Graphic Landscape: A Print Conference

Sometimes you get lucky and an project runs like clockwork. My blessing for 2021 was Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series in Britain, c.1775–1850, an online conference run on collaboration with the British Library. Co-convened by PMC Director Mark Hallett and the BL Lead Curator of Western Prints and Drawings Felicity Myrone, Graphic Landscape was my first end-to-end conference project and from start-to-finish it was a treat!

The conference ran across two pairs of afternoon sessions in early November focusing on four themes:

• Prints. Politics and Industrialisation

• Print and Politics

• Revisiting the Canon

• A Wider View: From Collaboration to Empire

18th & 19th century prints wouldn’t be my personal first inclination in art history, so I was curious on how the conference would be received. To my delight, I seem to be a outlier - we experienced the most active and engaged audience I’ve seen at an event yet. The PMC is absolutely a Graphic Landscape crowd. Better still is as the conference progressed I began to understand how the prints reflected much more than depictions of landscapes, but were illuminating insights into the rapid social, political and economic evolution of the industrialisation revolution.

If Landscape Prints are your thing, you can check out all the recordings on the PMC website. See if you can spot where my luck ran out and we ran into some tech issues!

Thanks for Mark Hallett and Felicity Myrone for convening the conference and Dani Convey for supporting on all four events.

Image: John Sell Cotman, Postwick Grove Norfolk, Plate 7, Liber Studiorum (1813-1838), published by H G Bohn 1938, Sort-ground etching. © The Trustees of the British Museum