History Day

Items

• An Englishman in New York
  An online exhibition charting the life of the diplomat, turned artist and writer Valentine Lawford. Recent additions to Lawford’s papers cast new light on Lawford’s creative collaboration with his partner Horst P. Horst and the life they made together as a gay couple in the mid-twentieth century.
• Antinous in the collection of the Institute of Classical Studies Library
  The blog discusses the books that have been published on Antinous, the lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian
• Art, life, love : narratives from the Benedict Nicolson Archive
  Benedict Nicolson (1914-1978) was an art historian and editor of the Burlington Magazine for nearly forty years. Born into an aristocratic but also liberal and bohemian family, and coming of age in the tumultuous interwar period, he encountered unprecedented opportunities and experiences. This display explores Nicolson’s extraordinary life through his archive. Created almost exclusively in a personal capacity, and documenting Nicolson’s relationships with both men and women, the material presents an incredible resource for the study of art history, social history and the history of gender, sex and sexualities.
• Auction Catalogues in the Paul Mellon Centre Library
  The library holds approximately 15,000 auction catalogues, mainly dating from the late nineteenth century onwards, but with some eighteenth and early nineteenth century sales.
• Autograph Letter Collection
  An extraordinary collection of letters to Women’s Service Library (now The Women’s Library) of prominent correspondents dating from 1851 to 1975.
• Autumn in the Archives!
  As History Day takes place during November, let’s explore some archival collections around the theme of ‘Autumn’!
• Brian Sewell : an introduction to the archive
  Brian Sewell (1931-2015) was an art historian, art critic, author and media personality. He lead a remarkable life: born in 1931 to a single mother, he studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and found fame both as Anthony Blunt’s unofficial spokesman following Blunt’s exposure as a Soviet spy and later in his role as daily arts correspondent for the Evening Standard. All his life he felt like an ‘outsider’ – this becoming the title of his published autobiographies – a reference to various aspects of his character and also his sexuality (he described himself as gay). This Sewell Archive, documents almost every part of his life and this display provides an introduction to the collection.
• Damaged & Destroyed : Three Stories of Preservation and Loss from the PMC’s Photographic Archive
  In 2021, the Paul Mellon Centre (PMC) published its photographic archive online. The archive comprises more than 100,000 reproductions of paintings, prints, photographs, and sculptures. The photographs, which were taken over a forty-year period between the early 1960s to the late 1990s, offer images of objects from across six centuries, and focus in particular on sixteenth- to nineteenth-century British art. This feature focuses on a selection of the damaged and destroyed works that are recorded in the Centre’s photographic archive, and uses them to suggest some of the values and limitations of such archives. It takes the form of three stories. The first offers a glimpse into the work and tragic life of the largely forgotten eighteenth-century artist Hugh Robinson; the second looks at four portraits of women associated with a titled Scottish family, the Rothes, which were totally destroyed during a high-profile warehouse fire in 1997; and the third looks at a damaged sketchbook by the nomadic Georgian artist George Chinnery.
• Dennis Sharp Archive : Concrete and Controversy, the architecture of Connell, Ward & Lucas
  Dennis Sharp (1933-2010) was an architect, designer, author and teacher. The Centre holds Sharp’s archive, which comprises material compiled in the course of his research on the architecture of Connell, Ward and Lucas. The archive is fully catalogued and available for research. This spotlight feature highlights some of the key themes that emerge from the archive and some of the treasures which it contains.
• DMU Shoe-perpower: 90 Years of Footwear Design at De Montfort University
  With origins associated with Leicester's booming shoe trade in the nineteenth century, this exhibition explores the evolution of one of DMU's most prestigious courses, celebrating the achievements of its staff and students, past and present.
• Exploration of the Paul Oppé Library and Archive
  Adolphus Paul Oppé (22 September 1878–29 March 1957) was an art historian and collector with a particular interest in British drawings and watercolours from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His scholarly work, like his collecting, focused on figures such as John Sell Cotman, Alexander Cozens, Francis Towne, Paul and Thomas Sandby and Thomas Rowlandson, and contributed considerably to establishing their reputations as major British artists.
