Category: Research

This is the first detailed analysis of elite men’s clothing in 17th-century Scotland and its influence on English male fashion. Focusing on the years 1566 through 1701, it centers on the clothing choices of five Stuart royals: James VI and I, Prince Henry, Charles I, Charles II, and James VII and II.   

The engaging text brims with details about the wardrobes and habits of Scottish royalty, such as how the men selected fabric and kept clothes clean. The book is organized along three themes: the significance of the Stuarts’ Scottish heritage in the style they developed; the role of Scots in exporting their style to London and beyond; and the reception of Stuart style among the male elite in Scotland. Maria Hayward explores how Stuart style was displayed in sport, at political and social events, and at church. The book also reveals the importance of vital supporting players—namely, the courtiers who helped kings and princes develop their style, as well as the tailors who disseminated it to men beyond the royal court.

The striking portraits depict a member of the military aristocracy and an unmarried woman from New Julfa, the Armenian district of Isfahan, which was the cosmopolitan capital of Persia in the 17th century. Paintings of this  style are known to have hung in the houses of Isfahan’s wealthy merchant classes.

The figures are dressed in luxurious fabrics including Persian silks, which the Armenians of Isfahan famously traded across the globe. Both portraits include European details, such as a Venetian wine glass, a German clock and Dutch flowers, signifying affluence through access to luxury international commodities. 

This is Volume I of the three-volume catalogue raisonné of all drawings considered by the authors to be by Rubens. It covers the years 1590–1608, Volumes II and III dealing, respectively, with the periods 1609–20 and 1621–40.

It is the first publication that presents the artist’s entire drawn oeuvre in chronological order, previous such publications containing only selections of drawings. By leafing through the illustrations, this arrangement provides the user with a quick visual impression of the variety of techniques, media, subject and functions of Rubens’s drawings at an one time. 

Volume I consists of the drawings of the artist’s childhood, apprenticeship and first years as a master in Antwerp to his formative years in Italy, spent mostly in Mantua and Rome, with an excursion to Spain.

These are the years primarily devoted to learning and absorbing the art of the past, from sixteenth-century German and Netherlandish prints to the works of the ancient and Italian Renaissance masters. A large number of these drawings consists of copies after the works of other artists, largely executed as part of the artistic training at the time.

While this is relatively short for a European adult man by today's standards, at the time Michelangelo was alive (1475 to 1564) that height would not have been unusual, said scientists with the Forensic Anthropology, Paleopathology and Bioarchaeology Research Center (FAPAB) in Avola, Italy. 

FAPAB researchers Francesco Galassi, a paleopathologist, and Elena Varotto, a forensic anthropologist, measured the shoes and then calculated the wearer's foot dimensions and height, and their results aligned with a description of Michelangelo by the 16th-century artist and writer Giorgio Vasari. Vasari wrote that Michelangelo was "broad in the shoulders" but the rest of his body was "somewhat slender in proportion" and his stature was average, according to the study.

Isaac Coates was an Englishman who lived in Wellington and Nelson between 1841 and 1845. During that time he painted watercolour portraits of 58 Māori from Nelson, Marlborough, Wellington, Waikanae and Kāpiti. Some of these portraits have been well-known for nearly 180 years, although their creator was not definitively identified until 2000. The discovery in 2007 of a Coates book of portraits in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University added many previously unknown images to his body of work. 

The portraits depict Māori men and women from chiefly whakapapa, as well as commoners and at least one slave. Coates’s meticulous records of each subject’s name, iwi and place of residence are invaluable, and his paintings are strong images of individuals, unlike the more stereotyped work of some of Coates’s contemporaries. Whānau, hapū and iwi treasure Coates’s works because they are the only images of some tūpuna, and they are reminders of those who risked their lives to bring their people to a better life in the Cook Strait regions of Kapiti coast, Wellington, Nelson and Marlborough.

Soon after the Greek Revolution, the Acropolis was cleared of its Medieval buildings. Byzantine icons too were shunned, even in University Museum collections. This lecture touches on icons in the Fitzwilliam but focuses on the fate of one icon in the Yale University Art Museum, acquired in 1871, but hidden in its storeroom until now.

