50th Anniversary Homecoming Weekend

We're looking forward to welcoming back our alumni and former members of staff on the 13th of September, 2014, for our Departmental Lunch!

On the 12-14 of September, the University of Essex will be hosting out 50th Anniversary Homecoming Weekend.

Art History at Essex is delighted to invite all of our former staff and students along to a FREE departmental lunch from 12:30pm - 2:30pm on Saturday 13th of September.

This will be a relaxed affair and will give you the opportunity to catch up with former colleagues, especially those you haven't seen for years - or maybe even decades!

Head to the website for more information, and to book your FREE place (booking is essential!).

Lecture Notes: Valerie Fraser on Stubbs/Perez

Amador Perez, Drawing 1

It’s always good to have more than one pair of eyes focusing on a work of art. The other day after lecturing on 18th century landscape painting I arranged for us to look at a couple of drawings from our collection of Latin American art based on a painting by George Stubbs of 1786. The original, now in Tate Britain, shows a very successful team – jockey John Larkin on the racehorse Otho – both very stiff and proud against a stormy sky. 

200 years later, in 1986, Brazilian Amador Perez reworked aspects the picture on a very small scale - we were taking it in turns to get a really close squint - and guess what? Sharp-eyed students spotted things in one of the drawings that I'd never noticed: a white horse with no rider and just a suggestion of wings, and a horse and rider conflated into a sort of blurry centaur who instead of a riding crop holds a bow and arrow. Wonderful! Perez is extending ideas of the speed, power and man-horse teamwork involved in horse racing into the realms of mythology – of Pegasus the winged horse, and Sagittarius, the bow-and-arrow carrying centaur.

So thank you, students, for helping me see Perez more clearly, and thanks too to Perez for helping me to see Stubbs in a new light. Very satisfying.

George Stubbs, Otho with John Larkin up