Sandy Jones (second year BA hons. Museum and Heritage Studies) discusses the advantages and challenges of studying the history of art and design later in life, in conversation with two student colleagues.

Day trip to the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, Summer 2012. Left to right: Jane, Sandy, Aurella Yussuf (BA hons. History of Design, Culture and Society), Marian and Thomas Cooper (BA hons. History of Decorative Arts and Crafts).

One thing I hear a lot is ‘What’s it like studying later in life?’ To be honest, I was filled with trepidation when I started. I hadn’t written an essay for 30 years, let alone sat an exam and I am, well, older… (polite cough). But once you start attending lectures, get to know other students and realize that you have a team of brilliantly supportive tutors, the experience tips from being terrifying to exciting. It’s a bit like starting a new job, only better. Much better.

People decide to go back to higher education for all sorts of reasons. According to a recent study published in The Independent, mature students – that’s anyone over 21 – make up around a third of the UK’s student population. So what is it like to be a mature student studying the history of art and design at Brighton? I discussed this with fellow ‘matures’ and study buddies, Marian Chambers (BA hons. History of Decorative Arts and Crafts) and Jane Allum (BA hons. History of Design, Culture and Society).

What was it that motivated you to apply for a place to study the history of art and design at Brighton?

J: I thought it was ‘now or never’. My sons had left home, my husband was about to row the Atlantic – we’d both taken a very early retirement. I worked in fashion early on and later restored houses and designed interiors, so the History of Art and Design programme appealed to me because it encompasses everything I’m interested in: dress history, design and architecture, interiors, objects and film.

M: I saw that the history of the English Country House was part of the course and that was it! I love interiors, textiles and gardens but wanted to know more about the social history and theory. I’ve always worked in admin but also dabbled in floristry and interior design. Also, Brighton is absolutely the right city to study art and design; it’s a creative city and there’s always something going on.

S: I’d been looking at the Museum and Heritage Studies course for a while and went to an open day to find out more. I’m a projects director in the design industry so this course presented me with an opportunity to understand the context to the industry I’ve worked in. Also, after 20+ years I wanted to change direction, but stay within a creative environment. I’ve always secretly wanted to work in a museum.

Did you do any preparation or courses before you started?

J: I wish I had arrived with better computer skills as I found the practical side of preparing a presentation hard in the beginning.

M: I did an Access course and this really helped. I learned how to learn again.

S: My work involves writing, planning and deadlines, and I found those skills useful in my approach to studying.

What are the more challenging aspects of studying as a mature student? And how is it rewarding?

J: The essays were challenging initially, but it’s about learning how to structure them. However, I have discovered that I love the detective aspect of research and uncovering the unique history of a particular art movement or object.

M: Essays, seminar presentations and some of the theoretical reading have been challenging. I’m learning how to construct detailed research in preparation for writing my dissertation next year, and I’m really enjoying it. I also like to share my learning with my family and friends – they say they are inspired by some of my stories and I love that.

S: I’m studying and working part time, and have a family so I have to be organized. Juggling work commitments can be stressful. What has surprised me is that I’m constantly discovering new things to be inspired by – I had a bit of a moment last year with the 1851 Great Exhibition; it became a complete obsession. This year the study of Postmodernism has another dimension to it – we three have actually lived through it, so there are unexpected benefits to studying later in life.

What are you hoping to do after your course?

M: My dream job would be to work at Petworth House, cleaning and restoring their art and objects when the house comes out of hibernation. I’m about to do a placement at Brighton and Hove Museum as part of the course, so I’m really looking forward to putting into practice what I’ve learnt so far.

J: I would like to continue studying or move into research.

S: I’d love to work in a museum as a curator or researcher.

What would you say to anyone thinking about going back to study?

M: Absolutely! 100% do it! It’s the best time of my life.

J: Be prepared to think about whether you need to do an Access course first.

S: Sounds obvious, but choose a subject that fascinates you. Going back to academic work is challenging and hard work but less so if you’re really interested in what you’re studying. Ask the university to put you in touch with a mature student so you can find out about how many hours you’ll need to study and the commitment you’ll need to make.

Stan Portus, second year student of BA (hons.) History of Design, Culture and Society, reviews a new show that celebrates the role of design in everyday life.

