MPG Seminars

Forthcoming papers

Monday 28 July, 6:30pm
Deirdre Coleman, Touissant Louverture in the Johnston House Museum.

The Haitian revolution was the only successful slave revolution in history, transforming the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the independent republic of Haiti. To what extent can we see the Johnston House Museum’s automaton clock and other ‘portraits’ of Toussaint L’Ouverture as part of the West’s disavowal of the Haitian revolution’s political goals of racial equality and racial liberation?

Past Papers

Monday 19 May, 6:30pm
Mark Shepheard, A Tale of Two Portraits: Mengs and the Infante Don Luis de Borbòn.

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. Meng’s portrait of the Infante was painted between 1774 and 1777, during his second period in Spain, where he was Primer Pintor (‘First Painter’) to the royal court. Employed principally to decorate the new Palacio Real in Madrid, he had originally attempted to avoid portrait commissions but the portraits that he ultimately painted in Spain are among his most successful. The portrait of Don Luis, though modest in setting, is a fine example, and the sensitively painted face suggests a close bond between painter and sitter. This paper will introduce Mengs’ portrait to a Melbourne audience and will explore the history of the painting and the context within which it was painted, its relationship to an almost identical version in Cleveland, and its overall place within Mengs’s oeuvre.

Monday 14 April, 6:30pm
Vivien Gaston, Portraits and Reanimation: Johann Zoffany’s Portrait of Elizabeth Farren as Hermione in Shakespeare’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’, c. 1780.

Johan Zoffany’s portrait of Elizabeth Farren as Hermione in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale represents one of the most striking, controversial and memorable scenes in all of Shakespeare’s plays. It is also a portrait of an actress whose private and public lives were equally intriguing, one of a few highly successful women whose celebrity status enabled their radical upward mobility. As a portrait, which creates the illusion that its subject, Elizabeth Farren, is before us, this life-size depiction provides a new interpretation on Shakespeare’s theme of the relationship of art and life. It adds further power to the theatrical moment when Hermione ‘comes to life’, with its reverberations both magical and humane. Through a range of visual and textual examples, this paper will explore the role of portraits when adopting theatrical personae in the late eighteenth century. It will review depictions of Hermione in the visual arts and the context for Zoffany’s remarkable reinterpretation, including new evidence about its provenance.

Monday 24 March 2014, 6:30pm
Ted Gott, Portraits of Augustus John in the National Gallery of Victoria.

‘In 1939 the Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, J. S. MacDonald, wrote forcefully about Augustus John’s life-size 1909 portrait of the Lord Mayor of Liverpool:  ‘the painting is a bad one, and its purchase should not be entertained’. Nonetheless, the painting was subsequently purchased for the NGV by the Felton Bequests’ Committee. Why was opinion divided about the merit of John’s painting, and how did a work that would seem to be a natural fit for a Liverpool collection end up gracing the walls of the NGV in Melbourne?’