ii. From artist’s house museum to the everyday

Helen Hills with Alice E. Sanger

Abstract

This essay traces the prevalent practices and habits of house museum visiting and curation to the emergence of the practice of visiting artists’ homes and the development of the institution of the house museum in 19th-century Britain amongst rich famous male artists and middle-class visitors. It argues that the specific historical circumstances of the rise of both the practice of visiting artists’ houses and the growth of house museums continue to haunt the institution, presentation and interpretation of house museums to a remarkable degree.

Keywords: home, everyday, architecture and gender; architecture and social class; Victorian culture; museology, Kettle’s Yard, John Clare Cottage, Mackintosh House, Francis Bacon studio, shrine, pilgrimage

Full text: OAJ_issue-11-final_article_0b

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2024s00B

Biographical notes 

Helen Hills has published widely on baroque art and architecture and theory of architecture, particularly on the interplay of architecture, spirituality, gender, and social class in the long 17th century, including The Matter of Miracles: Neapolitan Baroque Architecture and Sanctity (Manchester UP, 2016). Horrified by the complicity of art history with art and architecture in the work of marginalizing specific social groups depending on social class, poverty, gender, colour of skin, and geographical location, she has focused principally on women and on southern Italy, including Naples and Sicily. She taught at Queen’s University (Canada), Keele University (UK), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), and the University of Manchester before moving to York, where she was the first ever woman professor of art history.

Alice E. Sanger is an associate lecturer and an honorary associate in the Department of Art History at The Open University.  A former Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome, Alice has published on the devotional practice and art patronage of the Medici grand duchesses of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and co-edited, with Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker, the anthology Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Devotional Practice (Ashgate, 2012/Routledge, 2018). She is managing editor of the Open Arts Journal.