Welcome to this special issue of PMC Notes, which has been redesigned to mark the fact that 2020 is the Paul Mellon Centre’s fiftieth anniversary. I have used the opportunity provided by our refreshed newsletter, and this special year, to offer a brief account of the Centre’s history. This takes the shape of an illustrated, year-by-year chronicle in which I focus on some of the people, events, and projects that have shaped the Centre’s development. In doing so, I hope to shed light on all of the main strands of our activity over the past fifty years: our role in supporting scholarly publications on British art and architecture; our dissemination of grants and fellowships; our academic events programme; our research collections, which today offer a rich combination of library and archival resources; our teaching, which has long included annual Yale-in-London courses, and now encompasses a graduate summer school; and, finally, our in-house research projects, which have generated a series of exhibitions, catalogues raisonnés, and online publications. The following pages are also designed to suggest the ways in which the Centre has engaged with the wider field of British art studies over the last five decades. Over this period, this has been transformed from a small, rather closed area of art-historical specialisation, to one that is populated by thousands of scholars and researchers, who deploy a wide variety of approaches and address a
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