BAPCR AGM and evening talk by Claire Shepherd and Claire Chorley

Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/07/2020
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
Art Workers Guild

Categories

• BAPCR Evening Talk
• BAPCR Event

BAPCR evening talk, Wednesday 1st July 2019

At the Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queens’ Square, London, WC1N 3AT

Doors 6pm / AGM 6.30pm / Talk 7.15pm

We look forward to welcoming you at the Art Workers’ Guild for an evening talk by Claire Shepherd and Claire Chorley who will present:

Ghizilbashi Rezah and the Girl from New Julfa: seventeenth-century Armenian oil paintings from Iran in the Royal Collection

The Royal Collection is home to three extremely unusual, recently-identified 17^th century oil paintings by the previously unknown Armenian painter Marcos. Two of the full-length portraits of figures in richly-patterned dress are currently being conserved; they tell a tale of international trade and diplomacy centred around the cosmopolitan city of Isfahan in modern-day Iran. Inscriptions in Armenian identify the subjects as Ghizilbashi Rezah and Girl from New Julfa (New Julfa is the Armenian district of Isfahan). While Marcos would have worked with or been trained by one of the handful of European painters working in Isfahan at the time, his paintings also display less familiar techniques such as the use of carefully applied metal ‘glitter’ to imitate the metal thread in the figures’ coats. In this talk, we will discuss Marcos’s rich painting technique and the treatment of these fragile unlined canvases, as well as trying to answer some of the questions the paintings raise – how did they come to be made by an Armenian painter in Isfahan, and how and when might they have reached the Royal Collection? We will also look at their unusual seventeenth century chinoiserie frames, which are currently being treated by our colleague Jane Wallis.

Claire Chorley trained in the Conservation of Easel Paintings at the Hamilton Kerr Institute, University of Cambridge and completed a Mellon Fellowship in the U.S.A. Claire has cleaned and restored paintings by Holbein, Canaletto, Titian and Van Dyck during her time at the Royal Collection and contributed to the recent Royal Collection exhibition catalogue: Canaletto and the Art of Venice.

Claire Shepherd joined the Royal Collection as a Paintings Conservator in 2019, having previously worked at museums including the National Gallery, Guildhall Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art. She trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art and was a Caroline Villers Fellow there. She has written for publications including the National Gallery Technical Bulletin and The Burlington Magazine.

Entry is free of charge to BAPCR members (please email BAPCRsecretary@gmail.com to let us know that you will be attending), and £10 for non-members. Wine and soft drinks will be available to purchase before and after the talk.

Non-members can pay for tickets in advance by:

• Cheque – payable to the BAPCR, posted to: BAPCR, Rose Green, Broomham Lane, Whitesmith, BN8 6JQ
• BACS transfer – NatWest, Sort code: 53 50 33, Account number: 5300 0757

Please email Gemma Collins, BAPCR Secretary at BAPCRsecretary@gmail.com with your name and email address details when you pay for your tickets.