Welcome 2009-10 students!
Welcome to the RHUL Victorian MA blog.
We use this site to post materials and weblinks related to seminar texts and to post notices of interest to RHUL Victorianists, including notices of relevant exhibitions and talks in and around London.
There’s also a facility to post your comments so it’s a great place to follow up on seminar discussions and continue your conversations outside of class.
We look forward to meeting you at the MA Induction, Thurs 24th.
The RHUL Victorian MA team.
National Gallery study day: the city (London and Paris) in 19thC art
Dear All,
Please see below for notice of an interesting study day at the National Gallery on depictions of the city in 19thC art.
Best,
Vicky
Student Study Day
Thursday 30 April 2009
Sainsbury Wing Theatre, 10.30am–4.15pm
Tickets £6
LONDON/ PARIS:
SEX IN THE MODERN CITY
Concepts of modernity and Modernism inform this study day as we explore the seamy underbelly of these two cities. We will focus on Ideas of town and country, leisure and pleasure, and the inventions and innovations which impacted so dramatically on life and art throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. National Gallery works by Hogarth, Courbet, Monet and Manet will be placed in their social and artistic context drawing on notions of gendered spaces, radical techniques and ‘the gaze’.
Programme
10.30–11am Registration and coffee
11–11.15am Introduction to the Day
Colin Wiggins – Head of Education, National Gallery
11.15–11.45am Whores, Colourmen and Coffee Houses: Hogarth’s London and London in Hogarth
James Heard – National Gallery
11.45am–12.15pm Many Little Harmless and Interesting Adventures…’ Men, Women and Streets in Victorian London
Lynda Nead – Birkbeck
12.15–1.15pm Talks in the Gallery
1.15-2.15pm Lunch (not provided)
2.15pm–2.45pm Two Women on the Banks of the Seine: Courbet and ‘The Gaze’
Jo Rhymer – National Gallery
2.45–3.15pm Manet and Morisot: Modern Life and Modernism in Late C19th Paris
Kathleen Adler – Independent Scholar
3.15-3.45pm Degas’ Little Ballet Dancer Aged 1 Desire, Contempt and the Fate of the Rat Girl
Colin Wiggins
3.45-4.15pm Questions/Plenary discussion
To book
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/what/events/2009/apr/3004_sexinthemoderncity.htm
For further information Tel 020 7747 2891 Email lee.riley@ng-london.org.uk
Lee Riley, Education Department, The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN.
For institution group bookings, contact Lee Riley to arrange invoicing.
Aestheticism & Decadence: D. G. Rossetti
The Blessed Damozel (1871-81); Fogg painting 1871-77
Lady Lilith (1868)
The Wine of Circe by Edward Burne-Jones
Hello All,
Here are the images we will be discussing around the poems for today’s class. I’ll bring copies with me.
All best,
Vicky
Browning’s Painter Poems
Thought I’d follow Vicky’s example (below) and post a few images as visual context for the three Browning dramatic monologues we’ll be reading in this afternoon’s session. ‘My Last Duchess’ is, of course, fictional; but Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi were both real people (I like to think of them as ‘Andrew Taylor’ and ‘Brother Mick Jagger’ respectively). You’ll find 87 images of del Sarto’s work here; and here’s the image that Browning saw (a portrait of del Sarto’s wife, Lucrezia) that inspired him to write the poem:
Nice enough, you might think: is it really as lifeless as Browning’s del Sarto thinks? (‘All is silver-grey,/Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!’ 98-99). Fifty-seven Fra Lippo Lippi images are viewable here: it’s not so clear which specific Lippi works Browning had in mind when he wrote the ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ dramatic monologue, but he was certainly familiar with the frescoes at Prato cathedral, near Florence:
A close up of that one:
The guy on the left right who looks a bit like Phil Mitchell? That’s supposed to be a self-portrait by Lippi himself. I like this three chins. [AR]
Reading for Aestheticism & Decadence: Swinburne
Hellenistic sculpture of Hermaphrodite (Louvre)
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Simeon Solomon, Damon and Aglae (1866)
Dear All,
All of the poems set for this week are taken from Swinburne’s explosive debut verse volume, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866). They can be read online at
http://people.virginia.edu/~bpn2f/Swinburne/1866.html
Three of the poems refer to separate artworks (shown at the head of the post).
1.’Before the Mirror’ to James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s The Little White Girl: Symphony in White no.2 (1864) (Tate)
2.’Erotion’ to Simeon Solomon’s painting Damon and Aglae (exhib. RA 1866)
3.’Hermaphroditus’ to the Hellinistic sculpture of Hermaphrodite, also known as the Borghese Hermaphrodite (in the Louvre, where Swinburine viewed it)
I will bring copies of the essay on your reading list – Swinburne’s ‘Simeon Solomon: notes on his “Vision of Love”‘ – to class on Thursday.
I look forward to hearing your responses to these texts!
Vicky
Matthew Arnold’s Preface to Poems (1853)
I’ve been asked whether the text of this famous preface is available online. Probably the best bet is Google books: here for example (under the slightly odd title ‘Poetry and the Classics’; but it is the 1853 Preface), or here. It’s also the first essay in this Project Gutenburg edition; scroll down a little. [AR]
EN5280 Aestheticism and Decadence
Some possible critical reading for the class on Ruskin on Thursday:
John Dixon Hunt, ‘”Ut Pictura Poesis”‘ The Picturesque and John Ruskin’ MLN, Vol. 93, No. 5 Comparative Literature, pp.794-818. The essay is available on JSTOR, here.
Wendell V. Harris, ‘Ruskin’s Theoretic Practicality and the Royal Academy’s Aesthetic idealism’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol.52, No. 1 (June 1997), pp. 80-102. [JSTOR]
Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Harvard University Press, 1982) [Google books]
Kenneth Daley, The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John Ruskin (Ohio University press, 2001) [Google books]
Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (Princeton University Press, 1976)
Richard L. Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation: The Fine Arts as Literature in Ruskin, Rosetti and Pater (Harvard University press, 1975) [Google books]
