Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Report 2020–2021

PMC Staff List

Director of Studies

Mark Hallett

Deputy Director for Grants and Publications

Martin Postle

Deputy Director for Finance and Administration

Sarah Ruddick

Deputy Director for Research

Sarah Victoria Turner

Learning Programme Manager

Nermin Abdulla

Digital Producer (Parental Leave Cover)

(from 23 November 2020)

Lucy Andia

Events Manager (Parental Leave Cover) (from 29 March 2021)

Shauna Blanchfield

Director’s Assistant (to 16 May 2021)

PMC Networks Coordinator and Director’s Assistant (from 17 May 2021)

Bryony Botwright-Rance

Archivist, Data Protection and Records Manager

Charlotte Brunskill

Editor

Baillie Card

Events Assistant

Danielle Convey

Paul Oppé Archive Project Cataloguer

Anthony Day

Fellowships, Grants and Communications Manager

Harriet Fisher (Harriet Sweet from 3 June 2021)

Events Manager

Ella Fleming

Librarian

Emma Floyd

British Art Network Administrator (from 12 April 2021)

Danielle Goulé

Assistant Librarian (to 21 January 2021)

Natasha Held

Assistant Archivist and Records Manager

Jenny Hill

Operations Assistant (to 30 September 2020)

Operations Coordinator (from 1 October 2020)

Stephanie Jorgensen

Paul Oppé Library Project Cataloguer (to 26 February 2021)

Assistant Librarian (from 1 March 2021)

Lucy Kelsall Editor

Emily Lees

British Art Network Convenor (from 1 September 2020)

Martin Myrone

Country House Project Research

Assistant/Drawing Room Display Curator (to 30 October 2020)

Freddie Pegram

Editorial Assistant

Tom Powell

Operations Manager

Suzannah Pearson

Digital Producer

Alice Read

Head of Research (Parental Leave Cover) (to 31 December 2020)

Anna Reid

Picture Researcher

Maisoon Rehani

Finance and Administration Officer

Barbara Ruddick

Operations Manager (Parental Leave Cover) (from 14 September 2020)

Alessandro Schianchi

Digital Manager

Tom Scutt

Library and Archives Cataloguer

Mary Smith

Finance Officer (from 2 November 2020)

Marianette Violeta

HR Manager

Barbara Waugh

Introduction

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

The twelve-month period covered by this report was a unique one in the institution’s history, shaped as it was by the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Throughout this period, as had been the case in the spring and summer of 2020, the Centre’s staff largely worked from home, and were thereby denied – like the Centre’s community more generally – the regular experience of in-person interaction at our premises in Bedford Square. My colleagues continued to respond brilliantly to these new and often highly challenging circumstances, and worked tirelessly to ensure that we maintained and even expanded our customary range of scholarly activities.

Many of these activities were, of course, taking place online. These included the scores of research events that we hosted during this period, which included a series of webinars and lectures – twelve in total – devoted to the theme of British Art and Natural Forces; two international workshops on Art Criticism and the Pandemic; and a five-week programme of events entitled London, Asia, Art, Worlds. While this move to online programming brought with it many difficulties and – when compared to our more traditional in-person events – some losses, it also generated numerous gains. Most significantly of all, it enabled us to reach out to new audiences, both across the UK and the world, who were now able to participate in our events without the need to travel to London. Numerous attendees told us how thrilled they were to take part in PMC events for the first time, having never been able to visit us in the past.

Our Public Lecture Course and British Art Talks podcast reinforced this kind of outreach in their own distinctive ways. In a departure from its normal format, the spring 2021 Public Lecture Course saw us releasing a specially commissioned series of six films on the works and influence of the eighteenthcentury British artist William Hogarth. Meanwhile, we continued to develop our British Art Talks programme in two series of podcasts that respectively engaged with contemporary artists and with scholars noted for their experimental approaches to art-writing. These series followed on from the Sculpting Lives

podcast co-developed by the Centre’s Sarah Turner, which was launched earlier in 2020 and generated widespread interest and acclaim throughout the year.

