Taxing Knowledge: The Portrait of Richard Cobden by Emma Novello

FUAM Annual Lecture with Dr Rebecca Wade -  Taxing Knowledge: The Portrait of Richard Cobden by Emma Novello

The portrait of the politician Richard Cobden by the artist Emma Aloysia Novello was presented to the Brotherton Library in 1953 as part of the Novello Cowden Clarke Collection. Painted in Paris in 1861, the portrait materialises the alliance between Cobden and the Novello family that contributed to the Paper Duty Repeal Bill; part of the ultimately successful campaign against 'Taxes on Knowledge' that led to the transformation of journalism and proliferation of newspapers in Britain.

Dr Rebecca Wade is an Understanding British Portraits Fellow and the Maurice de Sausmarez Project Archivist in Special Collections and Galleries at the University of Leeds. She completed her PhD in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies in 2012 and her research interests sit between nineteenth-century museum and exhibitionary cultures, art and design education and the production, circulation and display of sculpture and its reproductions. Rebecca has completed postdoctoral fellowships with University of Cambridge Museums, the Henry Moore Foundation and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She is the author of Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and An Exhibition History of Victorian Leeds (Liverpool University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Art versus Industry? Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2016). Since 2022 Rebecca has been Deputy Editor of Art History, the journal of the Association for Art History.

Tickets for the lecture and reception refreshments: £9 (including a donation to FUAM Funds)