A fashion much in use: the vogue for print rooms in the late eighteenth century
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Monday 12 April 2021
(5-6pm --- NB: Booking closes 48 hours before the event.) - Online Zoom Event, link details will be emailed to attendees on the morning of the event
- Lecturer: Kate Retford
Professor Kate Retford will be introducing some new research she is currently working on – namely, late eighteenth-/early nineteenth- century print rooms – the fashion for pasting prints directly onto the walls of a room, often adding printed paper borders and decorative elements such as festoons. Such engraved images ranged from portraits, through scenes from Piranesi’s ‘Vedute di Roma’, to contemporary satires and could number 20-50 and sometimes even 200-300 prints. There are now fewer than a dozen such rooms surviving.
Lecturer
Professor Kate Retford is an art historian, she researches eighteenth-century British art, particularly the portraiture of the period, issues of gender, and the country house art collection. Kate joined the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck in 2003, having previously held a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and taught at the University of Warwick and Richmond, the American International University in London. She is Professor of History of Art, Head of the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Kate has written a number of books and articles, her last monograph, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain, was published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, by Yale University Press, in 2017 (now digitally available on the A&AePortal). Kate is currently working on a research project entitled: Cutting and Pasting: Making Print Rooms in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1840 and the first part is available in the open access journal, British Art Studies issue 24. She is a Member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of British Studies, a Member of the Advisory Board of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art & a Member of the Steering Committee for the AHRC research network: ‘Hidden lives: domestic servants in the European country house, 1700-1850’.
Completed