In another response to the circumstances in which we found ourselves over 2020–21, we offered a second tranche of Research Continuity Grants to institutions and scholars whose research projects were being adversely affected by the pandemic. These grants have been extremely well-received.

Alongside such initiatives, we ensured that our more established activities remained as ambitious and productive as ever. Thus, our publications programme went from strength to strength: our online journal British Art Studies continued to flourish, while the books we published in this period included, among other highlights, Matthew Craske’s critically acclaimed and prize-winning Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness. In the same period, our Archives and Library team took advantage of the Public Study Room’s closure to catalogue a series of important collections donated to the Centre. Meanwhile, our expanded support for the British Art Network proved transformative, enabling a raft of new programmes and activities, and a dramatic rise in its membership. Finally, our major online publication Art and the Country House was published in November 2020. The result of a long-term project led by the Centre’s Martin Postle, this important scholarly resource offers a wide range of new perspectives on the ways in which works of art have been collected and displayed in the British country house.

This year also saw us making important strides in ensuring that we become a more open and inclusive institution. This included drafting a new Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity Policy, diversifying the membership of our Advisory Council and Publications Committee, and developing a new suite of awards geared towards bringing more members of hitherto under-represented communities into the field of British art studies.

As we entered the summer of 2021, we were at last able to begin planning for the days when we might properly reopen the Centre and start working together in person once more. At the same time, it was satisfying to be able to look back on the past year as one that, despite all of its difficulties, had seen the Centre and its staff maintain our central mission of supporting the most original, rigorous and adventurous scholarship on British art and architecture.

Mark Hallett Director of Studies

Academic Activities

The Centre’s Academic Activities programme responded rapidly and creatively to the challenges of organising and hosting events during a global pandemic. Under the leadership of Anna Reid (Head of Research, parental leave cover in 2020) and Sarah Victoria Turner (Deputy Director for Research), a dynamic series of online talks, conferences, panels and podcasts was offered to an increasingly international audience. As well as presenting challenges, the production of an entirely digital events programme provided opportunities to experiment with the formats used for communicating new research and to think around developing new audiences for the research connected with the Centre. One of the first entirely digital events was Art Criticism and the Pandemic, a two-part panel discussion between art writers, historians and artists that attracted a large global audience.

The British Art and Natural Forces series of events took place across the autumn term, building on the experience of digital programming gained earlier in the year. This took the form of film screenings, panel discussions and keynote papers. The multi-part programme focused on the encounter between artistic or art-historical practice and the forces of the natural world, and placed such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. The contributions to this programme highlighted the growing interest within British art studies in the overlaps between artistic, geophysical, biological and ecological bodies of knowledge.

With audiences unable to visit the Centre for much of 2020, podcasts offered another way for its research to reach beyond the physical walls of our building in Bedford Square. In March 2020, Sarah Victoria Turner released Sculpting Lives, a podcast written and co-hosted with Jo Baring (Director of The Ingram Collection) focusing on the careers of historic and contemporary women sculptors. Listened to by more than 17,000 users, the podcast format has proved to be a popular and exciting channel for distribution and communication. Anna Reid also developed two new series of the British Art Talks podcast, one of which featured contributions by artists Lucy Skaer, Ryan Gander and Elizabeth Price, and the other of which was titled Experiments in Art Writing

John Akomfra, still from The Nine Muses (detail). Digital image courtesy of Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

Academic Activities

July 2020–June 2021

Summer Research Lunch Series 2020

17 July Theodore Gordon, ‘Dying a Very British Death: Ecstatic Antibodies and the Possibilities of Censorship of Queer Art in Britain, c.1990’

9–10 July 2020

Art Criticism and the Pandemic I

9 July, Resetting the Global

Speakers: Khairani Barokka, David Dibosa, Juliet Jacques, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Rehana Zaman

10 July, Whose Body?

Speakers: Larne Abse Gogarty, Robert McRuer, Jade Montserrat, Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, Marina Vishmidt

Chaired by Chris McCormack

6 October–3 December 2020

British Art and Natural Forces

A series of panels and keynote lectures addressed the ways in which artistic and art-historical thinking and practice –in the context of British art and visual culture – have shaped or been shaped by the encounter with natural forces, whether benign or cataclysmic, shortor long-term, visible or invisible.

