This interdisciplinary seminar will focus on mural painting and its place within the cultural life of Britain in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, highlighting new ways of looking at the work, its artists and patrons.
The aim is to stimulate interest in this often overlooked genre and its place in British art-historical studies. We hope to encourage curators, academics and museum professionals to exchange ideas about
the history, meaning, workshop practice and iconography of mural art, as well as its significance within contemporary British and Continental visual cultures.
Confirmed speakers and themes include Stijn Bussels (Leiden) and Ute Engel (LMU Munich) on Continental parallels; Andrew Pinnock (Southampton) on opera; Richard Johns (York) and David McNeil (Dalhousie) on architectural typologies, and Nick Nace (H-SC Virginia) on country house poetry, as well as artist/patron case studies by Julie Farguson (Oxford) and Stacey Hickling (UCL) on Antonio Verrio; Lydia Hamlett (Cambridge) on Louis Laguerre; François Marandet (IESA) on Louis Chéron; Anya Matthews (ORNC Greenwich) on James Thornhill, and Laurel Peterson (Yale) on Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini.
The seminar is organised by the British Art Network Sub Group ‘British Mural Painting’.
