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?

Melbourne Portrait Group Seminar: Vivien Gaston

Johann Zoffany, ‘Elizabeth Farren as Hermione in The Winter’s Tale'(c. 1780). National Gallery of Victoria, Everard Studley Miller Bequest.

Vivien Gaston, ‘Staying Alive: 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.

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.