6 October, Geomorphic Forces

Caterina Franciosi (Yale University), ‘“Hell on Earth”: Edward Burne-Jones’s Perseus Series (1876–1885) and Narratives of Geophysical Development’

Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St Andrews), ‘Picturing the Geological Sublime’

Joe Kerr (Syracuse University, London), ‘Alfred Watkins: Art, Nature and the Supernatural’

Tobah Aukland-Peck (City University, New York), ‘“Minerals of the Island”: Tracing the Fossil Landscapes of the 1951 Festival of Britain’

Chaired by Martin Myrone (PMC)

8 October, Plants, Animals

Lauren Cannady (University of Maryland), ‘The Order of Nature, the Disorder of Names’

Jeremy Melius (Tufts University), ‘Vivisection and the Visual Arts’

Laura Ouillon (Université de Paris), ‘Re-membering Trees after the Great Storm: Ecological Grief in Garry Fabian Miller’s Work’

Chaired by Sria Chatterjee (IXDM, Basel/ Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut)

20 October, Authors of Architecture

Freya Wigzell (University College London), ‘Piling Up the Debris’

Euan McCartney Robson (University College London), ‘Sticks and Stones: A Poetic Cathedral’

Alicia Weisberg-Roberts (Independent Scholar), ‘Terraforming Hong Kong (1840–1860)’

Jonathan Hill (University College London), ‘The Landscape of Climate: John Evelyn and Brenda Colvin’

Chaired by Martin Postle (PMC)

22 October, Keynote

Andrew Patrizio (University of Edinburgh), ‘Apocalyptic Conjunctures: The Weather of Art History’

Chaired by Mark Hallett (PMC)

3 November, Observations, Meteorology

Mark Cheetham (University of Toronto), ‘Storm Clouds, Plague Clouds & Laundry Lines of the Nineteenth Century: Domestic Meteorology Aboard Arctic Voyages from Britain’

Benjamin Pollitt (National Maritime Museum, London), ‘Between Westall’s Chaos and Humboldt’s Cosmos: Picturing the Weather in 1848’

Sarah Gould (Panthéon Sorbonne University), ‘Matters of Excess in J. M. W. Turner’s Paintings’

Nicholas Robbins (University College London), ‘John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate’

Chaired by Julia Lum (Scripps College)

5 November, Keynote

Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton University), ‘Observation and Diagnosis: Pathologizing Bodies, Medicalizing Space in the British Empire’

Chaired by Sria Chatterjee (IXDM, Basel/ Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut)

17 November, Decolonial Agencies

Holly Shaffer (Brown University), ‘Birds and Books in Flight across India and Britain’

Bergit Arends (University of Bristol), ‘Empire and Ecology: Activations by Contemporary Artists of Collections at the Natural History Museum in London’

Eleanore Neumann (University of Virginia), ‘Maria Graham on the Natural History of Brazil and Chile, 1821–1825’

Giulia Smith (University of Oxford), ‘Decolonising the Amazon: Aubrey Williams and Wilson Harris Find El Dorado’

Chaired by Hammad Nasar (PMC)

18–19 November, 48-hour Film Screening, INFINITY Minus Infinity

The Otolith Group (56 mins)

19 November, Keynote (Pre-Recorded)

T. J. Demos (University of California), ‘Racial Capitalocene: Ecology and Abolition’

24 November, Curating the Sea

Pandora Syperek (Loughborough University London) and Sarah Wade (University of East Anglia), ‘Curating the Sea: Oceanic Exhibition Making at a Time of Ecological Crisis’

Stefanie Hessler (Kunsthall Trondheim), ‘Tidalectic Curating’

Miranda Lowe (Natural History Museum, London), ‘Through the Curatorial Looking Glass: Re-Righting (not rewriting) the Oceanographic Natural Histories’

