Introduction

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

As the pages of this report will demonstrate, 2018–2019 saw the Centre maintaining its busy and successful schedule of scholarly events and implementing a substantial grants and fellowship programme. We continued developing our prize-winning publishing activities, both in print and online, organised a succession of well-received Yale in London courses and reached out to new audiences with our Public Lecture Courses and Write on Art essay competition. Our library and archive continued to grow, and members of the Centre completed a series of major scholarly research projects.

We also embarked upon an important new partnership with Tate Britain to jointly manage the British Art Network. This network, which is becoming ever more international in scope, brings together curators, academics and other art-world professionals, and is designed to foster the sharing of expertise and research on British art across a wide range of cultural organisations. At a time when so much of the arts sector in Britain is struggling due to financial cuts, and when curatorial morale across the nation’s regional museums and galleries is often very low, the network provides a much-needed form of resource and support. Its focus on research in the field of British art studies also provides a perfect match for the Centre’s own mission and aims. We anticipate taking the network into a new, far more ambitious and high-profile phase of its history.

The year also saw us paying our fond farewells to Amy Meyers, who stepped down from the Directorship of the Yale Center for British Art in the summer of 2019. Amy, whose portfolio of responsibilities included that of overseeing the Paul Mellon Centre, had served as a wonderful source of wisdom and support throughout her seventeen-year Directorship, and it was a pleasure to be able to say a proper good-bye to her at a series of events in London. The same events also offered us the opportunity to welcome her successor, Courtney Martin, with whom we look forward to working in the years to come.

Mark Hallett Director of Studies