Stan Portus by Calvert and Kinneir’s ubiquitious road signage at the Design Museum

The Design Museum’s spring 2013 exhibition, Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things, reveals the histories behind the designs that have come to occupy our lives. From Marcel Bich’s Biro to David Mellor’s traffic lights, present on almost every road in Britain, the exhibition reveals the extent and importance of design in how we live and its role in the world that surrounds us.

Six stories –  all employing exclamation marks (Taste!, Identity and Design!, Why We Collect!, Mater!als & Processes, !cons, and  Fash!on) – are assembled through 150 objects from the Design Museum’s collection. Artefacts are displayed in grey stained plywood boxes designed by Gitta Gschwendtner. These look like the crates that one imagines the objects would normally be stored in and this helps you feel close to the objects, with almost nothing held behind glass (minus the display of Euros and Matthew Dent’s sterling currency designed around an Heraldic shield). Everything presented feels tangible and real.  The claim for the influence design has on everyday life, put forward by the exhibition’s opening text panel, is reiterated by not having anything between you and the objects on display.

The first story, Taste! shows the influence of European Modernism on British design. For example, the influence of Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chairs is shown through the furniture used by the menswear store Simpson’s, the seating that occupied school cafeterias until the 1970s, and his items designed for Dorothea Ventris.  It seems fitting that the first part of the exhibition starts with Modernism – a movement that sought to integrate design and living almost completely – as the show sets out to illustrate the importance of design in relation to the day-to-day. Terence Conran made an impassioned speech last year at the unveiling of the new £80 million project to move the Design Museum to the Commonwealth Institute by 2015 where he called for design to become part of this country’s DNA. This exhibition supports this ambition by showing how design exists as part of the fabric of society and can act as a powerful social force.

A slant towards Europe is present throughout some of the exhibition, however little if any of the world beyond is mentioned. The exhibition largely traces design in the UK and illustrates how design has influenced the visual makeup of this country. It pays considerable attention to Giles Gilbert Scott’s telephone kiosk, something that almost shouts Britishness, and to Calvert and Kinneir’s ubiquitous road signs (although, in my opinion, it does not show the process and history behind these signs as well as the V&A’s exhibition, British Design 1948–2012, did last year).

It can feel that the exhibition brushes over the stories it wishes to tell, although there are exceptions to this, most notably with the example of the Anglepoise lamp, which is explored in detail. The last part of the exhibition, entitled Mater!als & Processes, focuses on plastic and its associated issues, as a material so heavily relied upon but that is produced from such a finite source. However, like other parts of the exhibition, you are left wishing that the show had delved deeper and engaged with the debates to a greater extent.  Arguably, the exhibition was not intended to do this, as it functions more to showcase the museum’s collection. Nevertheless, it could have considered the future for design and its role in tomorrow’s everyday life as opposed to just the past.

Despite these shortcomings, Extraordinary Stories about Ordinary Things is still worth a visit. It may not offer a great deal of content about what role design may play in the future, but it certainly provides an insight into what the Design Museum has been collecting throughout its history. Intriguingly, it may also offer a glimpse of what to expect from the Design Museum’s new home at the Commonwealth Institute in 2015.

Second year BA (hons.) Visual Culture student Dan Simmonds observed a recent satrical fine art student project that offers new ways of measuring the success of an artwork. Here he reviews the results.

The Committee ballot box, 2012. Photo by Dan Simmonds.

Hearing ‘You’re fired!’ is synonymous with BBC programme The Apprentice and the cut-throat world of business that it dramatises for viewers. The idea of success advocated by programmes such as this demonstrates a clear cultural preoccupation with defining what, or who, is ‘best’ or most ‘successful’. The words ‘You’re fired!’ and this business ethos is not often associated with the art world, but all these components clashed in late 2012 when second year BA (hons.) Critical Fine Art Practice (CFAP) students at the University of Brighton formed The Committee.

Seventeen members, each with a different role within The Committee, set out to discover what makes a successful piece of contemporary art, with each using a piece of their own work as a potential example of success. Their worth was to be judged against a set of six criteria which they had decided were fundamental to a successful artwork. These criteria were originality, a balance between accessibility and exclusivity, the effective use of medium, technical execution, emotional impact and finally the incorporation of cultural and contextual references. The use of reasonably complicated and ambiguous criteria such as ‘emotional impact’ and ‘effective use of medium’ made a nod to the grading criteria against which their works are marked in Higher Education. A subjective appreciation of art, as expressed by those who mark an artwork, surely cannot mean the same thing when applied to several different artworks. Marking processes may be flawed in this respect, which is something The Committee drew careful attention to.

