VSAO Fall Evening Lecture 2022

You are warmly invited to join us for this year’s Fall Evening Lecture, Thursday 24 November 2022, at 6:30 PM in Sidney Smith Hall 2110, University of Toronto

Kathryn Davies (University of York, UK)

The legacy of Sacred and Legendary Art: Anna Jameson’s revolutionary guide to Christian iconography

Anna Brownell (Murphy) Jameson, undated, photograph from an engraving from the John Ross Robertson Collection (JRR 983). Toronto Public Library, Toronto, Canada.

Kathryn Davies is an AHRC (UKRI)-funded Art History PhD student at University of York, UK. Her research interests lie in Medievalism, Gothic Revival art and architecture, and the networks and modes of knowledge exchange that supported these cultural and artistic developments in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Davies’s PhD research focuses on the iconographic writings of Anna Brownell Jameson (1794-1860). Her series on Christian art had phenomenally broad appeal for over 80 years — it was read by aspiring middle-classes, artists, intellectuals and religious reformers alike — but Jameson has been excluded in all major studies of iconographers and art historians to date, and has yet to be adequately recognised as a key influence on public taste and understanding of the medieval. Davies aims to analyse and evidence her critical place within the Victorian Gothic Revival more broadly, and to demonstrate her pivotal role in the development of the modern disciplines of art history and iconography.