Special Projects

The Royal Academy Chronicle

The year 2018 saw the culmination of one of the Paul Mellon Centre’s most innovative and ambitious research projects: The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. The RA Chronicle is a digital publication that explores the history of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Scholarly, research-based essays and films examining key artists, artworks and events from each individual year’s exhibition are accompanied by 250 completely digitised and searchable copies of the accompanying exhibition catalogues. This repository of original research and primary source material is intended to shine new light on British art, its exhibition histories and its publics, and to encourage further innovative study. The RA Chronicle was edited by Professor Mark Hallett, Dr Sarah Victoria Turner and Dr Jessica Feather, working with their colleagues Baillie Card, Tom Scutt and Maisoon Rehani.

The RA Chronicle was launched on 30 May 2018 to coincide with the 250th anniversary year of the annual exhibition of contemporary art at the Royal Academy, and with the exhibition The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, which was co-curated by the Centre’s Professor Hallett and Dr Turner.

London, Asia

The “London, Asia” research project is co-led by Dr Sarah Victoria Turner and Hammad Nasar. It posits London as a key, yet under-explored, site in the construction of art-historical narratives in and of Asia, and examines the city’s influence through exhibitions, institutions and art education. “London, Asia” also reflects on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with, and challenges, existing histories of British art. It is a collaborative research project with the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong.

This partnership has been cemented through the “London, Asia” Research Award, which offers a stipend of $10,000 for a researcher to spend time at both the Paul Mellon Centre and the Asia Art Archive exploring a theme pertinent to the project. The first award holder was Sarena Abdullah, Senior Lecturer at the School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), whose work explores the artistic relationship between Malaysia and Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. She presented her findings at a research event entitled “The Commonwealth Institute: Contexts, Collaborations, Contestations”. In the autumn of 2017, Dr Turner and Hammad Nasar co-taught “Britain, South Asia: Entangled Histories”, one of the Centre’s five-week Public Lecture Courses, allowing the research generated by the project to be shared with a broader audience. In January 2018 the project brought together researchers working on exhibition histories for a workshop in preparation for the publication of a “London, Asia” special issue of British Art Studies. This will feature essays, filmed conversations and digital projects exploring how exhibitions have been key sites for the cultural interchange of British and Asian art practices and histories.

Collections and Display: The British Country House

The Paul Mellon Centre research project, “Collection and Display: The British Country House”, led by Dr Postle, focuses on the collection and display of works of art in the country house in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The project is based on the intensive study of eight individual houses, carefully selected so as to ensure a broad range of examples – appropriately varied in terms of their chronology, location and scale, and rich in terms of their holdings, their inventories and their information regarding the display of works of art during their histories. It also draws on the Paul Mellon Centre’s own extensive research resources, which include much that is of relevance: archival materials, correspondence, country house guides, sales catalogues, books, photographs and newly commissioned images. The eight houses selected as case studies are Castle Howard, Yorkshire; Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire; Mells Manor, Somerset; Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute; Petworth, West Sussex; Raynham Hall, Norfolk; Trewithen, Cornwall; and West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire. The results of the research are to be published online by the Paul Mellon Centre in the summer of 2020.

This year, writing and research was completed on Doddington Hall, including a catalogue of the painting collection and essays relating to aspects of the display history. In August 2017, Dr Postle organised and participated in a research trip to Trewithen, Cornwall. The findings of the research were written up, peer-reviewed and edited over the following months, and were completed by the spring of 2018. A number of research trips were also organised by Dr Postle, including visits to Raynham Hall and Mount Stuart. Dr Postle also commissioned new pieces of research, including a catalogue of Raynham Hall’s picture collection and a history of the collection at Mount Stuart.

Several study days were held for contributors to the project, including owners, curators, academics and invited scholars. They focused on Petworth House in October 2017, organised by Allen Fellow Dr Jessica Feather and Andrew Loukes, curator at Petworth, and West Wycombe Park in March 2018, organised by Dr Adriano Aymonino, Dr Clare Hornsby and Dr Postle. A workshop for contributors and invited scholars, based around the eight case studies, was held at the Paul Mellon Centre in October 2017. In the spring of 2018, Dr Postle commenced the planning for research on Mells Manor, to be conducted in the autumn of 2018 and spring of 2019.