperately chilly to cold but could warm up at any time. In any case, the fellowship is in support of my dissertation on John Gibson. The bust of an unknown young woman that you see here is by Gibson and from the YCBA collection. They date the marble bust to the late 1820s, which seems reasonable based on her hair style, but her identity is a mystery. One of my many goals for this trip is to identify her. I would like to think that it is a bust of Emily d'Aguilar Robinson from Liverpool. She was one of Gibson's earliest supporters. She was married, but she and Gibson may have had a bit of a love affair. She died in 1829 while he was in Rome, and he designed her funerary monument which is now in the Oratory at St. James's Cemetery in Liverpool. Of course, it's very possible the bust is of someone else, so that and many other Gibson mysteries await me as I spend some time doing research.

Artist’s Studio in Britain (Part 1)

I’m in New Haven for the week-long seminar "Making Art, Picturing Practice: The Artist’s Studio in Britain, ca. 1700-1900" at the Yale Center for British Art, an event about which I first posted not too long ago. The seminar began informally yesterday with a guided tour of the exhibition Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance on its last day. I’m very glad I had a chance to see this show, and the tour was useful, not as a chronological history of Lawrence’s life and career, but as a close study of a few specific works in which we considered how Lawrence was both innovative and a leader in portrait painting from the 1790s to the 1820s. One of the pictures in the show was the work you see here, his portrait of Elizabeth Farren, Later Countess of Derby, which is owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is one of my favorite British paintings in the collection there. Farren was a comedic actress and mistress of the Earl of Derby, whom she married a few years after this portrait was exhibited in 1790 at the Royal Academy. It was Lawrence’s entree into the London portrait painting business and was received well by viewers. Farren appears as if she’s walked onto a stage or garden, and positions her head and body in such a way that she smiles coquettishly and seems to be flirting with the viewer. She is slightly off-balance and asymmetrical, which adds to the charm of the work. The virtuosity of his brush stroke is delightful in his ability to capture the white satin dress, the brown leather glove, and the spot of blue ribbon decorating her fan. I’ve always loved how Lawrence has the dress float to the bottom of the canvas, forcing Farren into the viewer’s space. One of the things we discussed during the tour was that pictures like this were often hung "on the line," resting literally on a railing that ran 8 feet high in the exhibition room at Somerset House, with the top of the frame leaning outward toward the viewer. What this suggests then is that Lawrence quite consciously used features in the painting like the trailing hem of the dress and the white shimmer of fabric to draw attention to his work in a room that would have been overcrowded with hundreds of pictures on display one beside the other. Farren’s presence would have dominated the viewer’s sweeping vista of the works on the wall.

There are about 10 doctoral students participating in the seminar this week. A few are from Yale, but others are from Harvard, Berkeley, the Courtauld, and other institutions, which is giving us all an opportunity to network and learn more about what others are working on with regard to British art. Our primary instructors (I call them that liberally as this is more of a discussion-based seminar than a series of formal presentations) are Martina Droth (Head of Research and Curator of Sculpture, YCBA) and Mark Hallett (Prof., History of Art, Univ. York, England), but we have others giving lectures and leading discussions this week.

Our sessions began today with a consideration of the growth of London and how artists changed neighborhoods from the mid-1700s into the early 1900s as society moved to ever further westward. We also discussed apprenticeship in the studio, how young artists who showed talent were sent to work for masters and learn from them. They would live with the artist in exchange for payment from the family for the apprentice’s training. We also looked closely at a selection of artist training manuals and sketchbooks, showing how apprentices would learn by copying from engravings, then casts, and slowly working up to the living model. The foundation of the Royal Academy school in 1768 offered new opportunities for students to be educated in the basics of draftsmanship, although they still learned the craft of painting in studios. By the mid-19th century, however, this model of pedagogy had evolved with a new emphasis on industrial and graphic design, specifically new state-organized institutional learning centers following the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the mandate to improve British design. We wrapped up the discussion with a consideration of how these new reform movements spread to places throughout the British Empire such as India and impacted local cultures there as well. All in all, the first day has been filled with an incredible amount of information, and having had opportunities to look closely at 18th- and 19th-century books and works of art is always a treat. Topics over the next few days will include sculptural practice and the representation of the artist in the studio, so stay tuned for more...

