Tickets for these events will be available to purchase after Christmas. Please look out on our new website for more details.
Saturday 20th January 2024
Pre-Raphaelite Perfume. Lecture to be given by Dr. Christina Bradstreet. Lecture starts at 11am (GMT). THIS LECTURE WILL BE DELIVERED VIA ZOOM.
In the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Millais, Rossetti, Waterhouse, De Morgan and others, figures of daydreaming women are shown smelling flowers, putting on perfume, making potpourri, performing magic, entranced by incense fumes, reposing by censors or swooning amid intoxicating fragrances. Yet the importance of the motif of scent in Pre-Raphaelite painting has been almost entirely overlooked. Many mid-late Victorian notions about smell - such as that smell is disease, rainbows radiate the scent of a meadow after rain, or that highly-perfumed flowers are asphyxiating - seem outlandish today. Join art historian, Dr. Christina Bradstreet to learn how these and other largely forgotten ideas about smell can enrich our understanding of paintings in surprising ways.
Dr. Christina Bradstreet is author of Scented Visions: Smell in Art, 1850-1914 (Penn State University Press, 2022) and curator of the upcoming exhibition Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites at the Barber Institute (11 October 2024 - 26 February 2025). She is Head of Programmes at the Association for Art History and was formerly in the Learning department at the National Gallery. Having written and narrated a series of 5-minute meditations for the National Gallery during the Covid-19 lockdowns, she now writes art meditations for Slo, a new art and mindfulness app.
Ticket prices: PRS Member - £5.00 / Non-Member - £8.00
Login details will be emailed during the week prior to the event.
If you require further information regarding this lecture please contact Chimaine Ross at 07411 672498 or email eventsprsoc@gmail.com
Saturday 10th February 2024
Phoebe Anna Traquair's Visionary Medievalism.. Lecture to be given by Dr. Clare Broome Saunders.
The Edinburgh based artist Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936) was one of the leading contributors to the British Arts and Crafts movement, and in 1920 became one of the first three women elected to the Royal Scottish Academy. Born Phoebe Anna Moss in Dublin, Traquair was inspired by childhood visits to the medieval manuscripts housed in Trinity College, particularly to see the Book of Kells, to pursue a career in art. The influence of these medieval documents - the use of colour, the interaction of text and image to create new meanings - reverberated throughout her long and varied life.
In this lecture, Clare Broome Saunders will explore the ways in which Traquair uses and develops her medieval sources to produce innovative new works, as well as her illustrations for medieval texts such as Elizabeth Brrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Traquair found a trip to Italy in the spring of 1889 transformative, as it led to a greater exposure to Dante’s work and allowed her to experience at first hand the work of early Tuscan painters, especially Fra Angelico and Botticelli.
This lecture will consider the influence of these medieval Florentine artists on the extraordinary mural Benedicte Omnia (O Ye Powers of the Lord (1888-91), which Traquair painted at the Song School of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh. In this mural, Traquair blends the medieval and the modern &emdash; those still alive, and those long dead &emdash; in an ambitious imaginative project to combine literature and music through art, and the medieval with the contemporary.
Dr. Clare Broome Saunders is the Senior Tutor at Blackfriars Hall and a member of the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include medievalism, women’s poetry, and European travel writers in the nineteenth century, as reflected in her books: Louisa Stuart Costello: A 19th Century Writing Life (2015); Women, Travel Writing and Truth (2014); and Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (2019). Forthcoming publications include work on the connections between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and William Blake, and a book on political medievalism in the long nineteenth century.
Ticket Price: £9.00. This is an in-person lecture. Refreshments will be available in The BMI Coffee Lounge. Friends welcome. Lecture starts at 11am in the John Peek Room at The Birmingham and Midland Institute (9 Margaret Street, Birmingham B3 3BS).
If you require further information regarding this lecture please contact Chimaine Ross at 07411 672498 or email eventsprsoc@gmail.com
Created 20 December 2023