Facing the Late Victorians
This exhibition will take audiences
back more than one hundred years to explore a phenomenon that will seem
astonishingly modern and familiar. Like the world we know now, Britain
at the end of the nineteenth century was a nation filled with images.
Whether circulating by means of posters, books, newspapers, magazines,
cards, and advertisements, or hanging on the walls of art galleries and
of private homes, images were everywhere. As is true today, what people
most wanted to see then were images of faces and bodies, especially
those of celebrities. A visual industry arose in the late Victorian
period to satisfy the demand for portraits in every medium and to
reproduce these on a mass scale. Pictures of monarchs and stage
performers, of course, were in great demand; more surprisingly, so were
portraits of what we might call cultural celebrities—that is, writers
and artists. Figures such as Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Aubrey Beardsley, James McNeill Whistler, W. B. Yeats, “George Eliot,”
and the feminist “New Women” writers were as famous for the way they
looked and dressed as for anything they created.
Writers
and artists trafficked in commodities, and they became commodities.
Their portraits also provided material for other workers in this
industry, such as caricaturists, who knew that the public took just as
great a delight in seeing its cultural heroes skewered as idealized.
These caricature artists, in turn, became celebrities themselves thanks
to the “New Journalism,” which was eager to circulate unflattering
images of the same poets and painters it made famous.
Facing
the Late Victorians features portraits of dozens of well-known figures
such as George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan
Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and John Singer Sargent, who
dominated the world of the arts, along with pioneering children’s book
authors and illustrators, such as E. Nesbit and Kate Greenaway. Many of
these are rarely seen images, such as Max Beerbohm’s savage caricature
of Oscar Wilde’s head, which seems to decay before our eyes faster than
did Dorian Gray’s face. But the show ranges widely to include
photographs and drawings of many lesser lights whose work was important
in advancing British art and literature—once celebrated writers such as
the feminist novelist Olive Schreiner and the Catholic poet Alice
Meynell, as well as the artists Ida Nettleship and William Rothenstein.
Of special note is a rare etching of famous actress
Sarah Bernhardt, who gave her farewell performance at the Tampa Bay
Hotel’s casino in 1906.
The show draws its sixty items
from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of
Delaware Library. Margaret D. Stetz, the exhibition’s curator, is the
Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of
Humanities at the University of Delaware.
FACING THE LATE VICTORIANS ROUNDTABLE TALK
Thursday, 11 March 2010, 4.00-5.15 pm, Reeves Theatre, Vaughn Hall,
University of Tampa
In
conjunction with the annual Nineteenth Century Studies Association
conference, hosted at the University of Tampa, this roundtable
discussion will include exhibition curator and noted scholar, Margaret
D. Stetz, Professor of Women’s Studies and Humanities at the University
of Delaware. Conference registrants and Museum members only. For more
information about the NCSA conference, “Theatricality and the
Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century,” go to
www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/index.html.
TALK ON “COLLECTING THE LATE VICTORIANS”
Saturday, 13 March 2010, 12 noon-12.45 pm, MacDonald Kelce Library, University of Tampa
Illustrated
talk by collector Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow,
University of Delaware Library. Sponsored by the Friends of the Tampa
Book Arts Studio and the Friends of the University of Tampa Library.
Free and open to the public.
A lavishly illustrated book
by Margaret D. Stetz, published by the University of Delaware Press,
accompanies Facing the Late Victorians. Copies are available for
purchase in the Henry B. Plant Museum Store.
Facing the Late Victorians is underwritten by Mrs. (Jean) Joel Mattison and by J. Thomas and Lavinia W. Touchton.
The Henry B. Plant Museum interprets the turn-of-the-century Tampa Bay Hotel and the lifestyles of America’s Gilded Age. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 4 pm Sunday, noon to 4 pm. Closed Monday. Admission is a suggested donation of $5 per adult, $2 for children under 12.