press release
Alexander Sturgis, director of the Holburne Museum in Bath, England, explores how artists thought about and depicted themselves in light of the Romantic myth of the artist as heroic and rebellious, isolated and suffering.
“Many of our contemporary ideas about artists and writers took shape during the 19th-century—whether it’s the suffering of Van Gogh, the social critique offered by artists like James Ensor, the escapism of the Romantics, or the modern urbanism of Manet and Baudelaire,” explains Peter Tokofsky, education specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Alexander Sturgis has literally written the book on how these images took shape, and I look forward to his lecture.”
