Love Stories

Lecture

The Baker Museum Exhibition Lecture
A Portrait of Love Stories, an exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery, London

Lucy Peltz, Ph.D., Head of Collection Displays (Tudor to Regency) and Senior Curator 18th Century Collections, National Portrait Gallery, London

Lucy Peltz, the exhibition curator, will introduce Love Stories from the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 1600 to the present day. The lecture will explore the relationship between portraiture and love, based on the real-life stories found across the National Portrait Gallery, London, the single largest collection of portraits in the world. The case studies in this lecture create an arc from love in the courtly tradition of the Renaissance, to love perceived as a dangerous malady, to errant love that had to be controlled and contained in most of the modern period, to today’s perception of love as one of the principal forms of human expression and the defining feature of a fulfilled life. This illustrated talk will delve deeper into the research around Love Stories and will help explain the curatorial choices that underpin the hang of the exhibition.

This presentation is part of the exhibition Love Stories from the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Lucy Peltz

Lucy Peltz

Lucy Peltz has been senior curator of 18th-century collections at the National Portrait Gallery, London, since 2001. She was appointed head of collection displays (Tudor to Regency) in 2015 and is one of the staff leading the current total redisplay project at the Gallery while it is closed for the Inspiring People redevelopment. During her career at the National Portrait Gallery, Peltz has curated several major exhibitions, particularly Thomas Lawrence: Regency, Power & Brilliance (2010-11) and Gainsborough’s Family Album (2017-18), both of which traveled to the United States. She has also done several other cross-period exhibitions, including working with Simon Schama on A Portrait of Britain (2017-18). Her academic monograph Facing the Text: Extra-illustration, Print Culture and Society in Britain, 1769-1840 was published by the Huntington Library Press in 2017.

Program Information

Program Information

View this month's program book to get general information about Artis—Naples and to read articles about this month’s activities.

  Program Book