YCBA Visiting Scholar Award

I'm a regular visitor to the Yale Center for British Art, and I haven't had a chance to report until now on some exciting news about them and me. Stay tuned for that below. Yesterday afternoon I took a train ride up to New Haven, CT with Peter Trippi (editor of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine and co-curator of the recent John William Waterhouse exhibition). We were on our way to the YCBA to hear Elizabeth Prettejohn give the last of a series of public lectures on Victorian art that she had been doing all month. I had hoped to attend more of them, but I was actually in Europe at the time. Regular bklynbiblio readers know that Prettejohn's name makes appearances here from time to time. I admit it: I'm a fan. In her talk she focused on the idea of Giorgione (ca. 1477/8-1510), specifically how his work was an influence on Victorian painters such as Edward Burne-Jones and art critics such as Walter Pater. Almost no works are safely attributed to Giorgione. For instance, the ca. 1509 work above, Le Concert champêtre (Musée du Louvre), was attributed to Giorgione but it is now said to have been by Titian. Even in the 19th-century very few works were definitively attributed to Giorgione. Prettejohn argued that this obfuscation charmed Aesthetic painters into borrowing on his Venetian style so as to create pictures about beauty without subject or moral virtue. The talk was interesting, and there was a wine reception afterwards, with opportunities for networking. I was invited to join a group for dinner as well, which was very generous of them. I always find myself feeling a bit self-conscious interacting with all the bigwigs of Victorian art criticism (including Tim Barringer, Martina Droth, and Jason Rosenfeld), but it was a pleasant evening overall and well worth the trip. By the time I got the train and subway home, it was after 1am.

Now for the news. I've been selected to participate in a 1-week seminar that will be taught by Martina Droth (Head of Research and Curator of Sculpture, YCBA) and Mark Hallett (Prof. of the History of Art, York University) at YCBA this June. The topic of the seminar is "The Artist's Studio in Britain, 1700-1900" and will be of great use to me in my dissertation research on the sculptor John Gibson. But the even BIGGER news is that the YCBA also has awarded me a 1-month Visiting Scholar Award. Much like the fellowship I received to the Henry Moore Institute last year, this award will provide me with housing, a per diem stipend, research facilities, and access to their fantastic collection and all the Yale University Libraries. I'll be there from November to December. I'm really looking forward to it.

50 UK Days: Week 5

During my last week in Leeds, I had the opportunity to go to the Yorkshire countryside to visit 2 estates where I was given personal tours, an incredible privilege that I will not forget. I first was at Lotherton Hall. Curator Adam White guided me around and told me about the history of the house, which has changed much in appearance since it was first built in the 1700s and now has a more Edwardian feel to it. The last owners were the Gascoigne family, and one can tell from what remains of their personal art collection that they were traditionalists whose taste did not reflect contemporary trends in art. Col. Gascoigne was an imperialist and named each of his guest rooms after far-flung regions of the British Empire, like the Rhodesia and Cape of Good Hope bedrooms. Later that same afternoon, curator James Lomax guided me around Temple Newsam, a huge manor home with so many rooms that at one point I was unable to even figure out what floor we were on. A house has stood at this location for over a millennium, but the current building dates from the Tudor period, with changes made to the exterior and interior over time. In the medieval period, it was a meeting place for the Knights Templar. The picture you see here is of the Oak Staircase, with paintings dating back to the 1500s and Richard James Wyatt’s Nymph Removing a Thorn from a Greyhound’s Foot (1850) at the base of the stairs. Although the staircase is Jacobean in design, it actually is a historic recreation from the 1890s when the Hon. Mrs. Meynell Ingram decided the house needed to live up to its rich historic past. She even altered the bedroom where Lord Darnley was born to give visitors a better sense of what his childhood room might have looked like in 1545. Darnley was the second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the reputed father of King James VI (who subsequently became James I of England and Scotland in 1603), so for a brief period Temple Newsam was a royal palace. Darnley himself was assassinated at the age of 21 because he sought to increase his power on the Scottish throne, after having already killed his wife’s private secretary because he was jealous of the time she spent with him.

I was a bit sad to leave Leeds, more than anything because the research fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute was so productive for me. I couldn’t have accomplished as much as I did if it weren’t for the superb staff there. I won’t name them all because I may forget someone (and some of them are now reading bklynbiblio!), but all of them truly made my time there a great one.

