Seminars, Workshops & Panel Discussions
Graduate Student Seminar
Street Life: The “Cries” in British Visual Culture, 1711-1877
Tuesday and Wednesday, June 9 & 10, 2026
June 9 Lewis Walpole Library
June 10 Beinecke Library and Yale Center for British Art
Led by Gillian Forrester, the seminar will explore the long-established traditions in visual culture of depicting street vendors “crying” or broadcasting their wares. The focus is primarily on British print culture, with the majority of the works published in and featuring London, but the exhibition also includes works in other media and is transnational in scope. It features works depicting vendors in Calcutta (present day Kolkata), the British Caribbean, Lima, New York, and Paris, and considers how the “Cries” genre was developed into an ethnographic discourse as Britain expanded its imperial reach.
Following a curator-led tour of the exhibition, the group will continue conversation with additional materials and visits to special collections study rooms at the Lewis Walpole Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Yale Center for British Art. While the seminar will focus primarily on visual culture, it will be of interest to students of food history, social history, and musicology.
There will also be a curator-led tour of the Yale Center for British Art’s exhibition, Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company 1750-1850.
For further information please email walpole@yale.edu
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).