Challenging Material: Joshua Reynolds and Artistic Experiment in the Eighteenth Century

A collaborative event organized by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and The Wallace Collection

Venue: The Wallace Collection, Goodison Lecture Theatre

This one-day conference, which accompanies the exhibition ‘Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint’ at the Wallace Collection, is designed to investigate and contextualise the artist’s famously experimental practice. Building upon the technical findings of the Reynolds Research Project at the Wallace Collection, and also on a range of recent conservation projects on Reynolds’s paintings, it will explore his distinctive manipulation of paint as a medium. Papers will explore new perspectives on Reynolds’s experimental forms of pictorial composition, narrative and allusion, and to look afresh at the dynamic interactions between the artist, his sitters and his models in the studio.

As well as focusing on Reynolds’s own art in detail, the conference seeks to place his experimental activities within the context of wider artistic, cultural and scientific practices of the eighteenth century.

Confirmed Speakers: Mark Aronson, Helen Brett, John Chu, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Matthew C. Hunter, Rica Jones, Andrew Loukes, Martin Myrone, Marica Pointon, Martin Postle, Sophie Reddington, Lisa Renne and Iris Wien

To book tickets and for more information click here

Event website