Art and Literature

John Keats

John Keats

ELPRIN Jeremy
When the second-generation Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) – best known today for his ‘Great Odes’ and for coining the term ‘Negative Capability’ – died in Rome, at the age of 25, he may have been penniless, but he was certainly not friendless. Although his work received little public recognition during his lifetime, his close circle of friends in England strove to defend his genius and preserve his memory for posterity. Friendship was always central to Keats’s life; his poetry and letters attest to a vitally social existence, and to the lasting influence of London literary coteries on his development as a poet and thinker.
John Ramsay

John Ramsay (and his Italian diary)

AMBLARD Marion
In 1782, John Ramsay undertook a journey to Italy with his father Allan, King George III’s Painter in Ordinary. Their tour lasted two years and for the entire duration of their stay, John Ramsay kept a diary in which he recorded his busy social life and shared his experience of practices of sociability in Italian cities.
John Thelwall

John Thelwall

NEWMAN Ian
John Thelwall was an orator, journalist, poet, and elocutionist, who remains best-known for being the subject of a Treason Trial in 1794, and for his involvement in radical groups such as the London Corresponding Society in which he helped to forge a new model of political sociability.
Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison

COWAN Brian
Joseph Addison was an important theorist of sociability best known for his essays published in The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714). His essays promoted and exemplified an ideal of polite sociability that became extremely influential in the eighteenth century and afterwards.
Joseph Farington (and his diary)

Joseph Farington (and his diary)

PHILP Mark
The Diary of Joseph Farington offers a rich source for thinking about sociability in the art world in London from 1793-1821. Nonetheless, it is striking that, while the Diary records a great deal of information – indeed ‘gossip’ - it seems as if this is of a rather distinctive character and suggests that a different sociability existed between men than among women.
Lord Byron

Lord Byron

LE PAPE Isabelle
CHARRIER-VOZEL Marianne
Cette notice explore les différents réseaux de sociabilité autour de la figure de Lord Byron dans les domaines artistique, sentimental et politique en retraçant les différentes étapes de son parcours à travers l’Europe. Depuis ses relations amicales nouées sur le sol britannique avec de jeunes prodiges de la littérature romantique (P.B Shelley, Mary Shelley…) jusqu’aux rencontres sentimentales sur les rivages vénitiens et les affinités politiques autour du combat pour l’indépendance grecque, la vie de Byron s’enrichit de réseaux tissés à l’échelle européenne.