'The Georgian painter, Thomas Gainsborough, spent some of the most productive years of his career making portraits and landscapes from a base in the city of Bath'. Inspired by the 2012 exhibition at the Holburne Museum curated by Susan Sloman, Steve Poole looks at this shift in Gainsborough's focus and how this changed the presentation of the poor.
Tag: artists
Heritage and Regeneration: making history at the Stokes Croft Museum
In August 2010, the Stokes Croft Museum opened: an unfunded venture, established to showcase the diversity of life in an area of Bristol renowned for its music and graffiti, but also its problems of crime, addiction and prostitution. Rose Wallis looks at this new 'single-room' heritage attraction, and how it reflects the many identities of the area.
Topographical Prints and the Image of Bristol: 1995-1860
From the time when urbanisation was first recognised as a radical and permanent phenomenon, debates and questions surrounding the physical, political, and social consequences of urban and industrial development accompanied every topographical modification; urban migration, expansion, and the industrialisation of the landscape became the object of popular scrutiny. Throughout the 19th century, commentators continued to compile both historic and prophetic accounts of rapidly evolving conurbations in an attempt to comprehend the future of these sites and their implications for the British nation and empire. In this article, Katy Layton Jones examines some of the ways in which engraved images of Bristol produced during the first half of the 19th century were informed by, and in turn informed, changing attitudes to that city and to urbanisation in general.