Winter Speaker Series 2021: Timothy Barringer

Timothy Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Yale University

The description “Victorian Radical” sounds hyperbolic. But for the voices in Victorian Britain who were among the first to confront questions raised by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, it was an apt moniker. Unsurprisingly, artists were foremost among these radical thinkers and they spoke out against mass production, pollution, climate change and social issues in congested cities. Their solutions often centered on ideas of beauty – in nature and in the hand-made object. They looked back to the past to identify periods of greater social justice, when material objects reflected society’s values, and campaigned for a future very different to the one we now inhabit. In reconsidering Victorian art today, Barringer will share the works of celebrated artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. But he will also draw our attention to female artists of the period, such as Elizabeth Siddal and Kate Bunce, and the many makers of ceramics, jewellery, enamels and textiles whose names have not survived. 

Lecture will be followed by audience Q&A with Timothy Barringer via Zoom chat.

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NEW! Bundle your Ticket with the exhibition catalogue!

Victorian Radicals : from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement, by Timothy Barringer, Martin Ellis and Victoria Osborne

This exhibition catalogue is a generously illustrated and exciting new study of the Victorian era features rarely seen works, provocative essays, and a striking, period-inspired design. The full spectrum of the Victorian avant-garde is in magnificent display in this book that features nearly 150 works drawn from the city of Birmingham’s unparalleled collection.

$48.00  tax, shipping and autographed bookplate included, 2018, hardcover, 280 pages, American Federation of Arts, DelMonico Books and Prestel.

Timothy Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). With colleagues he co-edited Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (1998); Colonialism and the Object (1998); Art and the British Empire (2007); Writing the Pre Raphaelites (2009) and Victorian Jamaica (2018). He was co-curator of “American Sublime” (2002); “Art and Emancipation in Jamaica” (2007); “Opulence and Anxiety” (2007); “Before and After Modernism” (2010); “Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde” (2012) and “Pastures Green and Dark, Satanic Mills” (2013); “Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and National Gallery, London, 2018) and “Picturesque and Sublime” (2018). He is co-curator of “Unto this Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin” (2019-20) and “Radical Victorians” (eight US museum venues, 2019-21). He is finishing a book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock.

Johanna and Ronald Becker
Santiago Neville
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Kathleen Shinners
Lockett Ford Ballard, Jr.
Mary Jennings