About this Event
I will begin by outlining the scope of the project and my thinking behind the site’s tri-partite structure and title: An Online Catalogue, Archive and Introduction to the Artist. Particular attention will be paid to two challenges: how to make a free-to-access site straightforward to use for a non-specialist audience; and then, how best to ensure the future of the site as an academic resource that can develop through the incorporation of new material and research. I will then move on to consider the different sections of the site, beginning with the approximately 1550 catalogue entries that form its core. Emphasis will be placed on the features that distinguish the site from a conventionally published catalogue and why it is that I have studiously avoided using the term catalogue raisonné. I will then look at each of the sections of the Archive, focusing first on the challenge of relating the material to the rest of the site, and then summarising their current status in relation to my ambition to produce a comprehensive if not definitive record of sales, exhibitions and publications, together with extensive transcriptions of all the early biographical accounts and related manuscript material. I will conclude my introduction to the site by looking at some of its inevitable limitations, not least as a challenge to my audience to use it as a resource for the investigation of themes beyond the project’s scope.
Speaker Biography
Greg Smith is an independent art historian who has published extensively on the history of British watercolours and watercolourists, as well as landscape artists working in Italy. He has also worked as a curator at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, the Design Museum, London and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham and has organised exhibitions on the work of Thomas Girtin (Tate Britain), Thomas Jones (National Museum of Wales) and Thomas Fearnley (Barber Institute of Fine Arts). As Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Greg has just concluded a five-year online project: Thomas Girtin (1775–1802): An Online Catalogue, Archive and Introduction to the Artist. He is currently working on an examination of watercolour as a commodity, focusing on the place of Joseph Mallord William Turner within a competitive and expanding art market.
Image credit: Thomas Girtin, Appledore, from Instow Sands, c.1800. Digital image courtesy of The Courtauld, London, Samuel Courtauld Trust (D.1952.RW.846).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Paul Mellon Centre and online, 16 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00