Association for Art History Annual Conference 2025

University of York

 

Pre-Raphaelite Networks Roundtable

Thursday 10 April, 16:00 – 17:30, Room SLB001

Facilitated by Serena Trowbridge and Emily Learmont of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, this roundtable

discussion brings together postgraduate students, curators, academics and writers at different

stages of their career to discuss career development, opportunities, and ways to move from

postgraduate to professional in Pre-Raphaelite studies. The event will be recorded for the Pre-

Raphaelite Podcast.

 

Pre-Raphaelite Networks

Friday 11 April, 10:00 – 16:30, Room SLB003

 

Morning session: 10:00 – 12:00

Introduction: Serena Trowbridge and Emily Learmont

 

Cecilia Rose, ‘Occult Networks: John William Waterhouse and The Hermetic Order of the Golden

Dawn’

With no letters or diaries surviving, John William Waterhouse remains one of the most elusive

figures in Pre-Raphaelitism, with very little known about his personal life and artistic influences.

Critics such as Elizabeth Prettejohn and Peter Trippi have suggested that he wished elements of his

life to remain hidden due to a private preoccupation with the somewhat controversial pursuit of

Occultism. Prompted by this suggestion, I have undertaken extensive archival research to explore

the possibility that he may have been a member of a secret Occult society, The Hermetic Order of

the Golden Dawn. The evidence is fairly compelling: his geographical proximity to several other

members, the fact that his brother-in-law was a member and conferred with him on the subject, and

the specific golden dawn emblems hidden in works such as The Magic Circle (1886) and Consulting

the Oracle (1884), all point to at least a peripheral involvement in the group.

Formed in 1888 and largely based in London, the society required a vow of secrecy, held meetings

on practising magic (as well as related activities such as tarot reading and seances), and admitted

men and women on equal terms. It became associated with the Suffrage Movement, due to its

progressive outlook on gender, and attracted a host of unconventional artistic figures, including the

poet W. B. Yeats, actress Florence Farr, Lady Jane Wilde, Aleister Crowley and illustrator Pamela

Colman Smith. There is a possibility that other Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as Evelyn De Morgan

(who had a keen interest in Spiritualism and Mediumship), were also involved in the Order – but this

is yet to be fully explored.

 

Cecilia Rose is in her final year of PhD study at the University of Exeter, having previously studied at

Birkbeck and Royal Holloway, University of London. Her PhD project explores mermaids and sirens as

androgynous figures in Victorian art and literature, looking specifically at the works of Evelyn De

Morgan, Edward Burne-Jones and John William Waterhouse, and their literary influences. Her work

on Evelyn De Morgan has been published in Shima Journal in 2023 and she recently won the Pre-

Raphaelite Society’s John Pickard Essay Prize for her essay on ‘John William Waterhouse and the

Occult’. Her other research interests include Victorian depictions of gender, the supernatural,

occultism and mythical creatures.

 

Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper, “Fayre Soul, Food Frend”: Jane Burden Morris and her Keepsake

Books’

In the 1880s and 90s, Jane Morris made and decorated at least 4 small keepsake books. These

manuscript collections were given to friends, sometimes as Christmas gifts, and contained extracts

of poems and proverbs, ranging from Chaucer to Newman. There are phrases in medieval French

and in Greek, alongside selections from contemporary poets including Amy Levy and Andrew Lang.

They show the breadth of her reading as well as Jane Morris’s delight in works by friends, and

writers in her wider circle. She frequently quotes Swinburne and includes verses by both Christina

and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

A close reading of these manuscripts is enlightening because it helps us to establish how new texts

were being read and incorporated into personal collections. It also allows us to recover the networks

of friendship that were being celebrated or reinforced when Jane Morris gave away these small,

carefully designed books. They were part of her construction of creative conversations at home and

on her travels.

These little books also reveal Jane Morris’s own idiosyncratic pattern-making. Her calligraphic

decorations do not resemble the work of her husband William, or her daughter May. They

demonstrate her independence, in her choice of reading and in her approach to design. And they

may encourage us to question the fuller meaning, to Jane and to her friends, of phrases like

‘kindness, nobler ever than revenge’ or ‘memor et fidelis’. These intensely personal productions can

open up intriguing connections between text/image, poet/reader and artist/friend.

