anteros_lmc | Entries tagged with event

A very belated fly-by post for International Women's Day. In lieu of having something more original to post, here's a rather striking artwork from the current display at the Keepers Gallery at The National Archives which highlights women in original artwork from the Second World War.

Ditty Box WRNS ratings, 1939-1946, Artist Olga Lehmann
Blurb as follows:

These artworks are being shown in the gallery to mark the 70th anniversary this year of Victory in Europe Day on 8 May 1945, and as part of Women’s History Month in March. During the First World War women volunteered to undertake various roles to help the war effort. As the Second World War approached, it was clear the demand for labour would increase. From 1941, every woman in Britain aged 18-60 had to be registered to work and later that year conscription of women was introduced. In 1943, almost 90% of single women and 80% of married women were employed as part of the war effort. Women worked in numerous areas during the Second World War, in paid as well as voluntary positions. This display of original artwork from the INF 3 record series highlights just a few.

If anyone is lucky enough to be in London on the 23rd March I can highly recommend going along to the Design Museum where fashion historian Amber Butchart is curating a series of events as part of the museum’s Women, Fashion, Power season. One of the final events is a lecture by Amber herself on Uniform, Power and the Sea. Blurb as follows:

Fashion Historian Amber Butchart guest-curates a programme of three talks on power, dress and culture. For this event she explores the links between uniform, power and nautical dress.

Nautical motifs are a perennial on contemporary catwalks, from regimental naval glamour to the square sailor collar. But how did these elements of men’s uniform — created as a spectacular display of sartorial power and military might — cross into women’s dress, and how did their meanings change with this transition? Fashion historian Amber Butchart discusses the complex relationship between uniform, war, power and fashion, from the development of naval uniform to its appropriation into womenswear, covering areas based on research from her latest book, Nautical Chic (2015): a look at the history of high fashion on the high seas.

Further details here: Uniform, Power and the Sea.

And while we're on the subject, you might want to look out for Amber's forthcoming book Nautical Chic, which looks rather divine!

The Keeper's Gallery at The National Archives in Kew is currently featuring what sounds like a rather fascinating exhibition on the High Court of Admiralty Prize Papers; a large collection of ships documents, private papers and correspondence recovered from vessels seized during the 17th to 19th centuries. The exhibition focuses on papers belonging to a Dutch ship, the Henriette which was captured in 1803 by the frigate Lapwing, Captain Alexander Skene, while returning from China with a cargo of tea. Amongst the items recovered from the Henriette were a pouch of seeds collected by a Dutch plant collector and wine producer Jan Teerlink, samples of silk, and several songs and poems including sheet music for a French love song, Romances d’Estelle by François Devienne, composer and professor for flute at the Paris Conservatory.

Jan Bekker Teirlinck

Alexander Skene

François Devienne

I don't know anything about Teerlink, Devienne or Skene, but this sounds like a fascinating exhibition and the haul recovered from the Henriette sounds like something worthy of the Aubreyad!

Seeds collected by Teirlinck

Romances d’Estelle by Devienne

On the off chance that anyone happens to be in the vicinity of Kew this week, The National Archives are hosting a seminar on Thursday 23rd on The Chevalier d'Eon: Transgender Diplomat at the Court of George III, 1763-1777. The event is free, but ticketed. Blurb as follows:

This event is part of our themed programme. Diplomacy is at the heart of all human interaction. Whether between international states and colonies, monarchs and their ministers, the major players in the theatres of war, kith and kin, or friends and enemies: diplomacy - or lack of it - will play its part. This programme of events aims to reflect the broad spectrum of interpretations of historical diplomacy and the art of peace-making.

In 1763 peace broke out between France and Britain, ending the Seven Years War. The defeated superpower France was left nursing its wounds, as well as thoughts of revenge. While King Louis XV's foreign minister sought to maintain the peace, the King's spy network, "the King's Secret" developed plans to invade England. These conflicting agendas were embodied in the Chevalier d'Eon, France's minister in London. A Georgian Edward Snowden, shortly after his arrival the Chevalier began publishing confidential diplomatic despatches and blackmailing his King. The Chevalier escaped assassination and imprisonment by becoming a woman in 1777.

