Pre-Raphaelite illustration: 'Works of Feeling'
Evening session
Thursday 12 April 2018 6.30 - 9pm
The Library, Burlington House, Royal Academy of Arts
£65. Includes welcome drinks in the Academicians Room and an expert-led tour of the Royal Academy’s Library and Print Room
Works of Feeling: Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustration
Terms and conditions
Rupert Maas, a Victorian and English art specialist and renowned dealer and gallery owner, is joined by curator Amanda-Jane Doran for an in-depth discussion of the Pre-Raphaelite art and illustration currently on display from the Royal Academy Collection.
An exclusive opportunity to hear from experts on Pre-Raphaelite art and illustration, including an in-depth look at the display of Victorian wood-engravings in the Royal Academy Print Room.
Experience the fascinating, intricate illustrative works of celebrated artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), Sir John Everett Millais PRA (1829–96) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) behind-the-scenes in the Royal Academy’s Library. Seldom exhibited in the modern day, these illustrations present an astounding originality in their approach to portraying subjects in Victorian poetry, prose and literature.
This event is a unique opportunity to delve further into the subject and see works not on public display from the RA’s print archives in historic and intimate surroundings, supported and enriched by experts in the field. Held in the Academy’s historic Library and Print Room, this exclusive event also offers the opportunity to view further prints, drawings and illustrated books by important Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian artists in the RA Collection.
The Royal Academy’s remarkable Library and Collection reflects its near 250-year history at the heart of the art world. Acquired from the RA’s foundation in 1768, spanning up to the present day, the Collection has been both a practical teaching tool and a resource for research and scholarship, informing and inspiring artists and scholars over the centuries. With many works donated by practising artists themselves, as well as their families, the collection reflects the membership of the Royal Academy (the Royal Academicians), as well as its supporters and the activities of the prestigious RA Schools. The Collection provides a unique insight into the history of the arts and culture in Britain.
The evening will begin with a warm welcome and refreshments in the Academicians’ Room followed by a private tour of the Collection, an exploration of the current display of pre-Raphaelite prints and an opportunity to view and discuss them in detail in a small group, in an expert-led tour with Amanda-Jane Doran and Rupert Maas.
6.30pm – Welcome and drinks reception in the Academicians’ Room
7.00 - 9.00pm – Private curated tour of the Royal Academy’s historic Library and Print Room
£65. Includes welcome drinks in the Academicians Room and an expert-led tour of the Royal Academy’s Library and Print Room
Works of Feeling: Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustration
Terms and conditions
Amanda-Jane Doran is a freelance writer and Rare Books and Illustration Curator at the RA whose area of expertise is in 19th and 20th-century illustrated books and magazines. Curator of the Punch Collection for 15 years and consultant to the Illustrated London News Group Archive, her particular interests include Victorian wood-engraved illustration, German 19th-century book illustration and caricature. She lectures at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Rare Book School and is a regular contributor to Illustration Magazine.
Recent exhibitions include Works of Feeling, Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustration, RA Print Room 2017/8, William Heath Robinson’s Life of Line, RA Print Room, 2016, Charles Stewart: Black and White Gothic, RA Tennant Gallery, 2015 and Graphic America: Wood Engraved Illustrations by Arthur Boyd Houghton, 2014, RA Print Room.
She is currently working on a study of female journalists and illustrators from the First World War period.
Rupert Maas was born in 1960, the same year that his father Jeremy started The Maas Gallery in Mayfair, London, dealing in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. He was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset 1973 –78, and took a ‘Desmond’ in Art History at Essex University 1980 – 83. He sailed the Atlantic in the summer of 1983 but was tricked by his father into joining him at The Maas Gallery later that year. Following the death of his father in 1997 he owns and runs the Gallery, which deals in Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite, Romantic and Modern British paintings, watercolours, drawings, reproductive engravings and sculpture, and the work of two or three living artists, especially Sarah Adams, the Cornish coastal painter. Under Rupert’s father, the Gallery gained the reputation of having spearheaded the revival of interest in Victorian Art. Rupert has maintained this tradition and has arranged a number of important exhibitions at his Gallery, including Pre-Raphaelites and Romantics, Masters of British Illustration, John Ruskin and his Circle, Burne-Jones, Victorian Fairy Paintings, regular exhibitions of Victorian Engravings and annual exhibitions of Victorian Paintings. He has arranged other commercialexhibitions of Victorian paintings in New York, Tokyo, Moscow and Shanghai. Since 1995 he has appeared on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow (he discovered a version of William Orpen’s The Spy worth £250,000 at Greenwich in 2010) and on Castle in the Country, as a picture specialist, and appears regularly on other programmes. He served on the executive committee of The Society of London Art Dealers 1998–9 and 2015. He co-owned and ran The Watercolours and Drawings Fair until 2010. He has regularly written articles for the arts press and lectures on art like a maniac. Another job, like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, was to promote whisky in the Far East, acting as a roving brand ambassador for Ballantine’s throughout China, 2007 – 2010.
James Finch spent five years working for the antiquarian printseller Grosvenor Prints before researching an AHRC-funded PhD thesis on the art critic and curator David Sylvester with the University of Kent and Tate. Since completing his thesis he has taught at the University of Kent and the Bishopsgate Institute and worked as a freelance researcher and cataloguer. James was initially employed by the RA as a cataloguer before he began his current position as Curatorial Assistant in the Collections Department earlier this year. James’ research has been published in Tate Papers and Kunst und Politik and he has presented papers at numerous conferences in Britain and overseas. His research interests include art criticism and the relationship between printmaking and other media.
About the Royal Academy Library
The Royal Academy Library is the oldest institutional fine art library in the country, established in 1768 for the use of the Members of the Academy and its students. It is housed in an evocative, hidden space tucked away next to the Sackler Galleries on the top floor of Burlington House. Entrance is via the Library Print Room, which opens onto a main reading room filled with thousands of historic books on art and art theory, architecture, archaeology and much more. This impressive room was once a Victorian sculpture gallery and was redesigned in the late 1980s by the architects Betty and H.T. Cadbury-Brown to hold the Library.
In the build-up the RA’s 250th anniversary in 2018, we are digitising 10,000 new items from the Academy’s collection – from works of art to letters and sketches. In this film, we take a look at how these works are chosen and what they can tell us about the history of art practice in the UK.
Our programme of short courses and classes offers the opportunity to explore a range of subjects, led by expert tutors and practising artists.
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