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Professor Mark Hallett, Head of Department, is giving this year's Watson Gordon lecture at the Scottish National Gallery

Posted on 10 October 2011

Professor Hallett's lecture is entitled 'Faces in a Library: Sir Joshua Reynolds's Streatham Worthies', and will take place on November 3rd. The lecture, which will be published as a short book in 2012, will focus on the remarkable set of thirteen portraits that the celebrated Georgian artist Sir Joshua Reynolds painted for a private library at Streatham Park, just outside London, between the early 1770s and 1781.Reynolds's pictures for Streatham, which include portraits of such cultural luminaries as Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson, will be explored as expressions of friendship, learning and fame, and as works that responded to the social rituals and intellectual ideals of the eighteenth-century library.

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