Dammit. I've been meaning to write a wee post about this exhibition for ages now and I finally get round to it on the day it closes! Oh well, never mind, there are still some nice pictures of boats to look at.

Earlier this summer the French National Maritime Museum held an exhibition at the Palace of Versailles of a collection of ship models commissioned by Napoleon in 1810 for the Gallery Trianon. The collection was built by Jacques-Noël Sane, Inspector General of Marine Engineering and Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Palace and it encompasses ships of the line, frigates, and smaller vessels.

Sadly the exhibition has now closed but there is a fascinating film about the conservation of the models and their installation in the Gallery Trianon.

Models of the Imperial Navy exhibition website and press release.

This is very short notice, but just in case anyone is kicking their heels in London this weekend, The Queens House at the Royal Museums Greenwich has a series of events running today and tomorrow "exploring the extraordinary story of Lady Emma Hamilton; actress, dancer, celebrity, trend-setter and muse." It's good to see Hamilton getting some serious attention as a performance artist, rather than just as an appendage to Nelson!

The Private Emma
Join curator Amy Miller as she looks at Lady Emma Hamilton, the woman behind a scandal; and at the personal documents surrounding her as Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson's notorious mistress.

Emma Hamilton's Attitudes Renewed
Performance artists Akleriah have been Inspired by Lady Emma Hamilton’s performances of ‘attitudes’ — a form of classical mime that she popularised in 18th-century Naples. Collaborating with film-maker Jason Wen, theatre director and drama lecturer Jillian Wallis, and University of Greenwich students, the extraordinary ‘rags to riches’ life story of Emma Hamilton, Lord Nelson’s mistress will be resurrected, and the relevance of the ‘attitudes’ art form today explored.

Emma as Performer: Items from the Caird Library Collection
A chance to see manuscript items from the Caird Library collection that demonstrate the power of Emma Hamilton as a performer.

A History of Actresses in the 18th Century
Join theatre historian Julian Day, as he tells gives a short account of the rise of the actress during the period of Lady Emma Hamilton’s life.

All events are free and run at various times over the course of the weekend, further infromation here.

Yesterday I went through to Edinburgh to accompany

esmerelda_t to a viewing of the exhibition High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson at the Queen's Gallery at the Palace of Holyrood House. The exhibition is drawn from the Royal Collections and it's really rather splendid. It's beautifully curated and there's lots of information to identify the characters Rowlandson is lampooning and to explain the political and social context of the era. There's also an excellent website accompanying the exhibition here, which includes high resolution downloadable images of every caricature on display, along with this rather entertaining animation narrated by none other than BRIAN BLESSED.

Rowlandson is probably my favourite of the Georgian caricaturists, as he rarely has quite such a vicious edge as Cruikshank and Gillray. Also he drew the most delightfully joyful porn! How could anyone forget New Feats of Horsemanship?! To say nothing of A Sailor's Farewell? And therein lies my one criticism of the exhibition. There's no porn! In fact there's barely even any smut. So although it's an excellent exhibition, I'm not sure how representative it is of Rowlandson's work. Of course it's possible that there isn't any smut in the Royal Collection, but given that many of these images were collected by George IV I don't believe that for one minute! We suspect that Her Maj is keeping all the smut for herself ;)

This is the only image that hints at Rowlandson's earthier artistic talents. Though as

esmerelda_t pointed out, it does prove that the randy plumber has been a standard porn trope for over two hundred years!

