The Pre-Raphaelites and the Royal Academy
Weekend art history course
17 February 2024 10am - 5pm18 February 2024 10am - 5pm
Wolfson British Academy Room | Burlington Gardens
£420. Includes light refreshments and a wine reception at the end of day one.
Friends of the RA book first
Flaming June
Join this weekend course for an in-depth look at the Pre-Raphaelites and their relationship with the Royal Academy.
This course will trace the creation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood from the Royal Academy Schools to its rejections of the teaching of the RA’s first President, Joshua Reynolds. It will explore why the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were so revolutionary and the importance of the burgeoning world of art criticism. We will look at the women involved in the movement – as life models and muses but also as artists and collaborators.
The weekend also considers the lasting impact of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – not least with Millais’ appointment to President of the RA in 1896 – and its development into artistic movements such as aestheticism, symbolism, arts and crafts and art nouveau.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement is seminal in British art history. The group’s unique combination of romanticism and realism was a direct reaction against the Royal Academy and its centring of the work of Raphael. However, the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Royal Academy is a complex one.
The course is led by art historians, curators and experts and includes a visit to the RA library and archive. No prior knowledge is required but debate and discussion are encouraged.
Minimum age 18. If you have any accessibility needs, please contact public.programmes@royalacademy.org.uk.
About the speakers
Annette Wickham is Curator of Works on Paper for the RA Collection and co-curator of the Angelica Kauffman exhibition.
Dr Carol Jacobi has been Curator of British Art at Tate, since 2012. She has also lectured, written and broadcast widely on 19th- and 20th-century art. Her books and displays look afresh at Victorian art through twenty-first century perspectives and recent exhibitions include The Rossettis (Tate and Wilmington, USA), Van Gogh and Britain; Ophelia (Shanghai); Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate (Canberra, Milan, Budapest) and she curated William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision for Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, Minneapolis, Manchester)
Christopher Newall is a freelance art historian, exhibition curator, lecturer and tour leader. He specialises in the field of nineteenth and twentieth-century British art, with emphasis on the career and influence of John Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism, and landscape painting. Exhibitions which Christopher Newall has conceived and curated include Pre-Raphaelite Vision – Truth to Nature (Tate Britain 2004) – which was an exploration of Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting and the observation of the physical world – and John Ruskin – Artist and Observer (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2014).
Dr Deborah Lam is a Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She has been invited to give talks at Keats House, as well as the keynote address at the Oxford English Graduate Conference last year. She is currently revising a monograph on forms of excess in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture for the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and is also working on a second interdisciplinary book project that considers how art writing frames an approach to thinking about the visible signs of effort in art.
Dr Hannah Higham joined the Royal Academy of Arts as our new Senior Curator of Collections in April 2023, having previously worked as the Senior Curator of Collections and Research for the Henry Moore Foundation. Formerly, she has worked for Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norfolk, and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. She holds an MA from the Courtauld Institute and a PhD from the University of Birmingham on early sixteenth-century Florentine Sculpture.
Dr Imogen Hart is the author of Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester University Press, 2010). She the co-editor of Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (Ashgate, 2010), with Jason Edwards, and Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe, Seventeenth Century to Contemporary (Bloomsbury, 2020), with Claire Jones. After completing her PhD in History of Art at the University of York, she worked at the Yale Center for British Art and, most recently, the University of California, Berkeley. She is the newly appointed Managing Editor of the Journal of Modern Craft. Her current research project explores the legacies of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Nicholas Tromans is an independent art historian. He has worked in universities, museums and auction houses. Nicholas has published widely on nineteenth-century British art, including books on David Wilkie, G. F. Watts and Richard Dadd. His most recent book is The Private Lives of Pictures: Art at Home in Britain 1800-1940 (2022). He is currently writing a history of psychiatrists’ interest in art.
Dr Sabrina Rahman is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Her current research examines issues of diaspora and interior design in Britain, Central Europe and South Asia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Together with Professor Kate Nichols (University of Birmingham) and Victoria Osborne (Birmingham Museums Trust), she was co-convener of the British Art Network research group Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites, supported by Tate, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Arts Council England (2020-2023). The group’s activities built upon her previous curatorial work at institutions in Austria, the United Kingdom and United States, as well as her commitment to anti-racist and decolonial practices.
Our courses and classes programme
Our varied programme of short courses and classes provides an opportunity to explore subjects ranging from life drawing to the history of exhibitions and arts management, led by expert tutors and practising artists. These courses introduce traditional art-making processes, as well as perspectives on art history, theory and business.
Give this course as a gift
All of our courses can be purchased as a gift for a friend or family member – giving the gift of education and a remarkable experience. To arrange a personalised Gift Voucher, please contact the Academic Programmes Team, by calling 020 7300 5641 or email academic.programmes@royalacademy.org.uk