Print Publications

From Elizabeth Goldring’s brilliantly received Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist, to the monumental achievement of Hugh Belsey’s two-volume catalogue raisonné, Thomas Gainsborough: The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies after Old Masters, the quality of the titles produced this year emphasises the Centre’s ongoing commitment to publishing the best and most rigorous scholarship on British art history.

Morna O’Neill’s Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915 is a revelatory study of a dealer, collector and curator who sold ‘pictures by old painters to buy pictures by living painters’, and was central to the development of modern art markets and national collections of art in the early twentieth century.

The PMC continued its record of publishing detailed studies of significant buildings in Britain with Kensington Palace: Art, Architecture and Society, edited by Olivia Fryman, which explores the palace’s rich material and cultural history, alongside its unique human stories.

Hugh Belsey’s catalogue raisonné of Gainsborough’s portraits has been many years in the making and is a landmark publication – another in the Centre’s series of foundational catalogues on the great figures in British art.

Focusing on the close scrutiny of artefacts to challenge received wisdom about their subjects, Paul Binki’s Gothic Sculpture encourages a reappraisal of medieval sculpture, while Edward S. Cooke, Jr., in Inventing Boston: Design, Production, and Consumption, 1680–1720, reveals through material culture how the inhabitants of Boston were colonial, provincial, metropolitan and global, all at the same time.

Published to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, Elizabeth Goldring’s biography of Nicholas Hilliard has proved a runaway success. Shortlisted in the 2019 Richard Schlagman Art Book Awards, Nicholas Hilliard has been reviewed to great acclaim in the Guardian, The Times, the Times Literary Supplement and Art Quarterly, amongst many others.

In collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, the PMC also produced the catalogue for the exhibition of work by British artist George Shaw held at the YCBA (4 October 2018 to 30 December 2019) curated by Mark Hallett, which digs beneath the surface of the show to explore Shaw’s polyphony of pop-culture inspirations and art-historical references.