Introduction

I have pleasure in submitting the forty-sixth Annual Report of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

This year saw the return of the PMC to expanded and redecorated premises at 15–16 Bedford Square, after a major building project which necessitated our temporary closure and the removal of all our staff to nearby office accommodation. Our new premises, which extend over two interconnected terrace houses on one of London’s most elegant squares, located right in the heart of Bloomsbury, have proved a great success. They provide greatly improved seminar, teaching and conference facilities, including a beautiful lecture room that features an original eighteenthcentury decorated ceiling and comfortably holds 60 people. The newly-furbished Centre also boasts a small exhibition space called the Drawing Room, which, as well as enabling us to host displays of materials from our collections, provides a showcase for the many books, now more than 300 in number, that we have published with Yale University Press. Meanwhile, our Yale in London student facilities are now far more substantial and comfortable, and include purpose-designed teaching and social areas across our top floor. Finally, our archival and library collections are now located in a greatly extended series of rooms across our basement, providing visitors to our Public Study Room with an even higher level of resource and service.

This major development in our history was accompanied by the launch of a second large-scale project: our new online journal, British Art Studies, the first issue of which was published in November 2015, and which has been developed and edited in collaboration with our colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art. This peer-reviewed, open-access journal is designed to promote world-class scholarship on British art and architecture, and to provide a showcase for the most innovative modes of digital art history. BAS is published three times a year, and features two open-call issues featuring pieces on a wide variety of topics, periods and materials, and a third themed issue, published in the summer, which this year was devoted to the subject of British Sculpture Abroad, 1945–2000. Alongside its packed arrays of scholarly articles, the journal includes a range of other regular features, including a ‘Conversation Piece’ that encompasses debates on important and provocative themes, and a ‘Look First’ section that encourages visitors to spend some time studying visual material before turning to stimulating forms of commentary. BAS has experimented with filmed content, has published recorded interviews, and is pioneering new ways of presenting cutting-edge research in the fields of conservation and restoration. In its first year, the journal won the ‘People’s Choice’ award for innovation at the 20th annual Museums and the Web conference and was visited by more than 20,000 unique users.

The year also incorporated a series of other innovations in the Centre’s outputs. October 2015 saw the launch of a new annual Public Lecture Course, geared to non-specialist audiences with an interest in British art and architecture, and taking the form of a course of free weekly lectures on a specific theme, run over the Fall term. Our inaugural course, which I taught with my colleague Martin Postle, and which was organised by Nermin Abdulla, was entitled From Satire to Spectacle: British Art in the Eighteenth Century. It was extremely well attended and generated very positive responses on the part of all those who had signed up; on its completion, planning soon began for the following year’s course, on the art and architecture of the British Country House.

Another development at the Centre was the introduction of a rolling programme of modestly scaled exhibition displays in our new Drawing Room. Three of these displays, which are designed to alert visitors to the riches of our library and archival holdings, and which are accompanied by small, pamphlet-sized catalogues, take place each year: those of the programme’s inaugural year focused, in turn, on modernist architecture in Britain; on the great historian of the English interior, John Cornforth; and on the history of the Yale in London programme.

All these activities, when seen alongside our packed schedule of research events and a raft of major book and online publications – which included a new online catalogue of the works of the Georgian watercolour artist Francis Towne –testify to the extent to which 2014–15 was a year of major growth in the Centre’s ambitions and activities. This was enabled by the support we received from our colleagues at Yale, and by the remarkable talents and energy of my colleagues here in London. We look forward to maintaining this record of achievement, collaboration and enterprise in the years to come.

Mark Hallett Director of Studies