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Lithographic Portraiture and Facsimile Signatures, c.1800–60

07 March 2024, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

a pencil drawing of a person

For this Research Seminar, we welcome Dr Tom Young, Courtauld Institute of Art, for a talk on ‘Lithographic Portraiture and Facsimile Signatures, c.1800–60'

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Queenie Lee – History of Art

Location

IAS Forum, Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)
South Wing
Wilkins Building
London
WC1E 6BT

Over the first decades of the nineteenth century, a new print portrait format achieved international popularity. This format combined a vignette of the sitter’s likeness with a facsimile reproduction of their signature – a self-assertion of individuality, as well as an indexical trace of agency. My talk will connect the popularity of this format to the development and global expansion of lithographic printing. By surveying the production of signed print portraits in a range of imperial and colonial contexts, it will track how the format communicated political ideas that were used as the basis for domination as well as tools for resistance.

About the Speaker

Dr Tom Young

Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories at Courtauld Institute of Art

Tom Young is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Prior to that, he was a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Warwick, the project curator of the British Museum’s exhibition, Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution, a curator at Lakeland Arts, and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. He has held fellowships at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Huntington Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2023. His first book, Unmaking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c.1813–58, was published with the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023. His second book, Lithography and the Modern World, c.1796–1914, is in preparation.

More about Dr Tom Young