Dr Suzanne Fagence Cooper FRHistS is a writer, broadcaster and curator with expertise in 19 th  and

20 th  century British art and culture. She spent 12 years at the V&A Museum, researching the

Victorian collections. She published Pre-Raphaelite Art in the V&A Museum in 2003 and Effie Gray in

2010. Her PhD examined musical imagery in Victorian painting. She is an invited lecturer for the Arts

Society and Cunard voyages, and is a Trustee of the Burne-Jones Catalogue Raisonne. Suzanne was

Research Curator for Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud (York Art Gallery, 2019).  Her book, To See

Clearly: Why Ruskin Matters was published by Quercus, and her latest work is At Home with Jane

and William Morris (paperback 2023). She is Research Curator for Beauty of the Earth: the art of

May, Jane and William Morris, opening in Winchester in Nov. 2025.

 

Melissa Berry, ‘Catalan Modernisme and the Pre-Raphaelite Connection’

Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920) was a central figure of Catalan Modernism, a movement dedicated

to the revitalization of the region’s identity, as an artist as well as a poet and collector. An influential

and cosmopolitan figure, Riquer spent two months in London in late spring of 1894. About this trip

he would later state:

"…the Modern Masters stood before me as strong as ever, and with all their profound

knowledge of their art —Burne-Jones, Millais, Moore, and, above all to me, Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, blazing like a sunflower of poetry, reflecting and reproducing absolute

beauty. "

His admiration for William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley were also mentioned, linking him to the Arts

and Crafts Movement and, while that is evidenced in his work, it was most clearly the work of the

Pre-Raphaelites that he was eager to import and share with colleagues in Spain.

Encountering the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, such are Burne-Jones and Rossetti, confirmed for

Riquer his proclivity toward a renewed medievalism as well as decorative aspects within his art. His

interest in expanding his own practice also grew, now with a focus on poster art alongside his

bookplates and illustrations that sometimes embellished his own writings. As a prominent early

advocate of Catalan Modernism, Riquer’s admiration for and integration of the Pre-Raphaelites’

work presents a heretofore neglected translocal connection while reiterating the necessity of hybrid

approaches to national identity.
 

Melissa Berry received her MA from the Courtauld Institute in 2006 and her PhD in Art

History and Visual Studies in 2015 from the University of Victoria where she is now an

Adjunct Assistant Professor. Her current research is focused on the trends and history of the

art market as well as translocal interconnections between European artists in the mid-19th

century, which she has presented at various international conferences and published in The

Victorian Review, Visual Culture in Britain, and The Burlington Magazine. Her book The

Société des trois in the Nineteenth Century was published with Routledge in 2018. Alongside

her academic teaching, she has also worked closely with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

and recently led art tours to Europe, bringing historical and contemporary art to life for

members of the public. 

 

Eduardo De Maio, ‘Nino Costa and the “Roma Preraffaellita”: Forging Cultural Internationalism
in Rome at the Fin de Siècle’

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, namely the decades following the unification of Italy,

the imperative of establishing Rome as the cultural epicentre of the new state became urgent.

However, Rome lacked a cohesive cultural identity that could unify the artistic regionalities of the

Italian peninsula and could compete internationally with other European cultural centres, such as

Paris or London. In this discouraging context, the painter Giovanni ‘Nino’ Costa emerged as an

instrumental figure in fostering cultural cosmopolitanism by circulating British artistic ideals within

the Roman art scene, making Rome a key anglophile and international cultural centre in Italy. Costa’s

connections with prominent figures in the local Anglo-American milieu, including the Pre- Raphaelite

follower and painter, Marie Spartali Stillman, contributed to the establishment of the international

cultural circle In Arte Libertas. This not only provided a valuable opportunity for Italian artists to

admire British Pre-Raphaelite and international art in original for the first time, but also stimulated

the Roman artistic context towards cultural international aspirations.

This paper examines the role of Nino Costa in establishing a unique anglophile and Pre-Raphaelite

inspired tendency within the Roman art scene in the late nineteenth century, that art historians

would later identify as ‘Roma Preraffaellita’, which embodied the urgency of cultural

internationalism in the city as well as in Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. This study will

reveal how Costa’s cosmopolitan endeavours positioned Rome as a receptive epicentre for Pre-

Raphaelitism, marking a transformative chapter in Italian fin-de-siècle art and culture.

