The Lewis Walpole Library will offer two master classes this summer, one in August and one in early September. Graduate students are invited to register for one or for both. As space is limited, early registration is encouraged. For questions or more information please write to Cynthia Roman cynthia.roman@yale.edu or Maggie Powell //margaret.powell@yale.edu">margaret.powell@yale.edu.
British History Painting in the Long Eighteenth Century
August 18-22, 2014
By Mark Salber Phillips, Professor of History at Carleton University, Ottawa and Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library
This residential seminar is intended to give doctoral students in a number of disciplines the opportunity to consider issues of history painting using both visual material and textual resources from the Lewis Walpole Library's collections. This course explores the often-embattled efforts of artists (including William Hogarth, Gavin Hamilton, Benjamin West and John Trumbull among others) to construct new modes of visual representations of narrative history and national history in particular. A multidisciplinary approach provides the theoretical context of Enlightenment intellectual history, the more focused discourse of art treatises, and direct encounters with the formal and aesthetic qualities of works of art.
The class is taught as a combination of lecture presentations, discussions, and small-group activities and includes visits to the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Most of the teaching takes place in the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington and is led by Mark Salber Phillips, Professor of History at Carleton University, Ottawa, and Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library
Caricature and the Comic Image, 1800-1850
September 4-6, 2014
By Brian Maidment, Professor of the History of Print, Liverpool John Moores University and Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, The Lewis Walpole Library
This residential seminar is aimed at providing graduate students across a range of academic subjects with an introduction to some of the ways that graphic images might be used as an important element in research. Built around the magnificent holdings of British caricatures and satirical prints held in the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, the class will provide students with an introduction to the various methods through which graphic images are made and reproduced and will feature workshops organized around the interpretative and historiographical issues raised by the academic study of prints. The focus will be on the period between 1800 and 1850 when political caricature began to give way to various forms of humorous prints that offered a satirical socio-political perspective on society. In particular, humorous prints at this time engaged with issues concerning the social changes being brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and class formation.
This seminar will be taught through small group sessions that engage with primary material drawn from the Library’s collections, and there will be an opportunity for students to gain some sense of the extent and nature of the collections held in Farmington. No previous experience of working with prints or other graphic images is required.
The seminar will begin in the late afternoon on Thursday, September 4, with a visit to the Beinecke Library, which will suggest some of the ways in which graphic images begin to invade texts in the 1820s and 1830s. The seminar will move to the Lewis Walpole Library for September 5 and 6.
Both courses are intended primarily for Yale students, but a limited number of places will be available to graduate students from other universities.