In the way that reality television courts discussion from a panel of experts, The Committee discussed their art and each criterion at length, and through this, found that they redefined the very criteria they had initially developed. Attendance at The Committee was considered compulsory and failure to attend three meetings resulted in a termination of membership. The words ‘You’re fired!’ were directed to one member for that very reason. The potentially never-ending set of discussions demonstrates the satire in The Committee’s work and acts as a comment on the dour meetings, and meetings about meetings, which many of us attend, often to little consequence.

Each Committee member handed in proposal forms for the pieces which made up the exhibition, and then judged each other’s work on the six criteria with a combined 60% agreed as a threshold for determining work as successful. The results of this judging process revealed a piece which was designed to conform to the criteria called ‘Prints’ fell short. The failure of this work could amount to the previously mentioned ambiguity of some criteria or, more likely, to the doomed nature of work which sets out to conform to such ideals as ‘emotional impact’. The Committee also invited public comment through a ballot system when they exhibited their work in the foyer of the University of Brighton’s Grand Parade campus. Just as the government or large companies undertake public research surveys, The Committee encouraged visitors to fill out a paper requiring them to mark each artwork against the six criteria, and also to leave comments. The Committee is yet to gather information on public interpretations of the exhibition and this is crucial to further understandings of their work’s success.

The Committee, centred on discovering what makes a successful artwork, may be flawed from the beginning due to the very nature of the questions they ask. ‘Success’ is tough to measure when considering something as subjective as art and The Committee’s satirical application of a set of criteria as a means of discovering it make it even more difficult to decipher. The criteria used are a direct reference to the draconian rules, regulations and criteria increasingly imposed on artists when applying for funding or when entering competitions. The Committee summed up their achievements in a presentation given during one of their discussions: ‘To criticize the institution, we became the institution’. Although there were intended outcomes as part of The Committee, in my opinion the best outcome is something that I perceive to be totally unintentional. The criteria used are those which some members of the viewing public may not normally consider when looking at art. Normally in galleries we are only given small captions of factual information but the ballot forms direct the public to consider particular aspects of the work whilst still allowing subjective opinion. It encourages a new way of seeing which I believe could be a way of opening gallery spaces to a whole new audience.

Gabriella Mihok, third year student of BA (hons) History of Decorative Arts and Crafts, introduces the university’s research partnerhip with Regency Town House and outlines her contribution to the project.

Baron Scotford, c1911, mixed format of cut-out & pen and ink. Image courtesy of: Secretary, Silhouette Collectors Club

The University of Brighton, in partnership with the Regency Town House in Brunswick Square, has organised a student research group to investigate the creation and consumption of silhouettes from the 18^th to the 20^th century, under the title Silhouettes, Fashion and Reality 1750-1950. The group includes PhD, MA and BA students from University of Brighton’s Visual and Material Culture and Fashion and Design History programmes, and has been organised by Professor Lou Taylor with assistance from Dr Annebella Pollen, Dr Lara Perry and Dr Charlotte Nicklas. It is a wonderful opportunity for us to unearth information about this largely unexplored subject and to see what silhouettes can tell us about fashion and society.

Funded by the university’s Springboard grant scheme, much of our research is focussed on the stunning collection of paper silhouettes held at the Regency Town House. Our findings will be catalogued and available to view on the both the Regency Town House and University of Brighton’s websites. A study day to present our findings will be held at the Design History Research Centre in June 2013, and finally our work will contribute towards a major Heritage Lottery-funded exhibition to be held in Brighton in 2014, with a touring exhibition to follow.

The popularity of the silhouette was at its height between1770-1840, and the images were either delicately painted or cut out using skilful scissor work. Before the advent of photography, the silhouette was an effective way of reproducing a person’s likeness. Photography caused the popularity of the silhouette to wane, but silhouette artists continued to work from department stores and seaside piers, including Brighton, so there is a strong local connection binding this project together.

The Regency Town House’s collection of silhouettes mostly date from 1750-1830, but also includes some wonderful later examples dating up to 1950. Each member of the research group has a specific time period to investigate. I chose to research some of the later silhouettes from 1895 -1919 as I have a particular interest in the fashion and decorative arts of the early twentieth century, and this offered a wonderful opportunity for me to explore this era’s design and consumption in greater depth.

