Execrable human traffic: Charles Dibdin, George Morland and the waterman

Scenes from Charles Dibdin's ballad My Poll and my Partner Joe were painted and etched by famous artists such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson but by far the most striking pictures were the pair of scenes painted in 1790 by George Morland (1763-1804). The other representations illustrated the closing lines ('For, seeing I was finely trick'd, / Plump to the devil I fairly kick'd / My Poll and my partner Joe') but Morland's pictures contrasted two scenes from earlier in the song: the domestic bliss of the waterman, Poll and Joe, and the waterman's violent capture by the press gang. The pictures recall Morland's astoundingly successful painting The Slave Trade (1788) which showed families being separated and sold off on the African coast. Dibdin and Morland were London contemporaries and their careers have some striking parallels. Between 1789 and 1804 both enjoyed success as independent performers who worked outside the established systems of salaried performance and private patronage. Both men found success with brief, light and sometimes pointed treatments of familiar subjects: family life, military figures, fashionable scenes, and a wide cast of people on the move such as pedlars and labourers. Both were famous for their representations of black Africans, both were twice imprisoned for debt, and both had lengthy accounts of their lives published within a couple of years of each other (1804 and 1809 for Dibdin; 1806 and 1807 for Morland). Dibdin's world was a world of people on the move, and in this paper I explore and explain My Poll and my Partner Joe and Morland's paintings after it in relation to the traffic of people and goods in late eighteenth century Britain. The waterman who is captured and forced to serve in the navy is a prime example of a trafficked person. I take this point a step further by suggesting that Dibdin and Morland are also a part of this traffic, since they were both artists who pioneered working for an open market and took on a commodity value. I argue that the paradigm of 'traffic' gives us a better understanding of the structures of both men's later careers and the subjects that formed the basis for their work in the years 1789-1804

Challenges for Art Historians teaching outside the HE classroom

Teaching 'outside the classroom' is one of the biggest challenges facing art historians. Students are often shy of paintings, sculptures, and buildings because they don't know how to make sense of objects and what to say about them. This paper describes an assessment initiative in a first-year undergraduate gallery-based History of Art module which was designed to help students engage more closely with objects and to practice genres of writing that are appropriate to the study of painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture. In the assessment students were asked to devise a proposal for a gallery display, offer feedback on their peers' proposals, and then each write a piece of work for a catalogue accompanying the display, using the winning proposal as the working brief

Rubens’s Landscape with St George and the Dragon: Relating Images to their Originals and Changing the Meaning of Representation at the Court of Charles I

This article argues that the least studied and understood of the works that Rubens painted at Charles I’s court, Landscape with St George and the Dragon (1629–30), is in fact the most important for understanding Charles’s strategies for representation during the period of his personal rule. The article shows that the painting identifies St George as the original and the King as his exact image. In this way, the article suggests, Rubens endorsed Charles’s anti-Calvinist policies, especially his reform of the Order of the Garter. The article also shows how Rubens’s painting took from masques both the license to represent the King as someone else, as well as a new narrative structure that figured Charles as the herald of peace. It concludes by suggesting that Rubens’s painting reinvigorated court masque performances in the early years of Charles’s personal rule

Worth the wait

A wide-ranging review of the Yale Center for British Art's new online catalogue, raising the question of whether digitisation brings us closer to the objects we study or pushes us further away

Dibdin and John Raphael Smith: Print culture and fine art

This interlude builds on insights into the relationship between song and visual culture by discussing in detail the relationship between Charles Dibdin and the artists George Morland and John Raphael Smith, who produced numerous high-art paintings based on Dibdin's songs. It considers the implications of this appropriation of a popular musical tradition by the elite art world, and provides a compelling account of the overlapping worlds of fine art, the theatre, and musical entertainment by examining the clubs and societies in which they mingled. It concludes by relating this to issues of professionalism and status, matters of supreme importance to a self-made man such as Dibdin

Designing curation for student engagement

In this article we discuss the ways students currently engage with, and navigate through, their learning resources. Working from the argument that students now read and research in ways that privilege assembly, visualisation and interconnection, we propose that questions of student engagement can be opened up profitably by concentrating on a particular trope of learning and assembly. That trope is ‘curation’ and we explore how this approach and activity might be used to enhance student learning, creativity and ownership. In our discussion we explore particular theories of curation, ‘bricolage’ and collaborative assembly, and explain ways in which these are directly relevant to today’s patterns and habits of student scholarship. After offering case-studies of curation pedagogy at the scales of module, programme, project and institution, we conclude by visualising and explaining our ‘curation learning cycle’. In this way, we tie theory, case-studies and taxonomy together to propose a curriculum design approach that heightens student learning and engagement

Creating Curators: using digital platforms to help students learn in art collections

This case study describes a collaboration between Imperial College and University College London in which science and technology students at Imperial were asked to create an online exhibition from artworks they had studied first-hand in UCL's art collections. It describes the structure of the activity and its fit with the learning style of the students the course aims and the schedule of assessment. It concludes that combining first-hand study of artworks with the use of digital platforms to develop key skills associated with visual analysis critical thinking and archival research has obvious resonance for current and next generation learners

External-facing assessments: Balancing the needs of students, external partner organisations and the public

Students producing work directed at an external audience - whether a formal assessment, a ‘showcase portfolio’, or a selection of work curated by students outside the curriculum - is emerging as a critical field of enquiry and practice. Drawing on three case studies this roundtable examines the challenges and opportunities as they embed external-facing assessments in programmes of study. After a brief introduction to the institutional context of UCL’s initiatives relating to the Connected Curriculum Collab projects, we will present three different examples: co-produced public facing assessments (Thomas Kador), peer assessments after group work (Pilar Garcia Souto) and the use of portfolios (Nicole Brown). In the subsequent discussion we aim to explore the opportunities for building capacity to establish partnerships between students, external partner organisations and the public. We also discuss the role that educational professionals and colleagues might have in mediating between the institution, its students, staff, and other stakeholders