Many Lives: Picture Frames in Context

by The Frame Blog

 a conference
hosted by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada

The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) invites submissions from conservators, curators, graduate students, and independent researchers for a two-day conference on the history and conservation of picture frames. The conference will take place at the AGO on Thursday 2 May, and Friday 3 May 2024.

This conference is co-organized by the museum’s curatorial and conservation departments to promote inter- and multi-disciplinary dialogue. The AGO is home to an important collection of historic frames, and a project is currently underway at AGO to catalogue and conserve this collection to make it more accessible for study and use. In the light of this project, the symposium aims to present current research which contextualizes frames in their many incarnations, including research on framemakers, framing traditions, the afterlives of frames, frame collections, pairings of frames with paintings, artists’ frames, the commercial history of framing, and related topics.

Keynote lectures will be delivered by Lynn Roberts, frame historian and publisher of The Frame Blog, and Hubert Baija, recently-retired long-time conservator of frames at the Rijksmuseum.

Applicants are requested to send a current CV and a 300-word abstract outlining the topic of a 20- minute paper to Julia.campbell-such@ago.ca by 15 December 2023.

Conference registration, accommodation in Toronto and some meals will be covered for speakers.  Further funding is available for travel for students and unaffiliated researchers. Special funding for one early-career scholar has been generously provided by the Decorative Arts Trust. Please indicate in your email with CV and abstract if you would like to apply for this funding.

16th century Flemish School, Mannerist hand-glass, its cover with relief scene of Judith & Holofernes, c.1570-79, boxwood & ebony, and details, 13.2 x 10.8 cm., Art Gallery of Ontario

[Opening image: frame carved by Andrea Brustolon (1662-1732) with four of the Labours of Heracles: the Nemean Lion; Cerberus; the Cretan Bull; the Ceryneian Hind; c.1700-25, boxwood, 21.5 x 18 cm., Thomson Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario]

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Sophonisba Anguissola (c.1532-d.1625), Self-portrait, c.1556, watercolour/ vellum, 8.3 x 6.4 cm., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Running concurrently with the conference, the exhibition in the AGO will be Making her mark: a history of women artists in Europe, 1400-1800, 27 March-1 July 2024.

Judith Leyster (1609-60), Self-portrait, c.1630, o/c, 74.6 x 65.1 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington

There were, of course, women framemakers as well – the first we know of in England working in the 17th century.

The set of framed paintings of the Fire Judge portraits hanging inside the Guild Hall in the 1720s

One of the largest and most visible official commissions given to three women in the 1670s comprised twenty-two Auricular frames for the portraits by John Michael Wright of the Fire Judges: the adjudicators of claims arising from all the losses sustained in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

  John Michael Wright (1617-94),  Sir Thomas Tyrrell, Fire Judge, c.1671, o/c, probably originally gilded; made by Mary Ashfield, Mary Fleshier or Mary Dorrell; Inner Temple Gallery https://www.innertemple.org.uk/who-we-are/history/paintings/

One of these frames may be borrowed for display in the exhibition, broadening the presentation of work by female European artists.

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