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The Enlightenment was a period of intense activity devoted to discovery and learning about the natural world, the past and other civilizations. Classification, collecting and deciphering were all important stages on the way to understanding the world and its inhabitants. The King's Library was built to house the books donated from the royal libraries of King George II and his grandson King George III, and they epitomize the interest in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in scholarship and study. Aimed at the general reader and relevant to many academic diciplines, this book explores the ways people acquired new information, organized their ideas and reached their conclusions.
1998 marks the 40th anniversary of the bequest to the British Museum by the collector Robert Wylie Lloyd (1868-1958) of fifty of Turner's finest watercolours. This book has been published to accompany a special exhibition of the collection.
A fresh perspective on British landscape drawing in the Victorian and Modern eras. The attempts by artists of the Victorian and early Modern period to convey not merely the physical properties of a landscape but also its emotional and spiritual impact - landscape as 'places of the mind', as the critic Geoffrey Grigson put it - is the focus of this fascinating new study of British watercolours produced between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on the British Museum's impressive collection, this book explores artists' spiritual quests to capture the essence of landscape and convey a sense of place. Artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on earlier traditions but developed and extended the genre through their imaginative, personal responses to the artistic, cultural and social upheavals of the time. The book includes works by Victorian artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Poynter and by many well known twentieth-century artists, such as John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, some of which have never previously been published.
The words 'amateur artist' conjure up a picture of Victorian ladies and gentlemen sketching in watercolours out of doors. This text challenges such an image, describing and illustrating over 200 works from the British Museum's collections.
Public and private institutions in the United States have long been home to a variety of art works, antiquities, and ethnological materials. For years, these collections have been seen as important archives that allow present and future generations to enjoy, appreciate, and value the art of all cultures. The past decade, however, has seen major changes in law and public policy and an active, ongoing debate over legal and ethical issues affecting the ownership of art and other cultural property. Contributors to Who Owns the Past? include legal scholars, museum professionals, anthropologists, archaeologists, and collectors. In clear, nontechnical language, they provide a comprehensive overview...
"Published ... to accompany the exhibition ... held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, from 25 October 2008 to 1 February 2009 and at the British Museum from 5 March to 31 May 2009."--T.p. verso.
John White's watercolours of the flora, fauna and North Carolina Algonquians he encountered on the expedition sent by Walter Raleigh in 1585 are some of the greatest treasures of the British Museum; engraved by Theodor de Bry in 1590 to illustrate Thomas Harriot's A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia , they informed and shaped Europe's view of America and its people for the next two centuries. This volume publishes a very successful interdisciplinary conference held in connection with the exhibition centred on John White, 'A New World: England's first view of America', with speakers from Europe, the USA and Britain, all of them experts in their fields. The varied and wide-ranging papers provided contextual and detailed information not covered in the exhibition catalogue and provide us with new ways of seeing and understanding both the European and Native American perspectives.
New World: England's First View of America
The Museum of Babel: Meditations on the Metahistorical Turn in Museography is a thought‐provoking, transatlantic reading of contemporary exhibits of the museum’s own past. Museums everywhere now exhibit ‘evocations’ of their own pasts, often in the form of refashioned, ancestral cabinets of curiosities. Moving beyond discussions of ‘the return to curiosity,’ Thurner calls this retrospective trend the metahistorical turn in museography. Providing engaging and lively meditations on exhibits of the museal past in art, natural history, archaeology, and anthropology museums, including the Prado, the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Louvre, Coimb...
This book is the first collection to feature histories of women in Western Esotericism while also highlighting women’s scholarship. In addition to providing a critical examination of important and under researched figures in the history of Western Esotericism, these fifteen essays also contribute to current debates in the study of esotericism about the very nature of the field itself. The chapters are divided into four thematic sections that address current topics in the study of esotericism: race and othering, femininity, power and leadership and embodiment. This collection not only adds important voices to the story of Western Esotericism, it hopes to change the way the story is told.