"Fungi and Flesh: William Henry Hunt’s Watercolors and the Politics of Technique" - Pamela Fletcher, Edith Cleaves Barry Professor of the History and Criticism of Art Inaugural Lecture

Fungi and Flesh: William Henry Hunt’s Watercolors and the Politics of Technique

In 1858, William Henry Hunt painted an extraordinary little watercolor called Fungi, now in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s collection. In this talk, Professor Pamela Fletcher offers a close reading of the painting and its contexts, connecting the materiality of Hunt’s technique to the questions of ecology, pollution, beauty, difference, and vision that shaped both the Victorian world and our own.

Pamela Fletcher ’89, P’25 is a professor of art history. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century British art and the history of the art market, and her classes cover topics that include modern and contemporary art, the history of new media, and the rise of the commercial art gallery. Her monograph The Victorian Painting of Modern Life was published in 2025. She is currently writing a history of the art market in nineteenth-century New York City, coauthored with Anne Helmreich, and has recently begun a new project on watercolorist William Henry Hunt.

Sponsored by the Office of Stewardship.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube Lord at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928.

Open to the public free of charge.

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Co-hosted with: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Art History, Digital and Computational Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies