The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art -Yale University
November 2007 Issue 25
newsletter A Passion for British Art: Collecting in the 20th Century Friday 18 January 2008 The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
J. M. W.Turner, “Dort, Dordrecht:The Dort Packet-Boat from Rotterdam Becalmed,” 1817-18, oil on canvas,Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
This one-day conference to be held at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, will discuss issues related to the collection of the late Paul Mellon (1907-1999), and the exhibition, ‘An American’s Passion for British Art, Paul Mellon’s Legacy’, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (20 October 2007 - 27 January 2008). Paul Mellon’s collection, which embraces paintings, watercolour s, dr awings, prints, sculptures, rare books and manuscripts is among the finest of its kind to have been
16 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3JA
Tel: 020 7580 0311
assembled in the twentieth century. Although it encompasses works from many periods and cultures, at the heart of the Mellon collection are pictures from the ‘Golden Age’ of British art, from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centur y. Among modern private collectors, however, Mr Mellon was not alone in his appreciation of the merits of the British School, and this conference aims to set his achievement within the global context of modern and contemporar y collecting.
Fax: 020 7636 6730
www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Paul Mellon Centre conference
A Passion for British Art: Collecting in the 20th Century
Friday 18 January 2008, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Conference Programme Morning session to be chaired by Professor Brian Allen (Director of Studies, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art). Afternoon session to be chaired by MaryAnne Stevens (Director of Academic Affairs, Royal Academy of Arts, London). 09.45 Registration
13.00 Lunch
10.00 Welcome and opening remarks by Brian Allen
14.30 Dr Alison Smith (Curator, Head of Acquisitions, British Art Pre-1900, Tate Britain) Modern Collectors of Victorian Art
10.15 Professor David Cannadine (Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History, Institute of Historical Research) Father and Son as Collectors and Philanthropists: Andrew W. Mellon and Paul Mellon Compared
15.15 Angus Trumble (Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, the Yale Center for British Art) From Hubert von Herkomer to Kenneth Clark: Buying British Art for Australasia, 1899-1954
11.00 Coffee break
16.00 Tea
11.30 Dr Shelley Bennett (Senior Research Associate, Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens) Henry and Arabella Huntington: Collecting and Cultural Philanthropy in America c.1900
16.30 Louisa Buck (Contemporary Art correspondent for the Art Newspaper) From Saatchi to Frieze: the Reception and Acquisition of Contemporary British Art at Home and Abroad
12.15 Andrew Wilton (Honorary Curator of Prints and Drawings, Royal Academy of Arts) Collecting British Watercolours and Drawings in the 20th Century
17.15 Closing remarks and discussion
18.00 - 19.00 Wine reception
Full conference fee ÂŁ40.00 (including coffee, lunch, tea and wine reception)
Student concessions are available at a reduced rate of ÂŁ20.00
To register for the conference please send a cheque made payable to The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, to: Lucy Nixon The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 16 Bedford Square London WC1B 3JA (include a stamped addressed envelope) Tel: 020 7580 0311 Fax: 020 7636 6730 Email: events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
The Paul Mellon Centre Staff Director of Studies: Brian Allen. Assistant Director for Academic Activities: Martin Postle. Assistant Director for Administration: Kasha Jenkinson. Librarian: Emma Floyd. Archivist: Emma Lauze. IT Officer: Maisoon Rehani. Administrative Assistant: Lucy Nixon. Yale-in-London Coordinator: Viv Redhead. Editor, Special Projects: Guilland Sutherland. Special Projects: Elizabeth Einberg, John Ingamells, Mary Peskett Smith. Advisory Council: David Bindman, Julius Bryant, Andrew Causey, Maurice Howard, Joseph Koerner, Sandy Nairne, Lynda Nead,
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Marcia Pointon, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Duncan Robinson, Michael Rosenthal, Kim Sloan.
