Birmingham to Ballarat: Visualising Antiquity in Global Victorian Cultures

This new project explores the global and imperial networks that made possible the creation, purchase and display of art in 1880s Britain and Australia. It focuses on 2 works each by 2 artists: (1) Solomon Joseph Solomon’s paintings Ajax and Cassandra (1886) and Samson and Delilah (1887); (2) Briton Riviere’s A Roman Holiday (1881) and Phoebus Apollo (1895).

This new project explores the global and imperial networks that made possible the creation, purchase and display of art in 1880s Britain and Australia. It focuses on 2 works each by 2 artists: (1) Solomon Joseph Solomon’s paintings Ajax and Cassandra (1886) and Samson and Delilah (1887); (2) Briton Riviere’s A Roman Holiday (1881) and Phoebus Apollo (1895).

These works were made by artists in London, but they ended up on display in galleries in Birmingham, Ballarat (in Victoria, Australia), Melbourne and Liverpool. The global but also local and regional mobility of these art objects and their makers is clear from their journeys across the globe, and a key component of the project will be comparative analysis of the institutions that now own them, told through the acquisition narratives of each painting. However, drawing on recent research into the movement of artworks, I am interested in unpacking the ways in which movement is inscribed – both materially and compositionally - into these images before they even began to make their journeys by rail, canal, and sea. The project examines how this transit impacts upon the meanings they generated in their new colonial and regional contexts. At its broadest level, this is a project about the connections between making and viewing, and  between the creation and reception of works of art in new imperial contexts.

In a late nineteenth-century art establishment vociferously asserting a national school of ‘British’ art, the fate of these paintings challenges and also expands our understanding of what ‘British’ art might be. The project is thus an attempt to explore British art history by considering the role played by empire in the making and viewing of ‘British’ art. Although I am still telling a story of European art, the project also contributes to what has sometimes been referred to as ‘provincialising’ Europe, for it explores the reliance of these examples of British art on extra-European cultures, while also generating complex hybrid forms in the ambiguous contexts of their display in settler colonies.

 I have already published a number of shorter works on this theme.

The resulting book is due to be completed 2021.

Dr Kate Nichols