As the train rolled into Liverpool today, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had been here once before with my cousin HA for a day visit, but not along the waterfront. Within an hour of my arrival, I was amazed to discover how much I like it. It probably helped that music by the Beatles was being piped through speakers as I stepped out of the taxi in front of my hotel at Albert Dock on the Mersey River. The dock area was established in the 1840s by Prince Albert as an important center for the shipping industry, and in the late 1980s underwent a complete overhaul and commercial gentrification that is quite stunning to behold as I walked around this afternoon. The hotel is actually one section of an enormous U-shaped Victorian warehouse that includes other hotels, restaurants, shops, and residences. It even has 3 museums in it, including a branch of the Tate, which I visited today, first to have a spot of afternoon tea and a scone with cream and preserves, then to go look at some art. I was thrilled by the sculpture exhibition I saw, and was dazzled by one particular bronze statue that reaffirmed for me, as I circled it over and over, the importance of seeing art in person. Sometimes a reproduction will just never do.

But I will save all that for my next post. I had a delicious dinner at ha ha bar & grill (sure, laugh at the name, but it was yummy: a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, chicken with Serrano ham and mozzarella cheese with a cherry tomato glaze baked in a brick oven until crisp, accompanied by new potatoes and green beans, followed by “eton mess” for dessert, berries with meringue and cream). While I ate, I read an interesting article by Anne Helmreich entitled “The Death of the Victorian Art Periodical,” and I attempted every once and a while to flirt with the cute waiter. For now though, I think I’ll settle down for the night with a nice cuppa tea.

BQH Conference

A few weeks ago, while I was in Florida, the executive committee in my graduate program met and, I'm pleased to say, approved my dissertation proposal: "Refashioning the Gods: John Gibson, the Roman School of Sculpture, and the Modern Classical Body." As you may remember from a previous post on this blog, Gibson was a British sculptor who moved to Rome in 1817 and established a studio there, becoming one of the most important sculptors of his day. My dissertation will address how Gibson was both a classicist and a modernist, how his appreciation of ancient Greco-Roman art merged with his understanding of modern taste, and thus made him the successful sculptor that he was in his day.

In addition to my upcoming residential fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, and a travel award from my school, I was informed this week that I also have received another award: the Spero-Goldreich Dissertation Fellowship. The money from this award is going to pay my travel expenses to do research in London at the Royal Academy this fall. I am extremely grateful to the private sponsors of this award.

Before I leave for England, however, I'll be making a stop in Montreal first, where I will be delivering a paper at the British Queer History Conference at McGill University. I am on a panel session on 19th-century British art with my friends and colleagues Carolyn Conroy (on Simeon Solomon) and Jongwoo Jeremy Kim (on Henry Scott Tuke). Christopher Reed from Penn State is our moderator. It should be an interesting conference, with talks by Jeffrey Weeks, Matt Cook, and others. You can see the whole program here.

You may be wondering how all this relates to the picture above. That is a photograph I took in April 2006 of Chatsworth, truly one of the most magnificent estates in England, still owned by the Duke of Devonshire and his family. The 6th Duke was one of Gibson's first patrons, and my upcoming conference paper will be about how these two bachelors negotiated the aspects of queer art patronage in the early 19th century. Here is the abstract for my paper.

The Sculptor and the Duke: John Gibson, the Duke of Devonshire, and Queer Art Patronage

During the winter of 1819, the Duke of Devonshire visited the Roman studio of the British sculptor John Gibson. At the time, Gibson was working on a seven-foot model of a sculptural group of two nudes entitled Mars Restrained by Cupid. The Duke immediately commissioned the work in marble. In the sculpture, the idealized warrior god and the ephebic god of love gaze into one another’s eyes as Cupid gently restrains Mars from brandishing his sword. Alluding to the pederastic tradition of ancient Greece, as well as the sensual aesthetics of the Biblical David as sculpted by Donatello and Michelangelo, Mars Restrained by Cupid is an example of early nineteenth-century queer art from the perspective of subject, artist, and patron.

Born in Wales and raised in Liverpool, the artist John Gibson (1790-1866) eventually made his way to Rome where he studied sculpture under Antonio Canova. Thereafter, he established a lifelong career in Rome as a British expatriate sculptor. Gibson came to count among his patrons Queen Victoria herself, but his legacy to art was the reintroduction of polychromy into sculpture with works such as the Tinted Venus, which premiered at the International Exhibition of 1862. Espousing the teachings of J.J. Winckelmann and the art of ancient Greece, Gibson produced interpretations of ephebic gods in marble, such as The Sleeping Shepherd Boy (1818) and Narcissus (1829). His patron, William Spencer Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire (1790-1858), inherited his title upon the death of his father in 1811 and began renovations at Chatsworth, including the construction of a sculpture gallery. Once the Napoleonic Wars had ended, he went on his first Grand Tour to Rome, and it was during this trip that he commissioned the statue by Gibson. He subsequently commissioned or purchased work from other sculptors in Rome, almost all of which were of mythological nude males, including Endymion by Canova and Ganymede with the Eagle of Jove by Adamo Tadolini. His arrangement of these works at the entrance to his sculpture gallery inevitably created a queer space through which one had to pass in order to see other works in the collection.

