Twenty two enthusiastic Art Historians attended a conference at the Tate Britain on Friday 2nd November jointly organised by the Association of Art Historians and the Tate Gallery. It was quite an exhausting day as not only were we entertained by three speakers talking on very diverse topics but  were also given three presentations by students showing us their projects for module 4 of the A level examination. We had also booked tickets to see the exhibitions on show, the Turner Prize and Millais, which we managed to fit into the day.

One of the speakers was Alison Smith, curator of the Millais exhibition and she gave a very insightful talk on how she organised the show and homed in on examples of drawings that he did when planning his paintings and how they differed from his final works as well as explaining all the different responses he had to his varying subjects. Many of us were amazed at how he started his drawings aged 9. She also pointed out how the collection had only ever been seen in its entirety in 1898, so it was an excellent opportunity for us to appreciate the vastness and spectrum of the collection.

She managed to complete her talk without once illustrating Ophelia or Bubbles as she said there was so much more to Millais than these two very famous works. However, we were lucky enough to see these pieces in the exhibition.

Other talks were on ‘The Strange Truth about Caricature,’ given by Nigel Spivey and an enlightening presentation by Satish Padiyar on eighteenth century painting. The students talked on Albrecht Altdorfer’s ‘Battle of Alexander’, Islamic calligraphy and David’s ‘Napoleon Crossing the St Bernard’. These student talks gave us a taster of the sort of things that we would be doing for our A2 projects.