This talk gives an overview of the how and why art travelled, from the 13th to the 20th centuries; paintings, textiles, as well as smaller items. 

It looks at, not just at the basic reasons why it travelled within historical contexts, but also the problems and solutions inherent in the size of objects on the move, the personnel that did the actual wrapping and packing of the art, the methods of wrapping and packing themselves and the logistics given the politics at certain periods in history. It also looks at insurance in a historical context, as well as the state of the roads over which the art was in transit. The use of primary sources moves the subject from myth to reality.

Dress in Medieval society functioned as symbols of status and circumstance: from indicating economic levels (e.g. receivers of alms), marriage status of women, to social class at birth. People were conditioned to decode the complex signage system in dress, beyond and above our contemporary 'reading' of fashion. This course offers the opportunity to explore fashion during the High to Late Middle Ages (1200-1500) through investigating period art, literature and surviving textiles, and develop to an understanding of the meaning of high- status clothing. In this class we will do practical exercises, visual investigations, discussions, and where available, field visits.

This lavishly illustrated book celebrates the life of Doris and Anna Zinkeisen, charting the rise of the sisters from a childhood in Scotland, to their emergence as amongst the most eminent artists of their day in London, to a quieter yet still highly productive life during their twilight years in rural Suffolk. During the golden age from the 1920s through to the 1950s, the Zinkeisen sisters enjoyed a huge success and won numerous accolades. 

Their paintings and design work, including posters, murals and luxury ocean liners, and costume designs for stage and film, are today emblematic of that period in British art.

Emotions, Art, and Christianity in the Transatlantic World, 1450–1800 is a collection of studies variously exploring the role of visual and material culture in shaping early modern emotional experiences. The volume’s transatlantic framework moves from The Netherlands, Spain, and Italy to Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and the Philippines, and centers on visual culture as a means to explore how emotions differ in their local and global “contexts” amidst the many shifts occurring c. 1450–1800. These themes are examined through the lens of art informed by religious ideas, especially Catholicism, with each essay probing how religiously inflected art stimulated, molded, and encoded emotions.

Frans Hals is one of the greatest portrait painters of all time and, together with Rembrandt, is one of the most eminent seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Published to coincide with the Wallace Collection's exhibition of the same name, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait explores the artist's highly innovative approach to male portraiture, from the beginning of his career in the 1610s until the end of his life in 1666. 

Through pose, expression and virtuosic painterly technique, Hals revolutionised the male portrait into something entirely new and fresh, capturing and revealing his sitters' characters like no one else before him. This book includes the first in-depth study of Hals's great masterpiece, The Laughing Cavalier, from 1624. The extravagantly dressed young man, confidently posed with his left arm akimbo in the extreme foreground of the picture and seemingly penetrating into the viewer's space, has been charming audiences for over a century. 

Richly illustrated, Frans Hals: The Male Portrait situates The Laughing Cavalier within the artist's larger oeuvre and demonstrates how, at a relatively early point in his career, Hals was able to achieve this great masterpiece.

This handsomely illustrated volume traces the intersections of art history and paintings restoration in nineteenth-century Europe. Repairing works of art and writing about them-the practices that became art conservation and art history-share a common ancestry. By the nineteenth century the two fields had become inseparably linked. While the art historical scholarship of this period has been widely studied, its restoration practices have received less scrutiny-until now. This book charts the intersections between art history and conservation in the treatment of Italian Renaissance paintings in nineteenth-century Europe. Initial chapters discuss the restoration of works by Giotto and Titian, framed by the contemporary scholarship of art historians such as Jacob Burckhardt, G. B. Cavalcaselle, and Joseph Crowe that was redefining the earlier age. Subsequent chapters recount how paintings conservation was integrated into museum settings. The narrative uses period texts, unpublished archival materials, and historical photographs in probing how paintings looked at a time when scholars were writing the foundational texts of art history, and how, simultaneously, contemporary restorers were negotiating the appearances of these works. The book proposes a model for a new conservation history, object focused yet enriched by consideration of a wider cultural horizon.