Company Registered in England 983028
Registered Charity 313838
support for scholarship in British Art awards
Grant Awards At the November 2007 meeting of the Centre’s Advisory Council, the following grants were awarded: Curatorial Research Grants
Research Support Grants
Beazley Archive, University of Oxford to help support a research curator for two years on the project to research, catalogue and publish The Arundel and Marlborough Collections of Engraved Gems and Cameos
Adriano Aymonino towards research costs and travel in the UK for his doctoral thesis ‘The First Duke and Duchess of Northumberland: Political Strategies, Patronage and Collecting in the Age of the Grand Tour’
National Portrait Gallery to help support a research curator for the final year of the project to research and publish the Gallery’s Catalogue of Later Victorian Portraits
Hugh Brigstocke towards travel and research costs in Italy for work on ‘A Catalogue of Drawings assembled by William Ottley’
The Chapter of Peterborough Cathedral to support a research curator for one year to continue the architectural analysis and research on the West Front of Peterborough Cathedral Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery to help support a research curator for two years to work on an exhibition and catalogue Sir Joshua Reynolds’s early patrons and Reynolds’s collection of works on paper
Educational Programme Grants National Portrait Gallery ‘Brilliant Women: Gender and Intellect, Reputation and Representation’ a two-day interdisciplinary and international conference at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 25-26 April 2008 Royal West of England Academy ‘The Representation of Night in Art’ a series of public lectures and talks at the Royal West of England Academy, MarchMay 2008 University of Birmingham ‘Wyndham Lewis: Modernity and Critique’ a two-day interdisciplinary conference at the Birmingham & Midland Institute, 25-26 January 2008
Patricia Crown towards travel and research costs in the USA for a publication on ‘Edward Francis Burney (1760-1848)’ Anne Dulau towards travel and research costs in the UK for an essay on ‘Boucher and Chardin in Eighteenth-century Britain’ Richard Hayes towards travel and research costs in the UK for a publication on ‘John Ruskin and the Road to Ferry Hinksey: Secular Volunteerism in Nineteenthcentury England’ Ann Smart Martin towards travel and research costs in the UK for her book ‘Banish the Night: Illumination and Reflection in Early Modern England and America’ John Munns towards travel and research costs in the USA for his doctoral thesis ‘The Crucified Body of Christ: Cross, Passion, Image and Devotion in England, 1066-1215’ Tania Sengupta towards travel and research costs in India for her doctoral thesis ‘Architecture of Governmental and Civic Domains - Colonial Encounter in District Towns, Bengal, British India’ Robert Tittler for travel and research costs in the UK for his book ‘Portraits, Painters and Publics in PostReformation England: the Canterbury Experience’ Kaylin Weber for travel and research costs in the UK for an exhibition and publication on ‘Benjamin West and his Aesthetic Environment’
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support for scholarship in British Art awards
Publication Grants (Author) Susan Bennett ‘Cultivating the human faculties’: James Barry (1741-1806) and the Society of Arts Jonathan Black & Brenda Martin Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Artist, Designer Gill Clarke Representing the Women’s Land Army Hanneke Grootenboer Treasuring the Gaze: Intimacy and Extremity of Vision in Eye Miniature Portraits Stanley Shepherd The Stained Glass Windows of A.W.N. Pugin
Publication Grants (Publisher) Ben Uri Gallery/London Jewish Museum of Art Rachel Dickson & Sarah MacDougall (Eds), Whitechapel at War : Isaac Rosenberg and his circle 1911-1918
National Galleries of Scotland Viccy Coltman & Stephen Lloyd (Eds), Henry Raeburn: Critical Reception and International Reputation National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Ted Gott (Ed), Modern Britain: 1900-1960. Master Works from Australian and New Zealand Collections National Museums Liverpool Jessica Feather, British Drawings and Watercolours in the Lady Lever Art Gallery Public Monuments and Sculpture Association George Noszlopy & Fiona Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire R o y a l Pa v i l i o n & M u s e u m s , B ri g h t o n David Beevers (Ed), Chinese Whispers: Chinoiserie in Britain 1650-1930 Southampton City Art Gallery Tim Craven (Ed), Robert Bevan and The Cumberland Market Group
Berg Books Jenny Graham, Inventing Van Eyck: The Remaking of an Artist for the Modern Age
Sussex Academic Press Tessa Murdoch (Ed), Beyond the Border: Huguenot Goldsmiths in Northern Europe and North America
Four Courts Press Michael McCarthy & Karina O’Neill (Eds), Studies in the Gothic Revival
Unicorn Press Timothy Wilcox, Laura Knight: Paintings and Drawings of the Ballet and the Stage
Gallery Oldham Stephen Whittle (Ed), Creative Tension – British Art 1950-2000
University of Chicago Press Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimacy and Extremity of Vision in Eye Miniature Portraits
Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge Paul Binski & Ann Massing (Eds), The Westminster Retable: History, Technique, Conservation
Walpole Society Hugh Brigstocke (Ed), Walpole Society Volume for 200
The next application for Senior, Junior, Postdoctoral and Paul Mellon Centre Rome Fellowships, Educational Programme and Research Support Grants is 15 January 2008. For further details please visit: http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/support.html or contact the Grants Administrator at grants@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk 4
Paul Mellon Centre publications
RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON The Complet Paintings Patrick Noon
Only twenty-five at the time of his death in 1828, young Richard Parkes Bonington nevertheless was a seminal figure in the development of modernism in nineteenth-century French painting. By birth he was Anglo-French, and he epitomized the new spirit of internationalism in which Constable was honored by the Academy in Paris in 1824; Bonington was there to witness the event. Mediating between the two traditions, he explored the potential of watercolour for fresh transient landscapes and drew inspiration not only from Delacroix but also from the work of Walter Scott and Byron in his history paintings. This catalogue raisonné of his oil and watercolor paintings represents the first attempt to establish and present the artist’s complete known oeuvre. Drawing on twenty-five years of research, Patrick Noon catalogues, analyzes, and reproduces 400 artworks now indisputably attributed to Bonington, many of which have never before been published. The book sets Bonington’s achievement in the context of the intellectual, social, and artistic ferment of high romanticism in Paris and
London and it shows the profound effect of his style on his friend and contemporary, Eugène Delacroix, and many others. Noon’s detailed and accurate study will inform all future discourse on Bonington and his remarkable legacy.
