Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Adam Bushby

Gentile Bellini (attr.), Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II (1480). National Gallery, London.

Adam Bushby, ‘El Gran Turco: Ottoman Turks in Venetian painting, 1453-1571′.

Monday 11 August, 6:30pm.

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Mark Shepheard

Anton Raphael Mengs, ‘Portrait of Don Luis de Borbon’ (c. 1774-77.). National Gallery of Victoria.

Mark Shepheard, ‘A tale of two portraits: Mengs and Don Luis de Borbón’.

The National Gallery of Victoria has recently acquired a superb portrait by Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-79), one of the eighteenth century’s greatest portrait painters. The sitter is the Infante Don Luis de Borbón (1727-85), brother of the Spanish king, Carlos III. Don Luis was a major patron of the arts, employing the cellist and composer Luigi Boccherini, as well as being an early supporter of the young Goya.

Portrait News

Georges Seurat, ‘Young woman powdering herself’, 1889-90. Courtauld Gallery, London.

A hidden self-portrait by Seurat rediscovered

An article by Aviva Burnstock (Head of the Department of Conservation & Technology, Courtauld Institute, London) and Karen Serres (Schroder Foundation Curator of Paintings, Courtauld Institute) in the April edition of The Burlington Magazine reveals a hidden self-portrait by Georges Seurat (1859-91) in his painting Young woman powdering herself of 1889-90.

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar Series

Augustus John, Portrait of Harold Chaloner Dowdall, Lord Mayor of Liverpool and his sword-bearer (1909). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Felton Bequest, 1938.

Next week, the Melbourne Portrait Group launches a series of seminars on various aspects of portraiture: we hope it will be the first of many. The series kicks off with a paper from Ted Gott, Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Some Recently Published Research on Portraits

Filippo Lippi: Portrait of a woman with a Man at a Casement, c. 1440. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A re-evaluation of Fra Filippo Lippi’s double-portrait in the Metropolitan Museum, New York

In an important new article in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Katalin Prajda (Central European University, Budapest) makes a convincing case for re-identifying the sitters in Filippo Lippi’s well-known double-portrait, the so-called Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement. They have traditionally been identified as Agnola di Bernardo Sapiti and her husband, Lorenzo di Rinieri Scolari, based on the coat of arms under the male sitter’s hands, which is that of the Scolari family. Prajda questions this identification, particularly as there was a considerable age difference between the couple, somewhere between twelve and twenty-four years (Agnola was born c. 1422; Lorenzo’s exact birth-date is not known but he was born between 1398 and 1410). Moreover, the pictorial elements of the portrait are all subordinate to the female sitter; she is the focus of the painting and the dominant figure within it. Prajda therefore suggests that it is she who is the member of the Scolari family rather than her companion.