Reading Group, led by Dr. Thom Braun, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College, 'A Walk Around Eighteenth-Century Covent Garden'
When:
—
Venue:
TBC
No booking required
The most famous image of someone walking in eighteenth-century Covent Garden is by William Hogarth: his Morning, from The Four Times of the Day.
In the eighteenth century Covent Garden piazza was the centre of a dynamic ‘round-the-clock’ urban space that encompassed a fruit and vegetable market, a theatre, artists’ studios, print shops, coffee houses, bagnios, and houses of ill repute. It was one of the defining spaces of eighteenth-century London, and, as such, it was represented across a range of media in a variety of ways. As well as being the subject of more than twenty paintings and scores of prints, Covent Garden is mentioned in contemporary novels, poems, continental guidebooks to London, and a range of other texts.
With its main focus on the visual, and starting with maps and mapping, this interdisciplinary session looked at a sample of topographical prints, all of which mediate the space in different ways. Through discussion of the images - and in relation to other insights that participants bring to the session - we explored some of the ways in which a key metropolitan space was understood and represented through the century.
Contact name:
Ann Lewis