Last week, the National Maritime Museum launched their latest major temporary exhibition Turner and the Sea. Blurb as follows:

Turner and the Sea at the National Maritime Museum is the first full-scale examination of J.M.W Turner’s lifelong fascination with the sea. Dramatic, contemplative, violent, beautiful, dangerous and sublime – the sea was the perfect subject to showcase Turner’s singular talents, and the 120 pieces on display include some of the most celebrated paintings of the artist’s long career.

There's an excellent review of the exhibition in the Guardian here and the NMM have also posted this rather nice trailer online.

Cross posting this from

nodbear's journal...

We’re chuffed to bits that our research into the lives of the historical crew of HMS Indefatigable will be featured at The National Archives this weekend as part of the Explore Your Archives series of events. On Saturday 23rd November The National Archives will host a one day event focused on how archives can inspire creativity. The programme includes an “Explore Our Stories” strand which provides members of the public with an opportunity to see ten Discovery Boxes containing documents that are not normally allowed out of the search rooms, and to hear how these documents have inspired research and revealed long hidden stories. Each Discovery Box item has been chosen by a member of the Archives’ staff, or one of the Friends of The National Archives, who will be on hand to answer questions about the documents, explain the information they reveal and the stories that they tell.

One of the ten documents being presented is ADM36/13144, the 1797 muster book of the HMS Indefatigable, and

nodbear will be on hand to talk about the amazing stories that the muster reveals. Visitors will have a chance to see the original ship’s muster book, to look through a copy of the document, and to see pictures of some of the young officers who served aboard the ship. (I can neither confirm nor deny that this will include pictures of Horatio and Archie ;)

Muster book of His Majesty's Ship the Indefatigable

The British Library has just launched a new exhibition Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain, which runs until March next year.

Blurb as follows:

Tasteful and polite, or riotous and pleasure-obsessed? Discover the Georgians as they really were, through the objects that tell the stories of their lives.

From beautifully furnished homes to raucous gambling dens, Georgians Revealed explores the revolution in everyday life that took place between 1714 and 1830. Cities and towns were transformed. Taking tea, reading magazines, gardening and shopping for leisure were commonplace, and conspicuous consumption became the pastime of the emerging middle classes.

Popular culture as we know it began, and with it the unstoppable rise of fashion and celebrity. Art galleries, museums and charities were founded. In this time of incredible innovation, ideas were endlessly debated in the new coffee houses and spread via the information highway that was mass print.

Drawing on the British Library’s uniquely rich and rare collections of illustrated books, newspapers, maps and advertisements, as well as loaned artworks and artefacts, Georgians Revealed brings to life the trials and triumphs of the ordinary people who transformed Britain forever.

There are also a series of events scheduled to coincide with the exhibition including a talk by Lucy Inglis on her new book Georgian London, a lecture on the letters of Ignatius Sancho, an event on Georgian mens fashion and Vice and Virtue - "a sumptuous evening of decadent pleasure and entertainment." Sounds like fun :)

Ubique Right of the Line photo ubique.jpg

As well as the new Nelson Navy and Nation exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, there are a number of other events taking place to commemorate Trafalgar Day this year. One that caught my eye is the imaginatively titled Marking the Battle of Trafalgar event at the Royal Armouries at Fort Nelson on Sunday, which involves the firing of an 1805 12 pounder naval gun, by uniformed crew from Ubique Right of the Line reenactment group. The gun, which was restored to firing condition by the Royal Armouries to commemorate the anniversary of Trafalgar in 2005, will be fired at 12 noon, 1pm, and 3pm and the event also features costumed performances by Ubique and HMS Loire.

If any of you happen to be in That London over the next couple of months you might be interested in checking out the Bishopgate Institute's new season of events, Boys & Girls, which "examines the changing nature of gender roles, what gender is, how we interpret our gender identity and gender equality." Lots of the events sound fascinating but the one that caught my eye is a talk by Justin Bengry of Birckbeck College called All Boys Together - Homing in on Homosociality. Blurb as follows:

All boys together? Nudge nudge. The belief that all male institutions are breeding grounds for homosexuality, has been a constant one. But what does go on behind the doors of the executive boardroom or the communal changing room? Is homosexuality the elephant in the room? The serpent in the grass? Or is it all just homosexual wish fulfilment fantasy?

