Robert Ker Porter’s multi-faceted life has, in modern scholarship, tended to fall into separate disciplinary pockets. His outstanding documentary drawings of archaeological remains in Persia and Mesopotamia have made his career an obligatory staging post in modern surveys of Persepolis and Babylon. Meanwhile, his 2550 square foot panorama, the Storming of Seringapatam, caused a sensation when it went on display at the Lyceum on the Strand, in 1800. That first ‘block-buster’, subsequent battle paintings, and Ker Porter’s later sketches of the campaign of Sir John Moore in Spain represent significant milestones in the depiction of warfare. Having grown up in poverty in Edinburgh, Ker Porter’s ambition for advancement remained notorious throughout his life; he married into the Russian aristocracy and painted the portraits of both Tsar Peter and Fath-Ali Shah Qajar. A promising young Romantic landscape painter in the 1790s, by the 1820s, he became British consul in Venezuela.
This first workshop on his life responds to new work on Ker Porter by uniting a small, interdisciplinary group of scholars who have all been studying different aspects of his cultural and intellectual activities. The aim is to reunite these different strands of enquiry in order to stimulate new discoveries and further questions.
No conference fee. For more information and to register, please contact Lindsay Allen:
lindsay.allen@kcl.ac.uk
With thanks to the London Centre for the Ancient Near East
www.soas.ac.uk/nme/ane/lcane for their support.
1.00-1.30 Arrivals, KCL Department of Classics, room B7
1.30 Welcome
1.40 Tom McLean – University of Otago
Robert Ker Porter’s Panoramas
2.10 Neil Ramsey – University of Western Sydney
‘This Disastrous Campaign’: Robert Ker Porter’s Letters from Portugal and
Spain (1809)
2.40 Discussion & coffee
3.00 Paul Luft – Durham
A Wanderer between Three Worlds, 1817-1819
3.30 Lindsay Allen – KCL
Dead letters: Ker Porter’s collections of antiquities
4.00 Mary Henes – KCL
‘The susceptible baronet’: travellers to Iran in the footsteps of Robert
Ker Porter
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/classics/eventrecord/20120721porter.aspx
Select abstracts will be made available on the website.