Lectures & Conferences

SPRING 2024

March 28 - 26th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

May 9 - The Limits of Free Speech: Gillray, The Royals and Censorship

The 26th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture / Music on the Dark Side of 1800: Listening to the Blind Virtuosa, Mademoiselle Paradis / Annette Richards, Given Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist, Cornell University / Thursday, March 28, 2024 / 5:30 pm /Yale University Art Gallery, Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Lecture Hall, 1111 Chapel St, New Haven, CT 06510

The 26th Lewis Walpole Library Lecture

Music on the Dark Side of 1800: Listening to the Blind Virtuosa, Mademoiselle Paradis

Thursday, March 28, 2024

5:30 pm

Yale University Art Gallery, Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Lecture Hall, 1111 Chapel St, New Haven, CT 06510

will be delivered by Annette RichardsGiven Foundation Professor in the Humanities and University Organist, Cornell University

In concerts across Europe in the 1780s, the young Viennese virtuosa Maria Theresia Paradis made blindness visible, even audible. Her performances invited listeners and viewers primed by horror ballads and literary romance to experience her story of trauma and misfortune within the frame of fictional narratives of doomed innocence and victimized Gothic heroines. Yet her outspoken views on blindness, informed by her own experience and contemporary philosophical discourse (by Diderot, Condillac, and Herder, among many others) explicitly resisted the language of victimization, even as she sold pity for profit. This lecture brings to sounding life the Paridisian contradiction between performing disability for money and resisting pity. It asks what 18th-century music culture can tell us about contemporary views on blindness and explores the ways the public performances of a young female virtuoso simultaneously embraced and critiqued a culture of gawking spectatorship, freak show aesthetics, and the ethics and economics of pity. How did this Gothic musical heroine capture the public imagination, and what does she reveal about how music looked and sounded on the dark side of 1800?

Color headshot of Annette Richards, a woman with short blond hair looking toward the right, a slight smile and raised eyebrows

Annette Richards is Professor of Music and University Organist at Cornell, and the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is a performer and scholar with a specialty in 18th-century music and aesthetics, and interdisciplinary research into music, literature and visual culture.

 
Dr. Richards was educated at Oxford University, (BA, MA) Stanford University (PhD) and the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam (Performer’s Diploma, Uitvoerend Musicus).
 
At Cornell Prof. Richards teaches courses on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music aesthetics and criticism; intersections between music and visual culture; music and the uncanny; the undergraduate history survey; the organ, culture and technology; as well as organ performance.
 
n.b. The lecture will be recorded and made available later on the Lewis Walpole Library playlist on the Yale Library YouTube channel.

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Lecture

The Limits of Free Speech: Gillray, The Royals and Censorship by Tim Clayton

With a panel discussion with Martin Rowson and Steve Bell

"The Introduction" by James Gillray. The Duke of York leads his bride to the King and Queen, who are seated side by side on the throne (right), much caricatured, making gestures of eager greed. The King looks through a glass, the Queen holds out her apron to catch the coins which the Duchess holds in her apron. Behind the pair on the extreme left walks a gigantic Prussian soldier with extravagantly long moustaches, carrying a large money-bag under each arm, inscribed '£100000' and '£100

May 9, 2024

3:30 to 5:30 pm

Humanities Quadrangle Lecture Hall, L01, 320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511

Organized by The Lewis Walpole Library

For a decade between 1785 and 1795 George III and Queen Charlotte were the most prominent faces in Gillray’s satire, and the scandalous love lives of their children added piquancy to a print culture that was distinctly libertine in tone. But the licence of printsellers provoked a backlash from the conservative wing of the establishment, especially after the French Revolution, and in late 1795 it became illegal to caricature the King. It is often claimed that caricaturists were immune to legal action, but some printsellers were punished and many prints were altered, suppressed or destroyed at this time. In this talk I shall discuss some of the liberties that caricaturists took and some of the penalties they came to face as they tested the extent of the freedom of the press – a burning issue then that remains highly relevant today.

portrait photo of white man with blue eyes and dark blond hairTim Clayton is a historian with special expertise in printed images of the long eighteenth century. The English Print 1688-1802 (1997) remains a standard guide to print production and consumption. Recently he has focused on caricature and the manipulation of public opinion in Bonaparte and the British (2015) and This Dark Business (2018). His latest book James Gillray: a Revolution in Satire won the Apollo Art Book of the Year award for 2023 and the Berger Prize for the best book on British Art.

Steve Bell studied art and qualified as a teacher before taking a sideways leap into cartooning full time in 1977. His original strip Maggie’s Farm appeared in Time Out and City Limits magazines from 1979 through to 1987 and, for 40 years from 1981 he wrote and drew the If… strip in the Guardian, covering every war since the Falklands crisis of 1982. From 1990 until his abrupt an unexplained sacking in 2023, he produced nearly 5000 large free-standing cartoons on the leader pages of the Guardian, from 2005 in full colour. He created the memorable image of John Major with his underpants worn outside his trousers and of Tony Blair with Margaret Thatcher’s rogue eyeball, and of George W Bush as a chimpanzee. His work has been published all over the world and he’s won numerous awards, including the What the Papers Say Cartoonist of the Year in 1993, the British Press Awards Cartoonist of the Year in 2002 and the Cartoon Arts Trust Award more times than he can remember. With Bob Godfrey he made a number of animated cartoons for TV, including a cartoon biography, Margaret Thatcher – Where Am I Now? Broadcast on Channel 4.

Martin Rowson is a multi award winning political cartoonist, illustrator, graphic novelist, writer, performer and poet. Over the past 41 years he has been published regularly in almost every British publication you can think of apart from The Sun & Private Eye, and is currently to be found on the pages of The Guardian, Byline Times, The New European & The Morning Star.

His books include comic book adaptations of The Waste Land, Tristram Shandy, Gulliver’s Travels and The Communist Manifesto, and his 2006 memoir about clearing his parents’ house, “Stuff”, was long listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He is currently working on an updated version of The Dunciad, or “A Conversation With Alexander Pope”, due for publication in December 2024.

 A Revolution in Satire with a colored gillray caricature of a man  in a blue coat, holding an orange sword, astride a rearing white horse, seen from behind, a sunburst emanating from the center with clouds surrounding the edges
 
Don’t miss the James Gillray Artist and Satirist Study Day with Tim Clayton and Steve Bell 

Friday, May 10, 10:00 am to 3:00 pm   Application required