Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

‘Amusements of solitude’ and ‘talismans of transport’: William Beckford and landscape painting in Britain and abroad (Eine gemeinsame Veranstaltung mit dem Freundeskreis des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte, der CONIVNCTA FLORESCIT)

This lecture explores the relationships between patrons and painters in British watercolour landscape in general and between William Beckford and Alexander and John Robert Cozens in particular. For patrons such as Sir George Beaumont, founder of the National Gallery, Richard Payne Knight, who wrote on the Picturesque, and William Beckford, author of Vathek and builder of Fonthill Abbey, the commissioning of watercolour landscapes was a process of exchange which only marginally involved funds. Beaumont worked with dozens of artists from Cozens to Constable, painting next to them and opening his collection to them, while Payne Knight and Beckford travelled and wrote alongside their artists - patrons and artists shaping each others’ vision in a symbiotic exchange of knowledge, taste, imagination and ways of seeing.

Dr. Kim Sloan
'BA (Toronto), PhD (London), FSA. Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours in the Department of Prints and Drawings and the Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum where she began working in 1992, after earlier work at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She has written books and exhibition catalogues on Alexander and John Robert Cozens (1986), Sir William Hamilton (Vases and Volcanoes, 1996), J.M.W.Turner (1998) and 'A Noble Art': Amateurs and Drawing Masters c.1600-1800 (2000). In 2003 she edited Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the 18th Century to celebrate the opening of the new gallery of that name in the restored King's Library in the British Museum.