Information > Programs > Master Class

The Lewis Walpole Library invites Yale graduate students to spend a week in the country.

The Lewis Walpole Library is once again offering a week-long master class in Farmington, taught by Brian Maidment and open to Yale graduate students. The number of participants is limited. This year Curator Cynthia Roman will join Professor Maidment in teaching the class.

For more information, please contact Margaret Powell, Librarian, at 860-284-5025 or 860-677-2140, or by e-mail: walpole@yale.edu

Intended for Yale graduate students who may not have had any specialist art historical background, this program draws on the extraordinary resources of the Lewis Walpole Library to offer students an introduction to the descriptive processes, research methodology, and interpretative issues raised by the advanced study of graphic images, focusing on a wide range of cultural artifacts.

Caricature and the Comic Image 1800-1850

Master Class for May 12-16, 2008

Despite the rather specialised topic suggested by the title, this week-long residential seminar aims to introduce doctoral students both to the broad interpretative issues raised by studying prints and graphic images as cultural artifacts and to the range of collections available at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington. While the Library has an extremely rich collection of eighteenth-century caricatures and other prints by such well known artists as Hogarth, Gillray, and Rowlandson, it also has an extraordinarily wide range of comic images from the first half of the nineteenth century, images which evolve or re-invent the caricature tradition to bear on social themes, especially the day-to-day experience of urban life. Less widely studied and reproduced than the caricatures of the late eighteenth century, this corpus of early nineteenth-century prints nonetheless forms an excellent starting place for studying the graphic tradition. As political and personal satire gave way to a focus on wider socio-cultural themes in comic image making, intaglio processes were substantially replaced by lithography and wood engraving as the favored media, thus opening up new possibilities in combining printed texts and illustration. These rapid changes in mode and subject combined with a volatile and experimental market place to re-define the nature of humour in this period.

The seminar is intended to give doctoral students in a number of disciplines -- most obviously art history, English and history -- the opportunity to work with the Farmington collections and to think over issues to do with the value, status and methodological challenges offered by the study of graphic material. No previous experience of working with prints or other graphic images is required.

The class is taught through a number of different small group activities, and will include visits to both the Yale Centre for British Art and the Beinecke Library in New Haven. Most of the teaching will take place in the Lewis Walpole's excellent new classrooms  and will be led by Brian Maidment and Cynthia Roman. Brian Maidment is Professor of English at Salford University in Manchester, UK, and has long-standing interests in the study of popular graphic traditions as well as a detailed knowledge of the Farmington collections. He has taught classes of this kind at Farmington since 2002. Cynthia Roman is the Lewis Walpole Library's Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings, and has extensive experience working with prints of all levels of aesthetic ambition and achievement.