The event is on the 24th of October at 19.00 and costs £7 / £5 concession. You can find further information about Girls & Boys and details of all events here

Wednesday's #AskACurator event on twitter was really rather fun. I didn't even attempt to follow the tag, there was so much traffic, I just tracked the museums I usually follow. I had to be very restrained so as not to monopolise the National Maritime Museums curators :} I did ask them a couple of questions, one about the proportion of the NMMs collections that is still to be digitised. The curator replied

A great proportion... However in the last year we've digitised around 35,000 archive items!

Which is pretty impressive by any standard! Someone also asked what the curator's favourite object was and he chose the Spanish naval ensign that I posted a picture off earlier in the year.

There was also a lovely question from someone (I suspect a fangirl ;) who asked:

Would you consider doing an exhibition based on Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels?

To which the curator responded enthusiastically:

Absolutely! Would love to do that. A 'Navy in Fiction' exhibition idea has been bandied about...
Hornblower, O'Brian, Austen, Smollett, and even James Bond - I reckon it would be great. Thoughts?

Needless to say that got my vote! :D I was also tempted to ask if the NMM had any plans to reprint Dressed to Kill but as that's not really a curatorial question I resisted :}

Apologies for being rather absent these days, RL is still demanding rather a lot of attention. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Anyway, never mind.

If you happen to be on twitter tomorrow, you might be interested in the #askacurator event that museums all over the world are participating in. Over 350 museums in 32 countries are taking part including, in the UK, the National Maritime Museum, SS Great Britain, the British Museum, National Museums of Scotland, the Imperial War Museum, and the Bodleian Library. You can find a full list of participating museums here. So if you ever wanted to ask the curators at the National Maritime Museum about their collection of naval breeches, now's your chance!

One final bit of spam from Portsmouth for the time being...

nodbear and I were rather chuffed to find this in the conference pack for the Port Towns Conference :)

The British Museum has launched a new museum discovery trail called "A Little Gay History: Desire and diversity across the world". The project highlights artefacts from the museum's collection that "provide evidence that desire between members of the same sex has always been an aspect of human existence and experience."

Blurb as follows:

The evidence for same-sex desire and fluid ideas of gender has often been overlooked in the past, but museums and their collections can allow us to look back and see diversity throughout history.

Much of the historical evidence is centred around men and their concerns and often what survives is partial, fragmentary or ambiguous. Such things have often been hidden in history, and obscured by censorship, but now we realise the past is much ‘queerer’ than we have often thought.

Hadrian and Antinous
Not all the artefacts are on permanent display, due to their fragility, but you can see many of them online here. There's also a rather wonderful commentary by museum curator Richard B Parkinson and guests, including the actor Simon Russel Beale, which you can listen to here.

I've been prety good at keeping an eye out for naval history conferences recently so I'm rather gutted that this one completely slipped under my radar. The fascinating sounding Naval Expertise and the Making of the Modern World Conference organised by the Society for the Social History of Medicine is taking place at Oxford tomorrow. Blurb as follows:

This conference examines the generation of expertise in naval contexts and traces how such developments helped shape the modern world. Expertise will be considered not only as knowledge but also as methods and practices central to the evolution of modern nation-states and empires.

In the search for useful knowledge and in answering the demands of global infrastructure, navies have not only pursued military aims, but have also encouraged the formation of other areas of expertise, whether medical, technological, or bureaucratic. Recent research has identified navies as forerunners of modern scientific research, social disciplinary practices, and political economy for instance. This conference will explore such developments comparatively and consider their influence in the early modern and modern periods. By exploring how issues such as social welfare, professionalization and industrialization shaped and were shaped by naval institutions and innovations, this inter-disciplinary conference will link scholarship on naval infrastructure with research on the origins of the modern world.