buildings can be interpreted through reference to classical mythology, Renaissance fortifications, and medieval houses.
correct behaviour, in life and in death. Matthew Craske looks closely, for the first time, at tomb sculptures in their social context.
March 2008 Hardcover £40.00 ISBN-13: 978-0300119299
He discusses a large number of monuments by many different sculptors, enriched by a knowledge of the person commemorated and the circumstances behind the commission. This results in a work of great scholarly density and originality that probes the motives behind the imagery and the epitaph. He begins by analysing the relationship of tomb designs to the changing and diverse culture of death in the eighteenth century, and then explains conditions of production and the shifting dynamics of the market. He concludes with a masterly analysis of the motivations of those who commissioned monuments, including women and ranging from aristocrats to merchants and professional people. This handsomely illustrated book presents a unique history of death, fame, example and attitudes to loss, as well as a remarkable art history.
Patrick Noon is Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings and Modern Sculpture, Minneapolis Institute of Arts. April 2008 Hardcover 360pp. £85.00 ISBN-13: 978-0300134216
SIR JOHN VANBRUGH Storyteller in Stone Vaughan Hart
This engaging and beautifully illustrated book examines the remarkable life and work of Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), by turns businessman, soldier, playwright, and the architect of some of the most important country houses of his era. Architectural historian,Vaughan Hart, examines Vanbrugh’s surviving, destroyed, and unrealized buildings— among them Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace—outlining the contemporary political and social events that influenced their design and showing how these strikingly original
THE SILENT RHETORIC OF THE BODY A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720-1770 Matthew Craske
This illuminating and original book opens up a neglected corner of eighteenthcentury art - the funeral monument. In the last forty years, studies of the satires of early and mid-eighteenth-century England have multiplied, whereas its funerary monuments have been neglected by all but a small group of enthusiasts. This book redresses the balance and demonstrates that tombs and inscriptions are of manifest worth to the student of eighteenth-century English value systems, providing as they do an archaeology of ideal types. Across the genres of art, there is, perhaps, no better register of shifting notions of
February 2008 Hardcover £45.00 ISBN-13:9780300135411
A FRAGILE MODERNISM Whistler and His Impressionist Followers Anna Gruetzner Robins
Whistler embarked on a new project in the 1880s, working on a small scale, in oil, pastel and watercolour, representing new London 5
Paul Mellon Centre publications
SOUTH AND EAST CLERKENWELL Volume 46
SLAVERY, SUGAR, AND THE CULTURE OF REFINEMENT Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 Kay Dian Kriz
NORTHERN CLERKENWELL AND PENTONVILLE Volume 47
subjects and painting portraits of new urban types.This book is the first critical study of Whistler and his Impressionist followers and offers an indepth analysis of Whistler's art as well as new insights into his modernist project. Anna Gruetzner-Robins shows how Whistler formed an avant-garde group around himself and sought out followers who included Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes, Mortimer Menpes, Theodore Roussel, Walter Sickert and Sidney Starr, to emulate his art and proselytise on his behalf. Their reminiscences and writings provide new information about Whistler's art, while their own little-known work, much of which is published here for the first time, is a testimony to its persuasive effect. Using a wealth of primary material, Gruetzner-Robins tracks the history of Whistler and his group and shows, through testimony and practice, that they were formulating an identity as avant-garde artists.This is the first critical study of these Impressionist artists and throws new light on this neglected aspect of British art.
