Salvator Rosa in Britain 18/10/10
at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 

The Paul Mellon Centre will be hosting this conference at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, to accompany the exhibition Salvator Rosa (1615-1673): Bandits, Wilderness and Magic which will run 15 September-28 November 2010. Rosa has always had a double importance for art in Britain, as both painter and phenomenon, and the conference aims to explore his vast impact on British painters and writers. Possible themes might include collectors and collecting; Rosa and concepts of the sublime, both in landscape and in magic, prophecy and enchantment; the afterlife of some outstanding works once or still in Britain, such as the Democritus, Belisarius, Atilius Regulus, Empedocles leap into Etna; Rosa and the concepts of Romantic genius and the freedom of the artist; the myths woven around Rosa's biography; bandits and witches.
Click here for conference details and ticketing arrangements.

Thomas Lawrence
Regency Power and Brilliance

18/11/10 at the National Portrait Gallery
19/11/10 at Paul Mellon Centre

This conference accompanies the exhibition Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance at the National Portrait Gallery, London (20 October 2010-23 January 2011) which will be shown at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 24 February- 5 June 2011). This will be the first exhibition in the United Kingdom since 1979 to examine Lawrence's work and the first substantial presentation of this artist in the United States.  It will present Lawrence as the most important British portrait painter of his generation and will explore his development as one of the most celebrated and influential European artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By his untimely death in 1830  Lawrence had achieved the greatest international reach and reputation of any British artist. Based on new research and fresh perspectives, this exhibition will introduce Lawrence to a new generation of museum visitors and students. It will also contextualise his work in the light of recent scholarship on the art, politics and culture of the period. The exhibition will include the artist's greatest paintings and drawings alongside lesser known works in order to provide a fresh understanding of Lawrence and his career.  It will contrast his approach to sitters according to age and gender, juxtapose the power and impact of his public works with the intimacy and intensity of those portraits of his friends and family, trace his innovations as a draughtsman and painter, and place him within the broader contexts of the aesthetic debates, networks of patronage and international politics of his day.
Click here for conference details and ticketing arrangements.

Paul Mellon Lectures 2011:
The National Gallery and the English Renaissance of Art

Mondays 17,24,31/1/11 and 7,14/2/11
at the National Gallery, London 

On his famous lecture tour of 1882 Oscar Wilde told American audiences about a 'great English Renaissance of Art', which had begun with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and was flourishing in the work of their successors. 'I call it our English Renaissance', he explained, 'because it is indeed a new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century'.

Victorian artists have often been castigated for their dependence on prototypes and precedents from the Old Masters. This lecture series, by Elizabeth Prettejohn (Professor of History of Art, University of Bristol), takes its cue instead from Wilde, who saw no inconsistency between the idea of a 'new birth' and the inspiration of the past. With the formation of the National Gallery in 1824, and the subsequent proliferation of exhibitions, reproductions, and scholarship on the Old Masters, the art of the past became visible and accessible as never before. Yet the history of art did not come ready-made to the Victorians. Such artists as van Eyck, Bellini, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, and Velázquez came to the National Gallery with the force of novelty. They were interpreted by the great Victorian critics, curators, and scholars and importantly, as these lectures will argue, by such artists as Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Whistler, Millais, and Leighton. The lectures will explore how the art of the past and the art of the present came to illuminate one another in the Victorian period.
Click here for lecture details and ticketing arrangements.