I am a BA History of Decorative Arts & Crafts student in my final year and research into the silhouettes of the early twentieth century is a brilliant learning curve for me as I continue to find out more about the changing dress styles of this era, from the corseted designs of 1895 through to the slim and elegant fashions of the late 1910s. Period fashion magazines held at St Peter’s House Library have been invaluable in comparing the dress styles worn in the silhouettes with contemporary photographs and illustrations.

One of the most interesting things to research was the changing hat designs, which by 1911 were impossibly voluminous. However, many hat designs included copious amounts of feathers, leading to the near extinction of many species of bird; the RSPB was formed in England as a response to the danger posed to wild birds due to the demand for plumage in fashionable millinery.

I am really looking forward to continuing my research and working with the rest of the group towards the final exhibition and I feel privileged to be a part of such an exciting project.

Luke Wyborn, first year student of BA (Hons.) Museum and Heritage Studies, promotes a local museum and describes his role there.

Brighton Toy and Model Museum view. Photo by Luke Wyborn

The Brighton Toy and Model Museum was established by avid toy collector and renovator Chris Littledale in 1990 and has been entertaining and educating visitors ever since. Located in the arches underneath Brighton Station, its four thousand square feet of exhibiting space contains over ten thousand toys and models, including priceless model train sets and many period antique toys. Its display area includes two large operational model railway layouts (in 00-gauge and gauge 0), and displays of period pieces from a range of classic manufacturers that includes Bing, Dinky, Hornby, Marklin, Meccano, Pelham Puppets, and Steiff. The Museum also includes individually-engineered pieces such as the working quarter-scale traction engine and the Spitfire fighter planes in the lobby, and a range of other working scale models throughout the Museum.

The museum prides itself on having one of the largest toy collections in the world owned by a single person, with displays showcasing artefacts from over a hundred years ago. The Museum worked towards official Museum Libraries and Archives Council accreditation for many years, finally receiving this recognition on 30^th July 2009. It has featured in many television programmes over the years including Sky Atlantic’s “Urban Secrets” with Alan Cumming and most recently BBC4’s “Timeshift: The Joy Of (Train) Sets”, available to view on BBC iPlayer.

I’ve been volunteering at the Museum since November 2012 and during that time have benefitted immensely from working behind the scenes and learning the day to day activities and duties that are needed to run a successful museum. Shortly after I began, the Museum received a funding grant of £34,000 from the National Lottery for the upcoming 150^th anniversary of Frank Hornby, of which the Museum will be holding celebratory events and ‘train running’ days over the next few months. They have also recently purchased Galaxy Tablets that will be installed around the Museum with (eventually) the entire Museum collection catalogued and available to view on these devices in a ‘wiki’ style. This cataloguing of the exhibits has been no easy task however, and myself and all the other volunteers have been hard at work, writing and photographing, to make this a reality.

Other recent roles I’ve had include making amendments to the Museum emergency procedure booklet and updating where necessary, as well as writing the draft edit of the Care and Conservation procedure needed for the 2013 MLA accreditation. Some of these roles have been quite challenging but in the long run, being a first year Museum & Heritage Studies undergraduate, I feel they’ve given me much deeper understanding of the mechanics of a museum and will benefit me in the future, especially as I won’t have the free time by my third year studies to continue in this role. I’d thoroughly recommend anyone interested in this field to come and volunteer, you’ll learn a lot, the staff are friendly and very knowledgeable in their field, and the free coffee isn’t too bad either!

Georgina Jarvis, an MA student of History of Design and Material Culture, appraises a recent conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Mariano Fortuny, dress, c.1920. Pleated silk, cord with silver, trimmed with beads. Museum number:T.739-1972.(c) Victoria and Albert Museum,London

We are living through a period of change; demonstrated in early 2013 as the last high street record store moved into administration, unable to keep up with the ways in which music can now be both distributed and consumed digitally. Technology is affecting our material world profoundly: increasingly goods that had previously been taken for granted are being replaced by intangible alternatives. With this kind of change it is possible to see what Raphael Samuel meant by the ‘fragility of the present,’ and why there exists a desire to borrow from, or retreat to the past.

