PAINTED TILES & ARTISTIC LADIES with Alison Inglis

In 1870, the Building News criticised the South Kensington Museum’s Central Refreshment Room for having ‘a modern art-manufacture effect in its details, rather than the loving handiwork ... characteristic of the best work.’

In this lecture, Dr Inglis, a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Melbourne, will explore the shifting attitudes toward artistic work that emerged in late Victorian Britain between 1860-1870, including the role of the Refreshment Rooms in raising the status of tile-painting from an industrial procedure employed at Minton’s Stoke-on-Trent factory in the mid-1860s, to a fashionable and respectable art form undertaken by predominantly female practitioners at Minton’s Art Pottery Studio in South Kensington in the early 1870s.

Alison Inglis is an internationally recognised specialist in British 19th century art. With a research interest in Australian art museums and the history of collecting and display in this country. She is currently researching a book on the circulation of works of art around the British Empire between 1850 –1950.