The HGSA’s second Brown Bag, part of our work-in-progress series, for this year will be held Nov. 8th at 6pm on the second floor of HUMA, rm 227. Claire Spadafora, a PhD student in the Art History department, will be sharing her research on artist William Kent in Italy.

Her project, on 18th-century architect and designer William Kent, is tentatively entitled”‘Remarks by way of Painting & Architecture’: William Kent’s Italian Travel Journal.”  Though her primary concentration is on Kent’s emphasis on painting in the journal (as opposed to architecture, for which he is best known), she also plans to discuss some of her larger goals for the project, including artists’ social networks in 18th-century Italy and artists’ “Grand Tour” travel. Her abstract is below:

Credited with bringing the Palladian style to England, the English designer and architect William Kent (c. 1685-1748) was recognized as being such a knowledgeable authority on the Italian manner that his English patrons dubbed him “the signor.” Kent’s expertise developed through nearly ten years of training and travel in Italy, where he studied not architecture but painting, an interest represented in previous scholarship as an anomaly in a career otherwise focused on architecture and design. Kent’s painting abilities have been consistently deemed inferior to his skills in these other areas. A previously untranscribed journal kept by Kent on a trip through central and northern Italy in 1714 suggests a possible motivation for the artist’s study of painting in Italy. The journal’s emphasis on masters of Italian Baroque classicism, including Guido Reni and Annibale Carracci, illustrates Kent’s keen developing awareness of the desires of English patrons for whom he crafted reproductive paintings and acted as an agent. Traveling in the company of a young English connoisseur, Kent focused in his travel notes on those works admired by his companion as well as subjects and styles similar to those requested (in reproduction) by his patrons back home. Careful analysis of the journal indicates that Kent’s motivation to study Italian painting came both from his desire to develop as an artist as from his desire to more acutely cater to the tastes of an elite English clientele.

Please join us in welcoming Claire!

If you are interested in presenting your work-in-progress at an HGSA Brown Bag, please contact any of the HGSA officers or your department rep!