GIS Interdisciplinary Seminar: 'Expressing the Self through Visual and Material Culture'

GIS Sociabilités Seminar

 'The Politics of the ‘Sociable Self: Theories and Practices (1650-1850)'

Ninth thematic session on 

'Expressing the Self through Visual and Material Culture'

29 May 2026 (17:00 - 19:00) 

at Université Paris Cité, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges (room 830)

- Sally Holloway (Univ. of Warwick) - ‘“A full-sized portrait of my lamented love”: Grieving through Objects in Eighteenth-Century Britain and India’

- Peter Humfrey (Univ. of St Andrews) - 'The private Picture Gallery as a social space in Regency England'

Session chaired by Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding (Univ. of Warwick) and Sophie Mesplède (Univ. Rennes 2)

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89354246392?pwd=Xi56e1d8GVslpJb49pgCfvb2BtT8Ao.1

Abstracts & bios: 

‘“A full-sized portrait of my lamented love”: Grieving through Objects in Eighteenth-Century Britain and India’

In the 1780s, the attorney William Hickey and his close friend Bob Pott had both made the journey to India with their long-term partners, the courtesans Charlotte Barry and Emily Warren, who lived as their ‘wives’. But within the space of a year, both women had died. Friends warned Hickey after his loss that ‘giving way to unavailing grief’ would be ‘both sinful and unmanly’, advising him, ‘the less said on this distressing subject the better’. This paper accordingly explores the various outlets to which the two men turned to navigate their grief, including commissioning objects such as mourning jewellery, full-length portraits, mausoleums and commemorative columns, by losing themselves in drink, and enjoying the soothings of friendship, benefits of nature, and pleasures of sociability. From this research, romantic heartbreak emerges as a distinct type of grief, navigated by men through particular gendered, sociable, and material rituals. 

Dr Sally Holloway is an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she is writing a book on the history of heartbreak in Britain between c. 1600 and the present day. She has published widely on histories of intimate relationships, and is the author of The Game of Love in Georgian England (OUP, 2019) on the rituals of courtship, the edited volume Feeling Things (OUP, 2018) on emotions and material culture, and most recently the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Love in the Age of Enlightenment. With Katie Barclay and Ute Frevert, she co-edits the Oxford University Press series ‘Emotions in History’.

'The private Picture Gallery as a social space in Regency England'

It was in the Regency period, between about 1800 and 1830, that the Picture Gallery became established as a highly desirable feature of aristocratic British houses, in both London and at their owners’ seats in the country. Although it could trace a distant ancestry back to the Long Galleries of Elizabethan times, a more direct source of inspiration was provided by the princely picture galleries of Italy, especially that at Palazzo Colonna in Rome. A rare eighteenth-century precedent was provided by the Gallery at Robert Walpole’s home at Houghton, Norfolk, but the real proliferation began after the French Revolution, and the massive importation of Old Master paintings from Italy and France on to the London art market. The earliest and most influential example of the Regency Picture Gallery – in fact consisting of two adjoining galleries – was that built by the 2nd Marquess of Stafford at Cleveland House, St James’s, to house a magnificent collection containing a high proportion of paintings previously in the Orléans collection. The present paper will examine the architectural character of this and subsequent examples, and the ways in which the paintings were displayed there. The paper will also consider the various other uses to which these galleries were put, as spaces for social interaction.

Peter Humfrey is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews. His principal area of research is Venetian Renaissance painting, and some of his books and exhibition catalogues on this topic have been translated into French. More recently, following on from the exhibition in Edinburgh in 2004 (The Age of Titian: Venetian Renaissance Art from Scottish Collections), he has developed an interest in the history of collecting and display in Britain in the Georgian period. Two of his books in this area are quoted in the Bibliography above.