Chaired by Mark Hallett (PMC)

1 December, Unstable Boundaries, Ecologies

Siobhan Angus (Yale University), ‘“Ferments of a disquieting instability”: Iron, Industrialization, and Anna Atkins’ Cyanotypes’

Laura Franchetti (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘The Undulating Self: Acoustical Physics, Embodied Sensations and Frederic Leighton’s Weaving the Wreath (c.1872)’

Thomas Hughes (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Ruskin, Drawing and the Limits of the Human’

Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell (University of Cambridge), ‘Erotic Ecologies: Horizontality and Be(holding) in Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT (2016)’

Luca Beisel (Freie Universität Berlin), ‘“As Nature Herself Might Do, Were Her Such Intent”: The Form-giving Forces of Nature and their Simulation in British Picturesque Landscape Art (ca. 1770–1820)’

Chaired by Anna Reid (PMC)

3 December, Final Panel Discussion

Hosted by Anna Reid (PMC)

Speakers: Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Tobah Aukland-Peck, Sria Chatterjee, Thomas Hughes, Miranda Lowe, Eleanore Neumann, Temi Odumosu, Andrew Patrizio, Giulia Smith, Pandora Syperek, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Lucy Whelan

Introduction by Mark Hallett (PMC)

British Art Talks Podcast, Series 2, Autumn 2020

28 October, Episode 1, Lucy Skaer

25 November, Episode 2 ,Elizabeth Price Part 1

27 November, Episode 3, Elizabeth Price Part 2

2 December, Episode 4, Ryan Gander

7 December, Episode 5, Elizabeth Price Part 3

Autumn Research Lunch Series 2020

16 October Elizabeth Robles, ‘“Black Art” and British Art History’

13 November Jade Montserrat, ‘Contagion’

27 November Jessica Carden and Tiffany Boyle, ‘Affective Proximities’

10 November 2020, Slade, London, Asia: Intersections of Decolonial Modernism

A talk that formed part of a series of programmes for London, Asia, a collaboration between Asia Art Archive and the Paul Mellon Centre

Lecture by Ming Tiampo

Chaired by Hammad Nasar

9 December 2020

Paul Mellon Centre Book Night

Thomas Crow, The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London, 1957–1969

Melody Barnett Deusner, Aesthetic Painting in Britain and America: Collectors, Art Worlds, Networks

Matthew Craske, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness

Martin Myrone, Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Education Opportunity in Romantic Britain

Sam Smiles, The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The Artist and his Critics

Spring Research Lunch Series 2021

8 January Hamish Muir, ‘Rewriting the Script: Theatre Playwriting Practice and the Design of an Ecological, Sustainable Theatre’

22 January Ileana-Lucia

Selejan, ‘Foto Studio Bluefields: Photography and Political Life on the Nicaraguan Caribbean’

29 January Rebecca Tropp, ‘Accommodating the Picturesque: The Country Houses of James Wyatt, John Nash and Sir John Soane, 1793–1815’

5 February Grace Thompson, ‘Bankside, Britain, Global, Public: The Turbine Hall Series in Tate Modern’

19 February Ana González, ‘Disorienting the Gaze: Ngozi Onwurah’s Early Films’

10 February 2021

French Art and Scotch Ideas: The Scottish Enlightenment and the Dawn of Modernity in French Art

A lecture as part of a collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre and the Fleming Collection, focusing on aspects of Scottish art, both current and neglected.

Introduction by Martin Postle

Lecture by Duncan Macmillan

10 March 2021

A Film Discussion: Shadows From Light

An in-conversation organised in collaboration with the BFI and University of Reading, preceded by a 48-hour ‘screening’ of the film on the Paul Mellon Centre website.

Speakers: Will Fowler, Rachel Garfield

15 March 2021

Book Launch: Pevsner Architectural Guides, Buildings of England: Wiltshire

Speakers: James O. Davies, Charles O’Brien, Julian Orbach

Chaired by Mark Hallett

17 March 2021

Speaking of Art: Art, Histories and the Podcast

A panel discussion reflecting on the development of British Art Talks and Sculpting Lives, two podcasts produced by the Paul Mellon Centre.

