Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Eugene Barilo von Reisberg: ‘Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Portraiture in the Age of Social Mobility’

Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Portrait of Queen Victoria (1843, detail, collection of HM Queen Elizabeth II); Portrait of Princess Tatiana Yusopova (1858m detail, St Petersburg: The State Hermitage); Portrait of Mrs Philip Vanderbyl (1866, detail, private collection).

Eugene Barilo von Reisberg (Art History Program, School of Culture & Communication), PhD Completion Seminar: ‘Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Portraiture in the Age of Social Mobility’.

Wednesday  16 December 2015, 6:00pm

University of Melbourne (Parkville), Baillieu Library, Dulcie Hollyock Room.

Lecture | Barbara Bryant: ‘Australia’s Pre-Raphaelite Collections: the People behind the Portraits

John Everett Millais, ‘Cecil Webb’, 1887. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria. Gift of the David Blanche family and Michael Blanche family in memory of Arthur and Yvonne Blanche through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009.

Barbara Bryant: ‘Australia’s Pre-Raphaelite Collections: the People behind the Portraits’.

Thursday 2 July, 6:30-7:30pm

NGV International, Ground Level, Clemenger Auditorium

Cost $16 M / $20 A / $18 C, Code P1549, Ph +61 3 8662 1555, 10am–5pm daily

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Dr Vivien Gaston: ‘Double Identity: William Orpen’s portrait of George C. Beresford (c. 1900) in the National Gallery of Victoria’.

William Orpen, ‘Portrait of George C. Beresford’, c. 1900. 135 x 76.8 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest 1928.

 Dr Vivien Gaston: ‘Double Identity: William Orpen’s portrait of George C. Beresford (c. 1900) in the National Gallery of Victoria.’

Thursday 30 April 2015, 6:45pm.

University of Melbourne, Baillieu Library, Dulcie Hollyock Room.

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Emily Wubben: ‘Artistic Souls: Baronne Madeleine Deslandes and her portrait by Edward Burne-Jones’

Edward Burne-Jones, Portrait of Baronne Madeleine Deslandes, 1895-96. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Emily Wubben, ‘Artistic Souls: Baronne Madeleine Deslandes and her portrait by Edward Burne-Jones’

Monday 1 December, 6:30pm.

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Alison Inglis: Portraiture and the Colonial Collection

‘Additions to the Public Library buildings’, Australasian Sketcher, 18 April 1889 State Library of Victoria)

Associate Professor Alison Inglis, ‘Portraiture and the Colonial Collection: Searching for Portraits in the National Gallery of Victoria in the Nineteenth Century

Monday 10 November, 6:30pm.

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar | Deirdre Coleman

Automaton clock representing François-Dominique Toussaint (L’Ouverture). Melbourne, Johnston Collection.

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?

New Books | Portraits in Revolutionary France & A Portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo restored

Amy Freund, Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0-271-06194-8.

A new book by Amy Freund, Assistant Professor of Art at Texas Christian University, explores the political and cultural role of the portrait in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 

The Franklins, Fame and Phrenology | Alison Inglis

Fig. 1: Thomas Phillips, Portrait of Sir John Franklin, 1828. Oil on canvas,768 mm x 514 mm. National Portrait Gallery, London. Bequeathed by Lady Franklin’s niece, Miss Sophia Cracroft, 1892. NPG 903.

Sir John Franklin is best known in Australia for his role in this country’s colonial history, in particular his attempts to foster education and culture in Van Diemen’s Land while Lieutenant-Governor of that distant imperial outpost between 1837 and 1843.[1]