Eduardo De Maio is an early career art historian and curator. He recently completed his PhD in

History of Art at the University of York, under the supervision of Elizabeth Prettejohn. His research

explored the cultural exchange and internationalism between Britain and Italian art at the turn of

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eduardo was a research fellow at the Center for Italian

Modern Art (CIMA) in New York in 2022 and a Teaching Assistant at the Department of History of Art

of the University of York. He has collaborated with cultural institutions in the UK (Henry Moore

Institute, Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019; Tate and Paul Mellon Centre, "Rossettis: In

Relation" conference, 2023) and participated in cultural and curatorial projects in Italy (MuSe,

Trento; and the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance, Forlì, 2024) as well as in the United

States, where in 2024 he curated an exhibition on the Futurist artist Fortunato Depero and his

relationship with advertising at the Italian Cultural Institute in Miami. He currently works in the Old

Masters art market and is a member of the British Art Network, the Paul Mellon Centre Doctoral

Researchers Network, and the Association for Art History.

 

LUNCH

Afternoon session: 14:30 – 16:30

 

Anne Anderson, “Mr Punch” and the Pre-Raphaelites’

F. C. Burnand, editor of Punch from 1880, apparently had little love for either the Pre-Raphaelites or

the Aesthetes. His farce The Colonel (February 1881), which preceded Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience,

took a swipe at both with the duplicitous Lambert Streyke, an apostle of the ‘ultra pre-Raphaelite,

mock hysteric, super-aesthetic school of art’ and his nephew Basil Giorgione, a chemist’s assistant

turned Pre-Raphaelite painter. Basil had in fact been invented by Punch cartoonist George du

Maurier in Affiliating an Aesthete (June 1880). According to Walter Hamilton, it was audacious to

call The Colonel an original piece as it relied heavily on the sayings and doings of the ‘intense’

characters created du Maurier. While his ‘Mutual Admiration Society’, featuring Mrs Cimabue

Brown, Maudle and Postlethwaite is well known, his campaign against the Pre-Raphaelites began

with A Legend of Camelot (1866), which parodies the styles of Rossetti and Hunt. The ‘Rise and Fall

of the Jack Spratts: A Tale of Modern Art and Fashion’, serialised September-October 1878, followed.

Both series were accompanied by verses, which are often overlooked in favour of the images. Du

Maurier appears to have wearied of mocking the Aesthetes after 1882. However, Harry Furness took

up the challenge in his ‘Grosvenor Gallery Gems.’ Although Hamilton observed that nobody had

heard of the aesthetes until they were made the target of ‘our sneering satirists’, the full impact of

Punch’s Campaign against the Cult of Beauty has yet to be assessed.

With a first degree in Archaeological Studies and a PhD in English, Anne Anderson was a senior

lecturer in Art and Design History at Southampton Solent University for 14 years. She has curated

four national exhibitions including Beyond the Brotherhood The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy (2019-20).

She has also held several prestigious fellowships including Fellow of the Huntington Library, CA;

Fellow of the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Library and Museum and Fellow of the American

Antiquarian Society. Anne has lectured for the A Learning Academy, the National Trust, the Art

Fund and Arts National (Australia). Author of seven books, covering topics as diverse as Pre-

Raphaelite art and Art Nouveau Architecture, Anne has also published in many respected journals.

Her most recent publications are "The Pre-Raphaelite Rebellion" and "Cranks and Crankdoms: Arts

and Crafts Rebels and Rural Utopias" in the Routledge Handbook of Victorian Rebels (2025).

 

Edith Charlesworth, ‘From Barnsley to Bellosguardo: A Pre-Raphaelite Confluence of Friends,

Family and Faith’

In December 1883, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan created her organ panels at All Saints in Cawthorne

near Barnsley, the last element of the church’s remodelling by her uncle, John Roddam Spencer

Stanhope, and George Frederick Bodley. De Morgan and Bodley were both regular visitors to the

Villa Nuti in Bellosguardo outside Florence, purchased by Stanhope in 1873 and his permanent home

from 1880. Neither of these locations have previously been studied in detail, yet here they are

uncovered as key examples of transnational, intergenerational Pre-Raphaelite networks. Villa Nuti

provided the initial point of contact between De Morgan and Edward Burne-Jones, where the latter

retreated into his "frightened" shell at the sight of such a "plain lady". The house gave Stanhope’s

niece a base from which to explore Renaissance collections and appeared in paintings including her

"Bells of San Vito" of 1891. Additionally, the villa provided the backdrop for future collaborations

between Stanhope and Bodley, and even inspired the latter to poetry. This paper will use the equally

neglected All Saints Church to illustrate the networks forged at Villa Nuti. It was within All Saints that

Stanhope's own pulpit panels dialogised with Burne-Jones's stained-glass memorial to Stanhope’s

daughter who died in Florence, which in turn occupied the same space as De Morgan's organ panels,

referencing Botticelli’s "Portrait of a Youth with a Medal". Both All Saints and Villa Nuti are locations of

vital importance for the communication of second generation Pre-Raphaelite artists and deserved to

be studied in detail.