The conference programme includes a truly eclectic selection of international papers featuring everything from the Amsterdam marine insurance market, to the problem of cholera, the Forth-Clyde ship canal, Japanese naval hospitals and public health, and education in the Danish peace time navy! These are the papers that really caught my eye though:

Constructing the Naval Sodomite: Shifting Perceptions of Homosexuality in Royal Navy Courts Martial for Sexual Crimes, 1690-1861, Seth Stein LeJacq (Johns Hopkins University).

‘None need apply but Seamen or Stout Hands’: The Impress Service and Manning the British Navy during the Age of Revolution, Jeremiah Dancy (University of Oxford).

Gentlemen, Seamen, and Professionals: Officer Training in the Royal Navy, 1775-1815, Evan Wilson
(University of Oxford).

I wonder If any of the delegates will be so good as to tweet from the conference? I hope so!

If any one happens to be hanging around Greenwich in March, the National Maritime Museum is running a series of seminars on Jane Austen and the Navy. Blurb as follows...

2013 marks the bicentenary of the publication of Jane Austen’s celebrated Pride and Prejudice. To mark this occasion we are hosting a series of lectures discussing Austen and her links with the Navy. Join us for a fascinating in-depth look at Georgian Britain and its dependence on seafaring.

7 March – Dr James Davey: The Navy in the Time of Austen
14 March – Prof. Jonathan Mee: Conversations and Austen
21 March – Prof. Claire Lamont: The Nation and Austen
28 March – Curator Amy Miller: Perceptions of the Navy in Mansfield Park
4 April – Prof. Emma Cleary: “Lydia used to want to go to London”: Jane Austen’s View of the Metropolis
11 April – speaker tbc

Further details from the NMM here: Jane Austen and the Navy.

Several newspapers featured a story last week about the National Maritime Museum loaning Nelson's Trafalgar uniform to, shock horror, the French. The uniform will be loaned for the first time to the Musée de l'Armée in Paris for their forthcoming exhibition, Napoléon et l'Europe.

The Guardian quotes Quintin Colville, curator of naval history at the NMM, as follows:

"It is absolutely an icon of British history and I don't think it has a competitor," he said. "It's never been loaned by the NMM before and hasn't left these shores since it returned from Trafalgar with Nelson's body, so, as you can imagine, every possible precaution has been taken."

According to Colville, very few items possess the same transportive power. "Because of the presence of the hole left by the musket ball, it does capture a split-second in time and it takes you straight back to that moment at the heart of an extraordinarily ferocious and all-consuming battle," he said. "Anyone who walks past the uniform is struck by that."

The Napoléon et l'Europe exhibition runs from 27th March - 14th July at Hotel National des Invalides and will feature 280 artefacts from 56 European institutions. While the Trafalgar uniform is on diaplay in Paris, it will be replaced at the NMM by Nelson's full dress uniform, and, on its return later in the year, it will "form the centrepiece of the NMM's new Nelson, Navy, Nation gallery, which charts the Royal Navy's role in 18th-century British history."

I sooo want to go to this conference! If the conference abstract is anything to go by, I suspect the papers will be rather heavy on the old critical theory discourse, but I bet they'll be a lot of fun too :)

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Anteros

.... he longs as he is longed for....

Entries tagged with event

International Women's Day

Uniform, Power and the Sea

High Court of Admiralty Prize Papers

The Chevalier d'Eon: Transgender Diplomat at the Court of George III

Maquettes de la Marine Imperiale

Emma Hamilton Revisited

High Spirits - The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson

Turner and the Sea

Indyboys at The National Archives

Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain

Marking the Battle of Trafalgar

All Boys Together

#AskACurator Questions

#askacurator Day

National Museum of the Royal Navy Seminar Series

A Little Gay History

Naval Expertise and the Making of the Modern World

Jane Austen and the Navy

Napoléon et l'Europe

Politeness and Prurience