At Home with c19th Dress and Textiles Reframed - 30 June 2024 -2.00pm BST

You are invited to join us ‘At Home’ for the June 2023 event of the 19th Century Dress and Textiles Reframed network. Short talks will share a bit of 'research joy', and help build our research community. This month we will be focused on photography and its connections to 19th century fashion.

Please join us with some of your own tea/coffee/cake - whether you spike these with brandy or gin is up to you! Talks will be no more than 10 minutes, and will be interspersed by time for questions and chat.

Robyne Calvert - “Artists & Photographic Fantasies”

This short talk will offer a whirlwind glance at they ways in which artists used photographs to explore dressing up and creating costume narratives, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Linley Sambourne, and David Wilkie WInfield.

Dr Robyne Calvert is a Cultural Historian with research interests focused on the history of fashion, art, architecture and design, particularly in Britain. She is a research and academic developer at the University of Glasgow. She has researched and lectured in heritage, architecture fashion and design history and theory at both UofG and Glasgow School of Art. She received the Pasold Fund PhD bursary for her thesis ‘Fashioning the Artist: Artistic Dress in Victorian Britain, 1848-1900’ (University of Glasgow, 2012). She has recently published a new history of the Mackintosh Building at GSA from Yale University Press in April 2024. podcast. Her main interest is how the lives of people can be told through their surviving clothes. Instagram: @robyneerica X (formerly Twitter): @robyneerica

Erika Lederman: ‘Counterfeit Specimens’. Isabel Agnes Cowper’s Needlework Photographs for the South Kensington Museum

Isabel Agnes Cowper (1826-1911) was the Official Museum Photographer for the South Museum (now the V&A) from 1868-1891. In her role running the museum’s photography studio, Cowper, a widow with four children, performed all manner of institutional photographic work, including documenting building construction, recording museum and loan objects and producing images for the museum’s expanding publishing programme. But she was particularly recognised as a specialist in the photography of needlework. This paper will introduce Cowper and look in detail at her photographs documenting embroidery and lace for the South Kensington Museum. Taking the material approach, the paper will follow the photographs into the broader photographic ecosystem, showing their circulation and use and illustrating the breadth of Cowper’s significant contribution to nineteenth-century needlework pedagogy and manufacture.

Erika Lederman is a cataloguer of photographs at the V&A. She recently completed a PhD through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s collaborative doctoral partnership. Her thesis, supervised by the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University and the Photography Section of the V&A, focused on women institutional photographers in nineteenth-century institutions. INSTAGRAM: @isabelagnescowper

Beatrice Behlen: Mrs Brooms photographs of suffragettes

For the first three decades of the 20th century, Christina Broom took recorded aspects of the public life of the British capital. Possibly the first female press photographer, Broom specialised in topographical views, royal pageantry, the life of soldiers living in London barracks and the activities of suffragettes. The Museum of London holds over 2,500 postcards and half-plate glass negatives produced by Broom often with the help of her daughter Winifred. More than 120 images document marches and other awareness- and fundraising activities of the voting rights campaigners between 1908 and 1913.

With their rich detail, particularly the glass negatives are a gift to students of Edwardian dress. This talk will provide a brief introduction to Christina Broom and an overview of her suffragette work before zooming in, literally, into some of the photographs. Broom was not a suffragette herself and - it has been suggested – photographed the female activists primarily for commercial reasons. Nevertheless, her images add vastly to our knowledge of the imaginative ways in which suffragettes garnered attention and collected money for their cause, as well as their awareness and use of the power of clothes.

Beatrice Behlen studied fashion design in Germany and the History of Dress at the Courtauld Institute in London, before becoming curatorial assistant at Kensington Palace. She taught at several art colleges and worked at a contemporary art gallery. In 2003, Beatrice returned to Historic Royal Palaces, curating and co-curating exhibitions on royal clothes. Since late 2007, Beatrice has been Senior Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts at the Museum of London; since 2005 associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins and from 2018-2022 she was one half of the Bande à part podcast. Her main interest is how the lives of people can be told through their surviving clothes. Instagram: @beabehlen X (formerly Twitter): @beatricebehlen

Image:

Christina Broom, Kensington W.S.P.U. stand at the Women’s Exhibition, Knightsbridge, May 1905 (© Museum of London)