‘Broken Pastoral and the English Folk’

Professor Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of Art History, Yale University

This paper examines the revived interest in folk culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, exploring the relationships between ethnography, musicology and the study of historical arts and crafts.

It places within this matrix the work of photographers, painters and composers, who derived both motifs and models for avant-garde artistic identity from the study of the rural poor. Professor Tim Barringer contends that the aesthetic potency of visual and musical compositions drawing on folk sources lay in the widespread acknowledgement of the imminent disappearance of folk culture in the face of modernity and mechanized warfare.

Under consideration are the photographer P.H. Emerson, painters George Clausen, Henry Herbert La Thangue and Augustus John, the gardener and writer Gertrude Jekyll, ethnographer E.B. Tylor, and composers Sir Hubert Parry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger.

Professor Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University.

This lecture is part of the 2013 Australasian Victorian Studies Association conference taking place from 6-8 February. For further information please click here.

Date:  6.00pm, Thursday, 7 February 2021

Venue: Public Lecture Theatre, Old Arts Building, The University of Melbourne

Bookings: Free but you need to register via this website.