Speakers: Jo Baring, Cathy Courtney, James Mansell, Inigo Wilkins

Co-chaired by Anna Reid and Sarah Victoria Turner

19 March 2021

One Object: Stories of British Art History

A presentation by four recipients of Centre funding who each focused on one intriguing object from their research to tell its story from their corner of British art history.

Lydia Miller, Letter to Ambrose McEvoy from Augustus John, Summer 1899, Vattetot-sur-mer

Fintan Cullen, Imperial Tensions on Display, Dublin c.1990

Hannah Lee, The Portrait of Philippe de la Motte

Pippa Oldfield, First World War Photo Album by Mairi Chisholm

31 March 2021

Book Launch: Pevsner Architectural Guides, Buildings of England: County Durham

Speakers: Simon Bradley, Martin Roberts

Chaired by Martin Postle

British Art Talks Podcast, Series 3: Experiments in Art Writing, Spring 2021

14 April, Episode 1, Catherine Grant

21 April, Episode 2, Adrian Rifkin

28 April, Episode 3, Maria Fusco

5 May, Episode 4, Roger Robinson

4–18 May 2021

Activating Art History

A series of panel discussions with curators, scholars, academics and authors who have all contributed to the study of British art history through the Paul Mellon Centre fellowships and grants scheme.

4 May, Curating Art History

Speakers: Ben Cartwright, Cynthia Johnston, Mark Sealy

Chaired by Martin Postle

11 May, Publishing Art History

Speakers: Jo Applin, Ian Dudley, Jacqueline Riding

Chaired by Mark Hallett

11 May, Researching Art History

Speakers: Eva Bentcheva, Anthony Geraghty, Felicity Myrone, Shirlynn Sham

Chaired by Sarah Victoria Turner

18 May, Digital Art History

Speakers: Adjoa Armah, Stacey Clapperton, Cathy Courtney, Lucy Steeds

Chaired by Lucy Andia

18 May, Funding Art History

Speakers: Emma Coleman, Gregory Perry, Sally Stott

Chaired by Harriet Fisher

5–6 May 2021

Art Criticism and the Pandemic II

5 May, Safer Spaces

Speakers: Sria Chatterjee, Isobel Harbison, Stella Nyanzi, Ariane Sutthavong

6 May, Wearing Out

Speakers: Oreet Ashery, Jackson Davidow, Leigh Claire La Berge, Marc Aziz Michael, Dante Micheaux, Monica Narula and Jeebesh Bagchi (Raqs Media Collective)

Chaired by Chris McCormack

Summer Fellows Lecture 2021

12 May Amy Tobin, ‘Issue and Taboo: Feminism and Art between New York and London c.1980’

Summer Research Seminar Series 2021

26 May Lynda Nead, ‘Glamour, Excess and Commodification: The Female Body in 1950s Britain’

9 June Julian Stallabrass, ‘Street Art: An Image of the People?’

23 June Sigrid de Jong, ‘Competing Capitals: Towards the Embellishment of London and Paris’

27 May–25 June 2021

London, Asia, Art, Worlds

A multi-part conference programme that took place over eight sessions across five weeks in a series of interconnected papers, conversations, performances and interventions as part of the Paul Mellon Centre’s London, Asia project

27 May, Sociality and Affect

Leela Gandhi (Brown University), ‘Invisible Inc’

Simone Wille (Art Historian), ‘Krishna Reddy between Santiniketan, London, Paris, Ljubljana, and Vienna: Cold War Friendships and Networks, Collaborations and Aesthetic Solidarities’

Greg Salter (University of Birmingham), ‘Sunil Gupta and Transnational Queer Kinship in the 1980s’

Chaired by Sarah Victoria Turner (PMC)

3 June, Potential Histories and Solidarities

Omar Kholeif (Sharjah Art Foundation) and Michael Rakowitz (Artist), ‘Keynote Conversation’