In this paper, I will consider the juxtaposition of Gibson’s sculptural oeuvre with Devonshire’s choice of art objects for this gallery, a queer space in which Mars Restrained by Cupid played an important role. Certainly it is true that representations of the nude male epitomized idealized beauty in Neoclassical art, and not all such figures are inherently queer in nature. However, art historians such as Thomas Crow have noted that there were homosocial artistic circles, such as the atelier of Jacques-Louis David, and that he and some of his students did paint subjects that pointed to the ancient Greek pederastic tradition. This spirit of homosexualism, according to Whitney Davis, demonstrates that in the early nineteenth century representations of same sex passion existed before the conscious manifestation of a homosexual identity occurred later in the century. Citing published and archival biographical and commercial information, as well as theories on the collecting and display of art, I will consider the sculptor Gibson and his patron the Duke of Devonshire as a case study for the existence of queer art patronage in Britain and Rome in the early nineteenth-century.

HMI Research Fellowship

Last week I received some fantastic news. I have been awarded a research fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. You can see a picture of the institute above. The contemporary glass facade on a Victorian row house gives you a good sense of how they see them as a bridge between the past and the present. According to their website, the HMI "is an award-winning exhibitions venue, research centre and sculpture archive." They specialize in British sculpture, mostly from the late 19th century to the present, but also hold material dating back to 1800. They are affiliated with The Henry Moore Foundation, which was established in 1977 by the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986), a leading figures in 20th-century sculpture. His large-scale, biomorphic figures can be found in museums and sculpture gardens around the world. Click here for just one example from the sculpture garden at Perry Green, Moore's home in England. By sheer coincidence the Tate Britain in London is opening an exhibition of his work in a few weeks as well.

This is a one-month residency research fellowship, for which they provide housing. I will have time to use their extensive library and archive, and to view the sculpture collections at the HMI and the Leeds Art Gallery, all in the goal of doing more research on the work of the sculptor John Gibson (1790-1866). You'll recall that I also received from my school a grant for a research project on Gibson in Liverpool, so this extended period of time will be an incredible start to the next phase of my academic career. We're still coordinating the dates, but the plan is for me to be doing all of this in the fall.

DSR Grant

Today was my last final exam ever, and I turned in my research papers too. I still have to complete my independent study project, which I will turn in after the holidays, but as of today I am officially finished with classes for credit! Even more exciting, the other day I received good news from my school. I've been awarded a Doctoral Student Research Grant. The award will help pay my expenses for a research trip I will be making to Liverpool, England next year. My proposal was to conduct research at the Walker Art Gallery and surrounding areas of Liverpool on the sculpture of John Gibson (1790-1866), about whom you may recall I gave a conference paper at Yale in November 2008. Gibson was born in Wales but his family moved to Liverpool when he was 9 years old. He received his early training in sculpting there, and his first patrons were all Liverpudlians. Despite his move to Rome he maintained a connection with this city, continuing to produce poetic subjects of gods and tomb monuments for many of its citizens. The image you see here is a photograph I took of Gibson's sculpture The Sleeping Shepherd Boy during my first visit to the Walker Art Gallery in April 2006 with my cousin HA in England. Gibson created the plaster cast of the statue in 1818 while he was studying with the great Antonio Canova (1757-1822), and he subsequently carved up to 3 versions in marble for different patrons. The Walker acquired this statue about 20 years ago, adding it to their already substantial holdings of sculpture by Gibson and others. It will be exciting to spend more time in Liverpool to do this research (in part also because a branch of my mother's family comes from this general area...I wonder if we're related?). I am very glad to have received this grant to help make the project happen, but since I probably won't be going until next fall, I will have to wait patiently until then.

