Hogarth In and Out of History: Yinka Shonibare's Diary of A Victorian Dandy (1998)

Lecture Series – Elizabeth Robles

13 May 2021
This is the sixth lecture in the seven-part series titled, Artist in Focus: William Hogarth.
Online

More than a decade after Lubaina Himid transformed Lady Sqaundergood into Margaret Thatcher, the artist Yinka Shonibare took on the titular role in his work Diary of A Victorian Dandy (1998). Despite Hogarth’s status as distinctly not-Victorian, Shonibare invoked the canonical artist’s moralising sequence A Rake’s Progress, to take playful aim at notions of Victoriana created and consumed in the 1980s and 1990s. Historical accuracy and the realities of day-to-day Victorian life fall to the wayside, making way for a long lost Britannia rooted in Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Victorian Values’, Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy, the ‘Laura Ashley Look’ and, of course, the ‘Father of English Painting’.

This lecture will be pre-recorded and will go live on our recordings page and our YouTube channel at 3 pm GMT on 13 May 2021.

About the speaker

Elizabeth Robles is a researcher and lecturer in contemporary art in the History of Art Department at the University of Bristol. She is particularly interested in the formation of ideas around ‘black art’ across the twentieth century and is currently a British Academy postdoctoral fellow working on a project entitled Making Waves: Black Artists & ‘Black Art’ in Britain from 1962–1982. Most recently she co-edited the exhibition publication The Place is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain (Sternberg, 2019) alongside curator Nick Aikens. She also co-leads the British Art Network Black British Artists Research Group.