David Morris (Afterall), ‘Artists for Democracy and the Vietnam Festival (1975)’

Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani (YCBA), ‘A Little Too Much “Commonwealth New Vision”’

Chaired by Parul Dave-Mukherji (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

4 June, Circulation and Encounter

Tim Barringer (Yale University) and Hew Locke (Artist), ‘East Indian, West Indian’

Michelle Wong (Asia Art Archive), ‘Overlay Pages, Stitched Worlds: On Ha Bik Chuen’s Creative and Archival Practice’

Sophia Balagamwala (Artist), ‘Whereabouts Unknown / Ata Pata Maloom Nahin’

Chaired by Hammad Nasar (PMC)

10 June, Pedagogy and LearningΩ

Naazish Ata-Ullah (formerly National College of Arts, Lahore), ‘Multi-layered Histories: Evolving Pedagogies in Pakistan’s Pioneering Art School’

Aziz Sohail (Curator), ‘A Changed World: London, Karachi, 1985–1999’

Charmaine Toh (National Gallery

Singapore), ‘First Move: Tang Da Wu in London’

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol (Singapore Art Museum), ‘Human, Person, Friend: Subjects of Comparative Religion in Postwar Thai Art’

Chaired by Ming Tiampo (Carleton University)

11 June, Bureaucracy and Agency

Zainub Verjee (Artist), ‘Past Disquiet of World Making: A Normative Enquiry into the Festival of India in London (1982)’

Aparna Kumar (University College

London), ‘Leveraging a Royal Coordinate: Partition and Museum Diplomacy across London and Lahore’

Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Amsterdam), ‘De/constructing Commonwealth Art Today, 1962’

Chaired by Karin Zitzewitz (Michigan State University)

17 June, Aesthetics and Ways of Knowing

Shigemi Inaga (Kyoto Seika University), ‘If You’re Fluent in English, Put on Japanese Kimono Abroad. But if Your English Is Awful, Better Be Dressed in Western Attire’

Sadia Shirazi (Curator), ‘Zarina: A Postcolonial Grid’

Elena Crippa (Tate), ‘Kim Lim’s Early Work: Reconfiguration and Reconciliation’

Eva Bentcheva (Art Historian), ‘Incommensurable Abstractions: Rasheed Araeen and Prafulla Mohanti’s Performances between Britain and South Asia’

Chaired by Dorothy Price (University of Bristol)

24 June, Thinking Through Empire Rana Mitter (University of Oxford), ‘The Making, Breaking and Return of Empire – 1750 to 2021 and Beyond’

Dipti Khera (New York University), ‘From Udaipur’s Streets to London’s Stephenson Way: Sensing Historical Moods between the Visual Worlds and Archived Words of Ghasi, Waugh, Finden, and Tod’

Toshio Watanabe (University of East Anglia), ‘Watercolour Landscape of “Japan” in Victorian London, Meiji Tokyo and Colonial Taipei: Shifts in the Canon’

Gemma Sharpe (City University of New York), ‘The Odder Story: Iqbal Geoffrey’s London’

Chaired by Wenny Teo (Courtauld Institute of Art)

25 June, Thinking from Asia

Patrick Flores (University of the Philippines), ‘Aroundness, Awareness: To Rework Art Out of Asia’

Amrita Dhallu (Tate), ‘Subcontinentment: Diasporas, Futurisms, Worldbuilding’

Farida Batool (Artist and Researcher) and Sehr Jalil (Artist and Researcher), ‘Contesting Public(s) and Art Education in Pakistan’

Stephanie Bailey (Ocula Magazine), ‘Thinking Through Empire from Asia: An Object Lesson’

Chaired by Yeewan Koon (University of Hong Kong)

Hammad Nasar (PMC), John Tain (Asia Art Archive), Ming Tiampo (Carleton University) and Sarah Victoria Turner (PMC), ‘Conference Wrap-Up’

Print Publications

With home offices established and the continuing uncertainty around the global situation integrated into daily routines, our publishing programme pressed onwards into the Covid era. In the early months of the pandemic, the biggest uncertainty for the list was the fate of those books already on press in China. As time went on, it was increasingly difficult to source illustrations, with museums, galleries and picture libraries closed and staff furloughed. But with careful planning, some ingenuity and a measure of good luck – and aided by strong relationships with freelancers and suppliers – the list was kept on track throughout, and a full complement of innovative and engaging new titles emerged into an unsettled and unfamiliar world.

