David Hansen is currently conducting research in collections and archives in England and Europe and delivered a lecture on the English portraitist and silhouettist John Dempsey at the Paul Mellon Centre in London on 18 May.

"In 1996 a folio of 51 watercolour portraits of Regency street people - was discovered in the print room of the Tasmanian Museum, in a drawer of a plan press marked ‘U’ for ‘Unknown’. One was found to be signed - by an itinerant portraitist and silhouettist named John Dempsey. Across the couple of generations prior to the widespread adoption of photography in the 1850s, a small army of artisan painters such as Dempsey supplied an expanding lower middle class market with modest miniature images of themselves and their families."

Event information