12:45 p.m., Feb. 22, 2010----An exhibition of portraits of Victorian-era celebrities, representing the work of a professor and a research fellow from the University of Delaware, will open March 5 at the Henry B. Plant Museum in Tampa, Fla.

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“Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection” is curated by Margaret D. Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities at UD.

The exhibition features drawings, prints, photographs, watercolors, and books from a collection assembled over the past 30 years by Samuels Lasner, who is senior research fellow at the University of Delaware Library and one of the premier authorities on 19th-century book history. His privately owned collection is housed in the Morris Library.

In conjunction with the Plant Museum exhibition and the annual Nineteenth Century Studies Association conference, Stetz will participate in a March 11 roundtable talk about “Facing the Late Victorians” at the University of Tampa. On March 13, also at that university, Samuels Lasner will present an illustrated talk, “Collecting the Late Victorians.”

Visitors to the exhibition, which runs through June 5, will come face to face with images of famous British poets, painters, novelists, playwrights and illustrators, including Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, James McNeill Whistler, George Eliot and feminist “New Women” writers. The experience of viewing the pictures is a surprisingly modern one, similar to today's media obsession with celebrities, Stetz said.

In the 19th century, she said, “British culture became the equivalent of a great hall of mirrors. Images of faces, including representations of writers' and artists' faces, were the new and inescapable accompaniments to daily life, just as celebrity photos are today.”

The exhibition, which grew from a 2002 show titled “Beyond Oscar Wilde” at UD's University Gallery, has traveled to the prestigious Grolier Club in New York City and elsewhere. It also was the basis for an illustrated book by Stetz, Facing the Late Victorians, which was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2007.

The Henry B. Plant Museum is in the architecturally significant former Tampa Bay Hotel. For more about the museum and the exhibition, visit the Web site.