Library Bytes: www.ilovelibraries.org

I confess that I have not renewed my membership in ALA (American Library Association) for a few years now. It's not that I don't support the organization, but that I already belong to other library and academic organizations, and all those memberships take money which I don't have right now. The best I can do on occasion is help promote libraries, and I thought a post today on ALA and libraries might be an interesting way to do so. Did you know, for instance, that the ALA Store sells posters with celebrities holding books as part of their READ campaign? The image you see here is one of them, showing off my fantasy boyfriend Ewan McGregor with a book of tales by Beatrix Potter, which presumably was released about the time he co-starred in Miss Potter with Renée Zellweger (which, by the way, is a surprisingly fantastic movie that I highly recommend). While reading a news story on The New York Times online, I followed an ad for another of ALA's campaigns, ilovelibraries.org. The site advertises itself as a way to keep people informed about the state of libraries and to promote what libraries can do for Americans of every race, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender/sexual orientation. According to the site's Get Informed page, "If you’re looking for the heart of any community, look no further than the local library. It’s the one place in America where the doors are open to everyone ... providing everyone the same access to information and opportunities for success." (Note that for some of the webpages, there's a weird design flaw where you have to scroll down past the white emptiness to read the text.) The website even has a special feature right now called "Nominate Your Librarian," with monetary prizes for some of the best librarians in the country.

So there's no doubt about it. Libraries rock, as I've commented about before on this blog. Not all types of libraries are the same. They are usually divided into four broad categories: public, school, academic, and special. Public is self-explanatory, but can range from small-town establishments like the adorable Provincetown Public Library to large city systems like the Brooklyn Public Library. School refers to elementary through high school, while academic is colleges and universities. Special Libraries encompass everything from corporate to museum environments. From this breakdown then, you can see that the types of environments are very different, and you can imagine that the types of services and clientele are worlds apart in many ways.

I admit that I've always enjoyed what I've seen as the luxury of working in academic and museum libraries. I would never work in an elementary school (my migraines couldn't handle the screaming children). I would probably also quit working in a public library within the first week. When I answer a reference question, I need them to be intellectually stimulating questions, not smelly homeless people demanding the newspaper or crazy people masturbating in public (these are actual incidents I've heard about). I know I'm being judgmental, but I'm being completely honest as it applies to my idea of work satisfaction. That said, I have an incredible amount of respect for my friends and colleagues who do work in public libraries and can handle this type of clientele with such aplomb. They have to take on the role of social workers and psychologists without any professional training, and as my friend SVH has pointed out, the instances in which one genuinely helps an individual desperate for real information, like health news on a medical condition, legal information to fight a corrupt landlord, or simply useful books on Martin Luther King, Jr. for a high school research project, makes being a librarian in this environment one of the most rewarding careers ever.

So get online and nominate your librarian for the I Love My Librarian Award to thank him or her for everything they've done for you, and remember to support your libraries!

Streisand & Kennedy Center Honors

In the center of the photo above is Barbra Streisand, who was among the six people honored this past weekend with awards from the Kennedy Center Honors. The awards recognize lifetime achievement in the performing arts and are named in honor of President John F. Kennedy. The award winners were Streisand, Morgan Freeman, Twyla Tharp, George Jones, and Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who (which is a strange mix of people, if you ask me). Apparently performers like Beyonce and Queen Latifah performed Streisand numbers in her honor. The event was taped and will be shown on CBS on December 30th. Here's a news byte about the awards from The New York Times. However, I think another news byte is even funnier, because it focuses on the fact that Streisand and President Bush kissed one another in greeting and congratulations. It's well known how much she dislikes him, and he's no fan of hers either. Afterwards she said she wished she had been given the award next year by President Obama, but that she was at least pleased that he was going to be the next President. For more on that funny news byte from the AP, click here.

CLAGS Award

I've received some exciting news. I'm the recipient of the Fall 2008 Graduate Student Travel Award from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS). The award is in recognition of the paper I will be giving later next week at a conference, and is to be used to assist with my travel expenses. My paper is entitled "Channeling (Ant)Eros: John Gibson's Queer Sculpture," but I'll talk more about the paper later. For now I thought I would blog about CLAGS, because they really are doing some fantastic work for 17 years now. As they say on their own website: "The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) was founded in 1991 as the first university-based research center in the United States dedicated to the study of historical, cultural, and political issues of vital concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals and communities." The founder and first director was Martin Duberman, a renown scholar of gay history. Back in the mid-'90s when I was first pursuing research in the field, I contacted Prof. Duberman to ask for his advice (by letter no less; this was before email was the norm). Imagine my excitement when I got home and there was a voicemail from him and a verbal invitation to phone him to talk more. We did speak, and I still to this day appreciate his encouragement of pursuing my interest in gay issues in the fields of art history and cultural studies. Sometimes people think we're in a "post-gay" world, but with the organized threat of new laws going into effect after Tuesday's election--laws that would outright take away the equal rights of gays and lesbians in places like California--groups like CLAGS are needed more now than ever. For more about CLAGS, check out their website at http://www.clags.org/.