Abstract

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition John Flaxman 1755-1826: Master of the Purest Line curated by Professor David Bindman at the Sir John Soane’s Museum and University College London, celebrating the restoration of the Flaxman Gallery, UCL in 2003. It included a ‘Flaxman Sculpture trail’ and was timed to coincide with the Conference of the Association of Art Historians hosted at UCL, as well as a project for MA students on the British Museum History of the Print Course.The catalogue was short-listed for the prestigious AXA/Art Newspaper Award 2003, and the exhibitions was well covered in the press. Petherbridge’s chapter incorporated new research (first put out in seminars in the Strang Print Room, UCL) and proposed a reading of Flaxman’s inflected line as more expressive than is usually acknowledged in neo-classical drawing scholarship. This led to her being consulted on Flaxman-influenced drawings by Humbert de Superville in the Accademia, Venice, by Dr. Giovanna Nepi Sciré, Department of Artistic and Cultural Heritage, Venice. These findings impacted directly on Petherbridge’s researches into earlier eighteenth century drawing, and she was invited to lecture on the anatomical drawings of horses by George Stubbs at the National Gallery during the 2005 exhibition Stubbs and the Horse, and participated in a conference and Study Day sponsored by the Mellon Foundation. Following a positive response to these papers, she was awarded a residential fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art from March 5 to April 27 2007, researching into George Stubb’s comparative anatomical drawings and delivering gallery talks in the collection. Researches were also undertaken at Yale Medical School Library on the relationship of Stubbs’ project to 18th century discourses of comparative anatomy, and will be written-up as an extended article for an art-historical journal, with the possibility of being extended further.