Extra-illustration: A lecture by Lucy Peltz
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
Extra-illustration: A Brief Introduction to an eighteenth-century cut and paste cult and its afterlife - Lecture by Lucy Peltz, National Portrait Gallery, followed by an object handling session at the Heinz Archive & Library, National Portrait Gallery
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of books were customized with prints and drawings in a practice called extra-illustration. Such books were often massively extended, lavishly bound and prized by their owners as objects of display, status and exchange. Extra-illustrated books are at once impressive, baffling and unwieldy. The scale of these compilations, and their interdisciplinary nature – literary texts, printed books, art collections and indexes of visual culture – has largely excluded them from the history of art and literature. In this talk, Lucy Peltz provided an introduction to the practice, moving between key extra-illustrated books, their contents and the historical and commercial contexts in which they were produced and enjoyed. In so doing, she mapped a history of extra-illustration and its social and cultural meanings, from its popularization in the 1770s to its simultaneous revival and reviling in the early twentieth century. The talk was followed by an opportunity to look at a range of extra-illustrated books, and the prints that were published to support the practice, that are part of the National Portrait Gallery Collection.
Contact name:
Kate Retford