“In the Midst of the Jovial Crowd”: Young James Boswell in London, 1762–1763

Curated by James Caudle, The Associate Editor, Yale Edition of the Private Papers of James Boswell

April - mid-October 2013

In autumn 1762, the ambitious, clever, jovial, and bumptious twenty-two-year-old Scotsman James Boswell traveled south from Edinburgh to London to seek his fortune in the capital. In his lively journal, he recorded his extraordinarily action-packed eight months there, and his efforts to become a permanent Londoner.

London in the Sixties (the 1760s) was a thrilling place, full of pleasures and dangers, wisdom and folly, high life and low life. This exhibition aspires to place visitors 'in the midst of the jovial crowd' in which young James Boswell felt so alive and happy. Prints by Hogarth and Rowlandson and others, and rare books and ballads, will bring to life the current events, everyday social life, and personalities celebrated in Boswell’s London Journal, unpublished until 1950, but now one of the best-loved works of eighteenth-century life-writing.

Emma Hamilton Dancing

Curated by John Cooper
Clare-Mellon Fellow in the History of Art and Graduate Research Assistant at the Yale Center for British Art

Early November 2013 through March 2014

Emma Hamilton (1761?-1815) first performed the Attitudes in Naples in the 1790s. The twelve neoclassical engravings of the Attitudes by Frederick Rehberg published in 1794 and 1797 and the twelve parodies of the same attributed to James Gillray and published by Hannah Humphrey in 1807 will be the centerpieces of the exhibition. Hamilton's embodied performances will be presented alongside prints and illustrated books representing a range of social and theatrical dancing in Europe that will include contemporary images of the Neapolitan dance the Taranatella, Greek dance from William Hamilton's volumes on antique vases, social dances including the Minuet, Cotillion, Quadrille, Allemande and Waltz, as well images of the classical ballet. The exhibition will present a new context for the Attitudes and will open up a new space in which to imagine the connections between art history and performance in Europe before the twentieth century.