• Exploring the Frank Simpson Archive
  Frank Simpson (1911–2002) was a Librarian and amateur art historian with a long-held interest in taste and the collecting of pictures in England in the eighteenth century, particularly from salerooms. The Paul Mellon Centre holds his archive, which includes records from the London office of M. Knoedler & Co., where he worked during the 1950s–1970s. Much of the material in this archive is unique and contains a wealth of information for those interested in the study of provenance, and collections and collecting during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
• Exploring the Gavin Stamp Archive
  Gavin Stamp (1948–2017) was a British architectural historian, writer and campaigner. His archive, which is held by the Centre, illustrates a prolific career and wide-ranging interests. It includes material related to the Scott family architectural dynasty; inter-war period architecture; telephone boxes; war memorials; power stations; Victorian churches; ecclesiastical design; and colonial architecture.
• Exposure and Contrast exhibition now open!
  Head curator, Indy Bhullar talk about the current exhibition
• Exposure and Contrast: The Exit Photography Group
  LSE Library’s Autumn/Winter exhibition derives from a collection of photographs and interviews held in the archives. The group responsible for this collection were called Exit and they came together in the 1970s to bear witness to the changes and challenges impacting Britain’s inner cities. 30,000 photos and 100 hours of interviews were edited down and released in the book ‘Survival Programmes: In Britain’s Inner Cities’ published in 1982 by Open University Press.
• Exquisite Corpse: How did corpses become beautiful? An iconographic wild ride from the danse macabre to Corpse Bride.
  This post was written by Lena Szalewska and Arianna Dalla Costa, Graduate Library Trainees at The Warburg Institute Library, for History Day 2024.
• Florence Nightingale and hospital design
  This exhibition highlights the impact of Florence Nightingale upon the design of hospitals and nurses’ training.
• From Black and White to Colour: Staff Selections from the Paul Mellon Centre's Archives & Library Collections
  This display featured material from across the Archives & Library collections at the Paul Mellon Centre. It demonstrated how various histories of British art and architecture can be told through the unique and sometimes unexpected items held here. The material was selected by staff working in the department and included objects chosen because they are particularly inspiring, unusual, illustrative or hold personal resonance.
• From woodcut to photograph: techniques of book illustration:
  This exhibition explores the history of the development of illustrative techniques from woodcuts through to photographs.
• Imperial designs: technology and empire in the 19th century
  This exhibition covers the period when Britain experienced the peak of her imperial and industrial power. In the years 1815 to 1870 she was undoubtedly the ‘workshop of the world’, and there was no rival posing both a military and an economic threat.
• In the Spotlight: Mid-Century Women Artists from the Charles Hasler Collection
  This blog post spotlights and celebrates the work of three women artists who feature in the Charles Hasler collection at the University of Reading Special Collections. All three artists, Eileen Mayo, Barbara Jones and Enid Marx, were very active in the mid-twentieth century, and are notable for developing their own original and innovative styles and interests, and applying their creative talents to a wide variety of different art forms.
• Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants (1542) | Sachiko Kusukawa
  Leonhard Fuchs’s History of Plants, published in 1542, was a landmark in Renaissance book-printing. It contained more than five hundred large woodcuts of plants, accompanied by their morphological description and medicinal uses. Typical of its time, Fuchs’s study was based on a classical work on the medicinal uses of plants by Dioscorides (first century AD). Unusually for its time, Fuchs’s book contained an illustration of the artists that were involved in the production of the images. Fuchs had good reason to be proud of the artists, as they created for him the beautiful illustrations that functioned in multiple ways to aid the study of plants. I will introduce the ways in which illustrations mattered in Fuchs’s History of Plants before having a look at the copy now at the Linnean Society.
• Oscar Wilde and Classical antiquity: an exhibition
  Between the 31 May and the 13 September 2024, the Combined Library of the Institute of Classical Studies and the Hellenic and Roman societies hosted an exhibition exploring the relationship between Oscar Wilde and the Classical world through the collections of the library.
• Paul Joyce Archive : original drawings and papers on G.E. Street and Victorian Gothic Architecture
  Paul Joyce (1934–2014) was an architectural draughtsman and historian with a life-long interest in the work of George Edmund Street (1824–1881), a leading architect of the Victorian Gothic Revival. The Centre holds Joyce’s archive, containing material compiled in the course of his research on G.E. Street and other Victorian architects. The archive is fully catalogued and available for research. This spotlight feature highlights original drawings from the archive and a representative sample of Joyce’s research.
• Rituals of Power
  Explore “Rituals of Power” in the Society’s new online exhibition