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Kate Retford

Kate Retford, ‘“The Picture was my Stage”: The Theatre of the Conversation Piece’

Dr Kate Retford, Lecturer in Eighteenth and early Nineteenth-Century History of Art, Birkbeck College, University 

This specialist academic conference developed themes raised in the exhibition The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons. Speakers, including Professors Felicity Nussbaum (UCLA) and Joseph Roach (Yale), explored and problematised ideas of ‘celebrity’ culture and the symbolic, allegorical and discursive functions of portraits of women players.