PROGRAMME

29 October

Rachel King, Curator of Renaissance Europe and the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum, London.

lecture of 40 minutes followed by discussion

Purchases from Prague: Buying Rudolph II and Bohemia in Nineteenth- Century England

Monday March 12, 1860, marked the beginning of a notable sale in London. That afternoon ‘the rooms of the fashionable auctioneers, Messrs. Christie, Manson, and Woods [were] crowded with amateurs of wealth and taste’. People were flocking to the dispersal of, in one newspaper’s words, that ‘celebrated collection, known under the designation of the “Vienna Museum”. The catalogue, a tome of over 130 pages, has been of interest for its revolutionary employment of salt-print photographs. When lot 1291 was finally reached, ten days later, a sum equivalent to around three quarters of a million pounds had been raised. The sale lifted eyebrows across England.
Correspondents in the regions were aghast at the prices achieved for the types of objects local authorities had been ignorantly jettisoning as ‘old silver’. A surviving annotated copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France records which lots were sold, remained unsold, who bought, and the hammer prices paid. My paper will study the sale, its history, and its legacy as one route to understanding British engagement with the history and material culture of Rudolph II and East Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century.

Rachel King, PhD is Curator of Renaissance Europe and the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum, London. She has previously held curatorial positions at The Burrell Collection, National Museums Scotland, and the Bavarian State Museums and Galleries. Rachel’s work is being undertaken as part of a British Museum publication celebrating the 2022 exhibition ‘Printmaking in Prague: Art from the Court of Rudolf II’ curated by Dr Olenka Horbatsch.

25 November

museum

16 December

workshop

25 January

Oskar J. Rojewski, Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Art Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland

lecture of 40 minutes followed by discussion

The History of the Courtier Painter of Queen Isabella of Castile and the
Habsburg Dynasty:  Michel Sittow’s Activities
Michel Sittow (ca. 1469-1525), a painter originally from Reval (present-day Tallinn, Estonia), trained in his craft in Bruges, possibly in the workshop of Hans Memling. Sittow emerged as a significant innovator in Early Modern painting, mainly in portraiture. This presentation focuses on the studies on Michel Sittow and on the significance of the written records about his life. It launches a new hypothesis on the works he executed during his stay in Castile and his service to the Habsburg dynasty.
Despite the sources related to his biography, few specific works are directly attributed to Sittow. This painter is renowned for his extensive travels and residencies at various European courts, including those of Isabella of Castile, Philip the Fair, Margaret of Austria, Christian II of Denmark, and Charles V. His itinerant life highlights the exchange of ideas and patronage among the European elite in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. An itinerant artist and economic migrant, Sittow was esteemed as a painter already during his lifetime. Notably, he is one of the few artists referenced in records from the Castilian court and in the inventories of Margaret of Austria's art collection in Mechelen from 1516 to 1523/4. These inventories have been instrumental in identifying Sittow's works, such as the Assumption of the Virgin from the Polyptych of Isabella the Catholic (National Gallery of Art in Washington) and other lost pieces.

Oskar J. Rojewski is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the Institute of Art Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Valencia and the University Jaume I in Spain. His research focuses on the migration of Flemish artists to the Mediterranean world in the fifteenth century and on court culture, with a particular emphasis on the role and position of court artists. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Instituto Moll. Centro de Investigación de Pintura Flamenca in Madrid, a member of several research groups, and has completed postdoctoral work at the University of Copenhagen in the Centre for Privacy Studies and at the University Rey Juan Carlos in the research team CINTER.