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Autumn 2007 Hardcover 256pp 90 b/w + 40 colour Illus £40.00 ISBN-13:9780300135459
Clerkenwell is one of the most varied, intricate and richly historic districts of England's capital city. Its choice for study by the Survey of London is a mark both of its age-old fascination and of its contemporary appeal.Today Southern Clerkenwell, just north of the City, has become a fashionable location. It houses many in the creative industries, its restaurants and bars are thronged, and its population has been rising for two decades. Northern Clerkenwell, by contrast, has long been acknowledged as having some of London's best Georgian housing and urban landscapes.There is also an intriguingly mixed quarter beyond the Angel and Pentonville Road, reaching north into Islington.The two parts of Clerkenwell are covered separately in these two interlinked volumes, which are available either separately or as a pair. Clerkenwell's present prosperity is rooted in its past. Its density of
development, its patterns of land-use and its street layout are witnesses to an unbroken history, going back to monastic foundations. Within the compass of the present volumes, the Survey of London brings together the riches of the area, aiming to omit nothing of significance, old or new. In so doing, it has created a practical record, in words and images, of enduring value and usefulness for planners, residents, historians and the wider public.These volumes are the latest in the parish series published, at regular intervals over the past hundred years, by the Survey of London.They mark several new departures for the Survey. They are the first to have photographs integrated with the text alongside the handsome architectural drawings for which the series is famed.They also make widespread use of colour images for the first time.
South and East Clerkenwell Volume 46 April 2008 400 pp. 305x235mm. 400 illus. £75.00* ISBN 978-0-300-13727-9
Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville Volume 47 April 2008 400 pp. 305x235mm. 400 illus. £75.00* ISBN 978-0-300-13937-2
Special price for Clerkenwell volumes 46 & 47 £135.00* ISBN 978-0-300-14063-7
This highly original book asks new questions about paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies between 1700 and1840, when the trade in sugar and slaves was the most active and profitable. In a wide-ranging study of scientific illustrations, scenes of daily life, caricatures and landscape imagery, Dian Kriz analyses the visual culture of refinement that accompanied the brutal
process in which African slaves transformed 'rude' sugar cane into pure white crystals.These works variously imagine Britain's Caribbean colonies as curious, frightening, deadly, pleasurable and even funny for viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Refinement is usually associated with the metropole and 'rudeness' with the colonies. And indeed, many of the artists considered here successfully capitalised on those characteristics of rudenessanimality, sensuality and savagery that increasingly came to be associated with all the inhabitants of the sugar islands. But many of
Paul Mellon Centre publications
the images and texts that form the subject of this book complicate this geographical division. Artists such as the Italian Agostino Brunias, working for a British colonial administrator in Dominica, and Scottish Academician Joseph Kidd, whose brother was a merchant and local official in the north of Jamaica, produced paintings and prints that offered the possibility of colonial refinement, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure. Kay Dian Kriz is Associate Professor of Art History at the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University. She is the author of The Idea of the English Landscape Painter, published by Yale University Press.
May 2008 288 pp. 256x192mm. 80b/w + 40 colour illus. £35.00 ISBN 978-0-300-14062-0
PAINTING OUT OF THE ORDINARY Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early NineteenthCentury Britain David Solkin
At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, London's art world was taken by storm by a new generation of painters, whose novel approach to the depiction of everyday life critics loudly trumpeted as a sign of the nation's cultural preeminence. Led by the precociously talented David Wilkie, this highly successful artistic movement sought to transform what was generally regarded as a low
the art of the Age of Revolution with the postmodern culture of the present day.
and vulgar pictorial tradition, with its roots in seventeenth-century Flanders and Holland, into a vehicle for entertaining but improving narratives which would set new standards of truthfulness in their imitation of nature. But on a deeper level, as David Solkin shows in this provocative yet highly accessible study, the same phenomenon registered the ambivalent feelings of a country in the throes of economic growth, and of conflict both at home and abroad. What emerges from the imagery of Wilkie and his colleagues – among them William Mulready, Edward Bird and the controversial watercolourist Thomas Heaphy – is a widespread sense that the ordinary lives of the common people are becoming increasingly bound up with the exceptional events of 'history'; that traditional boundaries between country and city are in the process of melting away; and that a more regularised and dynamic present is everywhere encroaching upon the customary patterns of the past. In its fascination with the compression of space and time, early nineteenthcentury British genre painting locates itself at the start of a trajectory linking
Professor David Solkin is Dean and Deputy, Courtauld Institute of Art. He is the author of Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England and the co-author and editor of Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836, both published by Yale University Press.