 

Edith Charlesworth is currently studying for an MPhil in the History of Art at Cambridge University,

funded by the Elgar Selwyn College Scholarship. She previously completed her undergraduate

degree also at Cambridge with a first class. She is specialising in nineteenth century decorative

artists, with a specific focus on the mortuary chapel of Mary Watts. Her research interests, however,

remain broad - she has written essays on a 15th century Salvator Mundi and the stained glass of

Shropshire. This paper stems from research for her undergraduate dissertation on the gold drawings

of Evelyn De Morgan, for which she was awarded the Cambridge University Art History Dissertation

prize. Her archival work on the gold drawings also formed the basis for her essay which was awarded

the Pre Raphaelite Society's John Pickard Prize this year. Edith has written for the Selwyn College

Magazine, won public speaking competitions and keeps up a regular blog on a range of artworks and

objects, which she promotes through social media. Edith has volunteered in local museums from

Wolverhampton to Shrewsbury, and currently in the National Portrait Gallery's learning department.

She has previously interned with Art UK, and archived and catalogued with the Shropshire Museums

Collection Centre. She is hoping to now step away from academia to forge a career in a museum or

gallery environment. 

 

Dr Jo Meacock, ‘“A freckled whelp”: Noel Paton’s Caliban, Scottish Identity and Enslavement’

This paper will focus on Scottish Pre-Raphaelite Noel Paton’s Caliban (1867-68), a fascinating

painting that marks the artist’s entrance into the establishment, his knighthood and appointment as

Her Majesty’s Limner, but also the last artwork that Paton was to exhibit at the Royal Academy in

London. It is complex and contradictory, a painting tied up with violence, colonialism and Paton’s

own complicated views on enslavement and racial prejudice.

Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest is a multifaceted character, enslaved, exploited, capable of

violence, treated as sub-human, his island colonised. Paton’s representation of him departs

markedly from contemporary depictions based on colonial racist ideologies –German scholar Georg

Gottfried Gervinus’ noted in his 4-volumed Shakespeare (1849-50, trans. English 1863), that Caliban

‘is a near-anagram of Cannibal’. However, Paton does not portray Caliban as savage in his violence,

but in a moment of calm and wonder, listening to Ariel’s music on a Scottish beach. In a depiction

full of sympathy, Paton, who was fondly referred to by photographer D. O. Hill as "Noll of the auburn

poll", gives Caliban red hair, linking him with other maligned characters like Shylock but also his own

Celtic roots. Paton knew what it was to be other and outsider, his studies at the Royal Academy

Schools in 1843, although bringing him in touch with John Everett Millais, cut short, possibly as a

result of bigotry experienced as a red-haired Scot with a regional accent in London. Using a rounded

arch format favoured by the Pre-Raphaelites and suggestive of an altarpiece, Caliban is elevated.

This paper will consider Paton’s unique portrayal of Caliban in the context of Victorian racism and his

own complex attitudes towards what it means to be ‘civilised’.

Dr Jo Meacock is Curator of British Art at Glasgow Life Museums, responsible for paintings,

sculpture, prints and drawings, 1600-1960. She gained an MA History of Art at the University of

Glasgow in 1997, followed by a PhD there in 2001 examining D. G. Rossetti’s secularisation of

religious iconography. Formerly the Scottish Regional Research Manager for the Public Catalogue

Foundation, Jo has also worked as Data Editing Manager for the National Inventory Research Project,

Research Associate for James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings: A Catalogue Raisonné and Editor

for Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951. A Trustee of

the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust and member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Scottish

Society for Art History, Jo is passionate about inclusion and art for everyone. She has published

widely on Pre-Raphaelitism and Aestheticism, notably including A Rossetti Family Chronology, co-

authored with Alison Chapman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and on Scottish 19th and early 20 th -

century art and women artists, and is currently working on a book on the Pre-Raphaelites and

Scotland.

