Dr. Kathryn Brown, (University of London) and University Postdoctoral Fellow, Art History
as part of the 19th Century Studies Speaker Series, Metropolitan Consumers
Dr Brown’s paper forms part of her ongoing research on the representation of privacy in nineteenth-century French painting. She has presented several conference papers on depictions of reading as an assertion of privacy and has an article on nineteenth-century women readers forthcoming in a collection published by Routledge entitled Intimate Metropolis. According to Dr Brown, notions of ‘private’ and ‘public’ based on separate physical spaces were repeatedly called into question in the nineteenth century with
the result that artists explored new expressions of individual privacy in both domestic and social settings. Dr Brown’s research explores how such works not only prefigure contemporary
conceptions of the modern, liberal individual’s right to exercise privacy in public and other social spaces, but also experiment in dramatic ways with the communication and withholding of visual information on the painted surface of the canvas.
Coordinated by Dr. Jillian Lerner and 19th Century Studies as part of the Metropolitan Consumers 19th Century Studies Speaker Series.
