Lectures & Conferences
Lewis Walpole Library-Farmington Libraries
Exhibition Talk
Thursday, June 11
7 to 8 pm
Street Life: The “Cries” in British Visual Culture, 1711-1877
By Gillian Forrester, Independent art historian, curator, and writer
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
154 Main Street
Farmington, CT 06032
This evening talk by exhibition guest curator Gillian Forrester, is the latest in the series of community-focused evening talks offered in collaboration between the Lewis Walpole Library and the Farmington Libraries in connection with the exhibition on view at the Lewis Walpole Library. The talk will be followed by a period for questions, refreshments, and an opportunity to visit the exhibition with the curator on-site.
The exhibition explores the long-established genre of the “Cries,” or the representation of street vendors “crying” or broadcasting their wares. Celebrating both the visual and the acoustic aspects of urban life, and usually taking the form of prints, the “Cries” images showcased economic prosperity through representations of diverse occupations and products being sold in urban spaces. On view are prints and paintings from 1711 through 1877, mostly from London; however also included are also works depicting vendors in Calcutta (present day Kolkata), the British Caribbean, Lima, New York, and Paris, and also considered is how the “Cries” genre was developed into an ethnographic discourse as Britain expanded its imperial reach.
Although the “Cries” genre encapsulated vendors with a wide range of wares, we are focusing on works depicting vendors of foodstuffs, and researching the kinds of produce, dairy products, fish, meat and baked goods that were sold on the streets of cities at this period. The exhibition investigates the proliferation of images of specific foods that had particular significance; one recurring trope is that of the milkmaid, an often-idealized figure that represented rural purity at a time when adulteration of milk was a major concern in Britain.
Gillian Forrester is an independent art historian, curator, and writer. She was formerly Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Yale Center for British Art and specializes in British print culture in a transnational context. She co-edited Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (Yale University Press, 2007), which won the College Art Association’s 2009 Alfred H. Barr Jr., Award for an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, and contributed a chapter on nineteenth-century Jamaican photography to Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018). She has a particular interest in the prints of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, and has published extensively on both artists. Other publications include essays on British WW1 prints for Modern Times: British Prints, 1913-1939 (Yale University Press, 2021), on Christiane Baumgartner’s recent woodcuts (Cristea Roberts Gallery, 2021), and on the African-Caribbean painter Hurvin Anderson (Tate, 2026).
The exhibition Street Life: The “Cries” in British Visual Culture, 1711-1877 is on view through August 21, 2026.
Space is limited and registration is required:
click here to register for the talk
Please note that bags are not permitted in the library.
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