May 2008 Hardcover 384 pp. 295x248mm. 100b/w + 150 colour illus. £45.00 ISBN 978-0-300-14061-3
domestic projects and sponsoring civic buildings that promoted their charitable image in postReformation society. In this beautiful and elegantly argued book, Maurice Howard reveals that changes of style in architecture emerged from the practical needs of construction and the selfimage of major patrons in the revolutionary century between Reformation and Civil War, and he shows how the transformation of the country's stock of buildings was accompanied by a new language both of word and of vision, as building accounts, government regulation and theoretical writing on the one hand and pictorial
THE BUILDING OF ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN ENGLAND Maurice Howard
The dissolution of the monasteries ravaged England in the 1530s and resulted in the great destruction of the built fabric of the country. It was also, however, a time in which many new initiatives emerged. In the following century, former monasteries were adapted to a variety of uses in both public and private buildings: royal palaces and country houses, town halls and schools, almshouses and refashioned parish churches. No new towns were built in England, but the urban environment changed rapidly to reflect the needs of both national and local government. Patrons of building spent sometimes wisely, some times extravagantly, in managing a balance between their own
representation on the other directed new ways of documenting the changed appearance of the buildings in which people lived, worshipped and worked. Maurice Howard is Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. January 2008 256 pp. 275x245mm. 50 b/w + 50 colour illus. £45.00 ISBN 978-0-300-13543-5
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ya l e center for british art 1080 Chapel Street P.O. Box 208280 New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8280 www.yale.edu/ycba
Full details of the following exhibitions and programs can be found at www.yale.edu/ycba, by telephoning 001 203 432 2800, or by e-mailing ycba.info@yale.edu. e x h i b i t i o n s at t h e c e n t e r British Orientalist Painting, 1830–1925 7 February–28 April 2008 Organized by Tate Britain in association with the Yale Center for British Art. Pearls to Pyramids: British Visual Culture and the Levant, 1600–1830 7 February–28 April 2008 Organized by the Yale Center for British Art. A New World: England’s First View of America 6 March–1 June 2008 Organized by the British Museum. Joseph Wright of Derby in Liverpool 6 May–31 August 2008 Co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
to u r i n g e x h i b i t i o n s Reflections on a Life with Horses: Paintings by Sir Alfred Munnings from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art Through 29 March 2008 at the National Sporting Library, Middleburg, Virginia Paul Mellon’s Legacy: A Passion for British Art Through 27 January 2008 at the Royal Academy of Arts, London Great British Watercolors from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art Through 13 January 2008 at The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
g r a d uat e s t u d e n t s y m p o s i u m The Power of Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Morality Saturday, 5 April 2008, 9 am–6:30 pm Keynote lecture 5:30 pm This one-day graduate student symposium will explore the aesthetic, political, and moral power of beauty. The event concludes with a keynote lecture. The symposium is free and open to the public; advance registration is recommended. To register, please email ycba.research@yale.edu. Support for this symposium has been provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Benjamin West, Isaac’s Servant Tying the Bracelet on Rebecca’s Arm (detail), 1775, oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
p u b l i c at i o n s The Yale Center for British Art is pleased to announce the following new publications: Joseph Wright of Derby: Art and Life in Liverpool, 1768-1785, edited by Alex Kidson, with contributions by Elizabeth Barker, Martin Hopkinson, Jane Longmore, and Sarah Parsons. Co-published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven. November 2007. Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II, (Studies in British Art, vol. 18), edited by Catharine MacLeod and Julia Marciari Alexander, with essays by Tim Harris, Sheila O’Connell, Joseph Roach, Kevin Sharpe, Susan Shifrin, Andrew Walkling, Rachel Weil, and Steven Zwicker. Co-published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. Distributed by Yale University Press. December 2007.
v i s i t i n g f e l low s January Sarah Tiffin, Curator, Asian Art pre-1970, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia “False Nature: British Meditation on the Poison Tree of Java.” February–March Mary Roberts, Senior Lecturer, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Sydney “Visions of the Painter-Traveler: British Orientalist and Ottoman Portraits.” March Hanneke Grootenboer, Research Leader, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, University of Amsterdam “Treasuring the Gaze: Intimacy and Extremity of Vision in Eye Miniature Portraits.” April David Bindman, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Senior Visiting Fellow, and Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University College London Research on subjects including Darwin and British art, and participation in the scholarly life of the Center. May–June Mark Phillips, Professor, Department of History, Carleton University Research on historical illustration and the visualization of the past in Britain, circa 1740–1850, as part of a larger project on historical representation and the problems of distance and meditation in historical narrative.
g u e s t f e l low April Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, independent scholar “Royal Academicians and the Crisis of Masculinity in Modern England.”