Curator’s Tour – Last Chance to see Guildhall Art Gallery’s exhibition celebrating telegraphy anniversary

On Thursday 19th January, the City of London Corporation’s Guildhall Art Gallery will hold a free Curator’s talk and guided tour of its latest exhibition, ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’, which marks the 150th anniversary of the first communications cable that was laid across the Atlantic, connecting Europe with America.

For the last time, Anne Chapman (a Scrambled Messages PhD Researcher based at King's College London) will regale visitors with intriguing tales of how the cable changed the world and transformed peoples’ understanding of time, space and speed of communication by allowing near-instantaneous communications across continents for the first time. The show is a collaboration between Guildhall Art Gallery, King’s College London, The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Institute of Making at University College London.

Highlights:
· Never-seen-before paintings by prominent Victorian artists and rare artefacts including telegraph cable samples, newspapers, maps, codebooks and telegraphic devices.
· Edwin Landseer’s renowned ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ (1848) painting of the last, thwarted journey of HMS Terror.
· A messaging machine designed by UCL and inspired by a Roald Dahl novel, which produces one-of-a-kind texts and enables visitors to create their own coded messages.

‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’ is open to the public until 22nd January 2017.

The City of London Corporation, which owns and manages Guildhall Art Gallery, invests £80m every year in heritage and cultural activities of all kinds. It is the UK’s largest funder of culture after the government, the BBC, and the Heritage Lottery Fund.