This tendency is certainly not unique to our time; this was made clear at a November 2012 conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art called Revival: Utopia, Identity and Memory.  One of its described intentions was to generate new understandings of reworkings of the past in architecture and design. To achieve this a group of speakers with diverse areas of interest came together. The complexity of such a task was clearly illustrated by the glossary of terms, which had been compiled collaboratively by participants. Rather than editing or condensing each entry down to a simplified definition, individual responses were presented alongside one another in dialogue. This glossary was distributed at the start of the conference and served as a strong indication of the richness of discussion to follow.

A number of common threads ran throughout the event. Niccola Shearman’s paper, ‘German Expressionists and the Gothic – the case of a super-revival,’ highlighted her interest in the effects of revivalism on identity when mixed with contemporary influence. Through her research on the woodcut in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, Shearman analysed the various factors that trigger a return to that past; asking whether art reflects the spirit of the age, or contributes to it. She explained that revivals tend to come at a time of cultural questioning, and in doing so highlighted the way that seemingly very different periods of revival occur through time due to the same concerns.

It is also true however, that stylistically architecture or design may remain the same over time, the ideologies attached to them can alter. This was something highlighted as part of  Matt Lodder’s paper, ‘The New Old Style: Tradition, Archetype and Rhetoric in Contemporary Western Tattooing’. Here he described the cyclical nature of Western tattooing and the recurrence of a style that has become known as “American Traditional,” which is characterised by thick black lines and blocks of colour, typically depicting motifs such as anchors, swallows or portraits of women. Lodder was able to show that despite experimentation and innovation within the art, these traditional forms continue to be revisited and revived peridocally. By highlighting the repetition of imagery and form, Lodder was able to show how this style of tattooing has come to define our idea of what tattooing is and what it should be.

In a paper entitled ‘Mariano Fortuny’s Delphos Gown: a Pleating Together of Time(s)’, Wendy Ligon Smith directly addressed the question of metaphor within revivalism. The work of designer Fortuny (1871 – 1906) was informed by the past , through his study of art history and his famous Delphos gown, inspired by Greek sculpture. In order to create the pleats he invented a machine so effective that the pleats are still in place today and are often still stored in the way originally instructed; twisted, as shown in the image below. Although Fortuny refined the design over the course of his career, the design altered very little and is therefore at odds with Roland Barthes’s and Walter Benjamin’s theories that link changes in fashion to the passing of time. Ligon Smith cited Benjamin to highlight how the pleats in the Delphos gown could be seen as a metaphor for the layering effect of time. She argued that this continuity in style and technique contradicts the idea that fashion relies on forgetfulness for its newness.

This conference is not the only recent event to look at ideas of revivalism, memory and identity. For example, the Serpentine’s annual marathon (October 2012) brought together 60 participants over three days to present ideas on debates linked to memory in science, art and culture. Sustaining Identity, a November 2012 symposium at the V&A, saw architect Juhani Pallasmaa give an impassioned keynote, questioning whether newness is a relevant aspiration or represents a future without a past.  Pallasmaa argued that tradition needs to be re-invented with every generation. In fact many of Pallasmaa’s points were reflected in discussions that took place at the Courtauld, suggesting that a return to the past can be both a search for authenticity and a reaction to contemporary life.

Event info: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/events/2012/summer/jun20_Revival.shtml

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2012/10/memory_marathon.html

http://www.vam.ac.uk/whatson/event/1967/sustaining-identity-iii-symposium-3205/

Doctoral student, Bridget Millmore, reviews a recent Cambridge conference and its innovative approach to material culture and technology. 

Sometimes when you’re writing there’s a moment that you reach when your inner dialogue begins to question everything that you compose.  That’s when it’s time to step away.  For me that involved going to a conference. Material Culture as a subject area and the ‘material turn’ in history is definitely in academic vogue.  At the end of September 2012, I attended a colloquium at Cambridge University with the title ‘We Need to Talk about Things’.  It was the concluding event to a programme of seminar talks that focussed on the material culture of the eighteenth century –a fitting series for my own PhD on the material culture of eighteenth century love tokens.  At last, I had found the seminar group that studied the same stuff as me – but only as the series came to an end!

The keynote speech was given by Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, whose only visual  image for her presentation was one familiar to me – the tokens left for babies at the Foundling Hospital, London, established in 1741.  She spoke about the tactility of objects,  the conversations that are shaped through the display of objects, the words we use to describe the work that things do and the fact that we care about things because they are impregnated with meanings.  Discussing the tokens left for babies by their mothers at the Foundling Hospital, Jordanova drew attention to the degrees of ambivalence attached to these objects, which ‘stand in’ for complex situations and emotions.

The great thing that I discovered when I got home was that I could listen to all the sessions that I had missed.  They were all available as podcasts and they featured speakers and participants that I am familiar with through my studies – including John Styles, Nicholas Thomas and Maxine Berg.  For example, the seminar on fashion featured John Styles talking about the production and consumption of cotton, while the session on money included Catherine Eagleton from the British Museum (who I met when I researched the museum’s collection of love tokens and with whom I have subsequently been in correspondence).

What is particularly interesting about all the ‘things’ sessions is how they cross disciplines.  So, in the same talk, the speaker can be referring to musical and scientific instruments and the history of science but can then discuss the textiles on which they are represented – Chinese silk tapestries.  Similarly, the eighteenth century warship was introduced as an object in itself, but then discussed as a system of objects, a representation of empire and a self-contained community.

So I am now converted to podcasts – not only for those things you miss at an event but also for the times you wished that a speaker could repeat a point.  You can listen again to those bits that don’t make sense the first time you hear them.  If you are interested in anything connected to material culture and eighteenth century then why not take a look and listen:

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1980/196

A late 18th/early 19th century sailor’s love token engraved on a shilling, collection of Bridget Millmore

Yasmin Newman, third year student on the BA (Hons.) Visual Culture degree, reflects on Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibition

If you have only ever seen the works of the Pre-Raphaelites and contemporaries in books or on a projector screen, or even not at all, this is a must-see show. Personally, I came away wishing to my tutor that I could stay and live in the exhibition forever.

The exquisite detail can only fully be appreciated first hand through these sensually provoking paintings, sketches and applied arts. The array of media in this exhibition provides a great opportunity to see the small scale Elizabeth Siddal works and applied arts together with the ‘high art’ we know well.

What divided my colleagues was the separation of ‘Beauty’ in its own room, especially with all but one of the paintings depicting the female subject, highlighting the vulnerability of women from this period. However it does show the development of the Pre-Raphaelite movement from the naturalistic to the Aesthetic, all the while retaining its realism (the movement was often compared to the new medium of photography). The exhibition offers a contextual view of the subject rather than the biography of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which has been done previously (therefore moving in a less chronological order than most exhibitions). It also extends beyond the Aesthetic to that of the Arts and Crafts movement represented by the works of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in the ‘Paradise’ room.

The use of the Virgin Mary cobalt blue colour is prevalent throughout the exhibition accentuating the moral stories of the Pre-Raphaelites and the affluence of their benefactors. Lapis lazuli blue (once the most rare and expensive pigment) is, of course, a symbol of material wealth, which could also be a comment on women of the period, who were seen as commodities or as spending a huge amount on commodities. These vivid colours are achieved through the use of a white ground under artificially pigmented paint. The Pre-Raphaelites also experimented extensively with paint techniques.

My seven must-sees:
• Edward Burne-Jones, Sidonia Von Bork 1860, for the complexity of the subject’s dress.
• James Everett Millais, Mariana 1850-1. The cobalt-blue velvet dress is so real.
• William Holman Hunt, The Shadow of Death 1870-3. Hunt went to Israel to create his truthful representation.
• William Holman Hunt, Isabella and the Pot of Basil 1866-8, retouched 1886. This sense-provoking painting made me almost smell the basil growing in the pot above her dead lover’s head, which she waters with her tears.
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith 1866-8, altered 1872-3.
• Edward Burne-Jones, The Baleful Head 1885-7.
• William Holman Hunt, The Lady of Shalott c.1888-1905.

It is important to emphasise the beauty of Millais’ Mariana. The blue of the subject’s dress is so vivid; the velvet appears realistic, as if it could be touched. One can smell the cold air penetrating the stained glass windows, sympathise with her melancholic gaze and feel the ache in her back from hunching over her workbench. None of these can be achieved in reproductions of the image.

I would also recommend reading Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott poem before the exhibition, and taking a good few minutes to take in the wonder that is Hunt’s interpretation in the ‘Mythologies’ room. It is so very different to the famous J.W. Waterhouse painting of the same name.