 

Karl Merrick and Alex Round, ‘Establishing Pre-Raphaelite Networks for the Twenty-First Century’

Collaboratively responding to the exciting, challenging and innovative ways in which both research

and art was produced and consumed allowed The Pre-Raphaelites to pioneer radical changes in

Victorian art culture. Similarly, those of us who study, work with or draw inspiration from the Pre-

Raphaelites today face both modern challenges and exciting opportunities. The rise of social media,

streaming services and short-form content needed a response from The Pre-Raphaelite Society to

maintain its potency and entice a new generation scholars and enthusiasts.

In this talk, we shall discuss the benefits of a collaborative approach to establishing contemporary

networks of Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasts. Drawing on our experience establishing The Pre-Raphaelite

Podcast, we will demonstrate how international and cross-disciplinary relationships can be created,

sustained and grown. The Pre-Raphaelite Podcast filled a vacuum between a popular enthusiasm for

the art and rigorous academic study which encapsulated perhaps the bulk of consumers of Pre-

Raphaelitism.

While The Pre-Raphaelite Podcast remains a practical and vocational endeavour, it is appropriate to

talk about it in terms of the digital humanities and we can retrospectively theorise around the

project. Responding to the limitations of conferences, particularly post-pandemic, the Podcast team

were able to mobilise new technological opportunities for digital networking. Furthermore, we

firmly believe that we have created an accessible, ever-expanding digital archive of contemporary

Pre-Raphaelitism that previously would have been impossible. We have been able to draw from the

experience of scholars, historians, museum professionals, curators, artists, craftspeople, musicians,

authors, poets and photographers in a way that echoes the original inter-disciplinary, multi-media

phenomenon of Pre-Raphaelitism. The output is a sizable snapshot into the Pre-Raphaelite

landscape of the early twenty-first century.

Karl Merrick is a final year PhD student at Birmingham City University researching Swinburne in the

Gothic mode. A dedicated scholar and advocate of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, he is a trustee of The Pre-

Raphaelite Society and is the driving force behind The Pre-Raphaelite Podcast. As a founding

member of the graduate network he fosters engagement between emerging researchers in the field.

Karl has taught sessions on Gothic Literature at Birmingham City University and delivered insightful

talks on Swinburne, Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelites. His passion for the period extends beyond

academia, shaping his creative pursuits and his contributions to the community, Karl is also an active

musician, poet and craftsperson taking inspiration from Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and the Art

and Crafts movement. 

Alex Round is currently an AHRC funded PhD candidate at Birmingham City University and elected

trustee of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. She is the 2023 recipient of the Rose Sidgwick

Award, which was awarded by the British Federation of Women Graduates, and a recipient of the

2023 Dahesh Museum of Art Prize. She is also a Visiting Lecturer, having taught at Birmingham City

University and at Warwick. Her research concerns friendship networks formed between Pre-

Raphaelite women and the ways on which these friendships played a formative role in their works.

Upcoming projects include an edited collection of essays titled Forgotten Sisters: Overlooked Pre-

Raphaelite Women with the University of Delaware Press. 

 

Serena Trowbridge is Chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and Reader in Victorian Literature at

Birmingham City University, UK, where she is Associate Director for Research in English. Recent

publications include My Ladys Soul: The Poetry of Elizabeth Siddall (Victorian Secrets 2018) and The

Poems of Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (Victorian Secrets 2022), and numerous other journal articles,

chapters and books on Pre-Raphaelitism in art and literature.

Emily Learmont is the founder and Co-ordinator of the Pre-Raphaelite Society Graduate Network.

She has just completed her PhD, which was an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership

Studentship at the University of Edinburgh and the National Galleries of Scotland. Her thesis

focusses on William Bell Scott (1811–90), an Edinburgh-born member of the Pre-Raphaelite social

circle, and is titled ‘William Bell Scott’s “Decorative Painting of a Pictorial Kind”: History and National

Identity’. Her book, William Bell Scott’s Screen: A Pre-Raphaelite Romance, was published by the

National Galleries of Scotland in 2023, and she curated an exhibition, William Bell Scott: The King’s

Quair Mural, for the galleries in 2024. She is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Centre

for Open Learning and an arts educator for the National Galleries of Scotland.