St. Martin’s Lane: Art, Design, and the Cultural Geography of the Eighteenth-Century London Art World

Posted on 3 March 2021

For those who missed the Zoom seminar, or would like to listen again, the recording from Prof. Stacey Sloboda's talk on 2 March can now be viewed online.

The Zoom recording is available on this link, with the passcode NB=0ROqJ.

Abstract

St. Martin’s Lane and the surrounding neighborhood of Covent Garden was a centre of artistic production in the mid-18th century. William Hogarth’s St. Martin’s Lane Academy served as a professional hub and training ground for two-generations of British painters, sculptors, and architects, while the neighborhood was also home to the best-known cabinetmakers, wood carvers, and print engravers of the period. This talk offers a cultural geography of the neighborhood, and considers the social, artistic, and professional relationships between these groups of artists to argue that the mid-eighteenth-century London art world was more integrated, collaborative, and inclusive of diverse materials and artistic practices than has yet been recognized.

Stacey Sloboda is the Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2014), the co-editor with Michael Yonan of Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art (2019), and the editor of A Cultural History of the Interior in the Age of Enlightenment (2021). She is currently writing a book on the artists and artisans working in and around St. Martin’s Lane.

Image: Thomas Sandby, A View of St. Martin’s Court, c. 1765. The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.