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Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women, 18th Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery 2008)
BRILLIANT WOMEN: 18th Century Bluestockings was an exhibition that originated in the work of Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz at the Huntington Library in Pasadena in 2001 where they both held Library Research Fellowships. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue studied the influence of the Bluestocking Circle, with particular focus on the group around Elizabeth Montague in the 1770s; traced the development of the work, social organization and public reception of the Circle through the 1780s; outlined the political reaction and its effect on the Circle in the 1790s; and finally examined the legacy of the Bluestockings in the early nineteenth century, with some comments on the twentieth.
The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue brought the art, literature, poetry, philosophy, classics, language, drama, correspondence, history, and political writings of the Bluestockings together through the visual mediums of oil, pen and ink, watercolour, pastel, pencil, hand-tinted etchings, engraving, mezzotints, sculpture, pottery, and the penny press. The artistic genres exhibited included a broad range in each medium, from the academic tradition to the new eighteenth century printing technologies. Most works exhibited were drawn from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the British Library, and the British Museum.
The exhibition participants at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2008 attempted to portray visually in miniature 35 years of academic scholarship on the Bluestocking Circle. The exhibition combined tightly arranged wall displays of paintings, prints, and drawings with glass cabinet displays of books, letters, and manuscripts. The smaller floor plan of the exhibit created the impression of an intimate circle of friendships among the members of the Bluestockings while perhaps not reflecting the rather grander scale of their achievements. The larger paintings in the exhibition such as Angelica Kauffmann's The Artist Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting, (1791-94) and Richard Samuel's Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo, (1778) would have benefited from a larger exhibition space.
The exhibition served well to illustrate how members of the Bluestocking Circle wielded their pens and brushes to reflect their professional interests, both in the subject matter and content of their art and literature, and in the materials...