Distinguished monographs on major artists have been a feature of the PMC’s list since its foundation, and this year we were delighted to continue that tradition by publishing Matthew Craske’s ground-breaking work on Joseph Wright of Derby. This year’s list also featured an investigation of William Blake’s highly regarded monoprints and a study of J. M. W. Turner’s audacious and compelling late works.

Martin Myrone’s biographical survey of almost 1,800 students at the Royal Academy of Arts was the basis for his exploration of the historical genesis of the figure of the artist; while Melody Deusner shed new light on the Aesthetic Movement and the production and circulation of artworks. This year’s distinguished team of authors also produced a scintillating study of Mod culture’s dynamic impact on post-war British art; an illuminating account of the gifted designer and brilliant art entrepreneur Daniel Cottier; a longawaited investigation of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland and their extraordinary campaign of patronage; and a deeply researched exploration of the life and work of the celebrated eighteenth-century artist, explorer, naturalist and author Mark Catesby.

We also continued our contribution to Yale’s Art & Architecture ePortal, with four more historic books appearing on the platform this year. We have been highly gratified to see the growing number of people encountering these important titles in a new way, and look forward to seeing that continue over the coming years.

Pomona (detail), staircase window in Ingliston House, Midlothian, by Cottier & Co, London, c.1870–5. Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc. © 2006

Print Publications

July 2020–June 2021

Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and ArtEducational Opportunity in Romantic Britain

September 2020

The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The Artist and his Critics

October 2020

Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness

November 2020

The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London 1957–1969

October 2020

Melody Barnett Deusner

Aesthetic Painting in Britain and America: Collectors, Art Worlds, Networks

October 2020

Martin Myrone

Thomas Crow

Sam Smiles

Matthew Craske

Joseph Viscomi

William Blake’s Printed Paintings: Methods, Origins, Meanings

May 2021

Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland

June 2021

Petra

Daniel Cottier: Designer, Decorator, Dealer

May 2021

Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catesby

June 2021

ten-Doesschate Chu, Max Donnelly

Adriano Aymonino

Henrietta McBurney

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (detail), 1766, Derby Museum and Art Gallery

Paul Mellon Centre

British Art Studies

During the period covered by this report, three issues of British Art Studies –the Centre’s peer-reviewed and open access journal – were published online. The journal was founded in 2015 and is co-published with the Yale Center for British Art.

Issue 17 (September 2020) was a themed issue on Elizabethan and Jacobean miniature painting, guest edited by Catharine MacLeod and Alexander Marr. It contains nine articles, written by art historians, curators and conservators, which were all drawn from a 2019 conference on Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, hosted by the National Portrait Gallery and co-organised by the Paul Mellon Centre and the University of Cambridge. The journal’s digital platform allowed the integration of zoomable high-resolution images of several miniatures and enabled us to present images from technical analysis using a slider tool for close comparison.

The next two issues were both open issues. Issue 18 (November 2020) features articles on a range of subjects, and a ‘Conversation Piece’ feature, convened by BAS contributing editor Sria Chatterjee, brought together short texts from twenty authors responding to her provocation on British art history, environmental justice and the ecological crisis. Independent curator Angela Chan also commissioned five artists and collectives to contribute cover art for this issue, selecting pieces thematically connected to the arts and environmental justice. For Issue 19 (February 2021), we commissioned another ‘Conversation Piece’ feature on a timely subject in British art history: the provocation was ‘Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum’ by Dan Hicks. Both of these features were among our most read within months of being published. Alongside the articles in Issue 19, Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor contributed cover art from a series of works examining Portuguese and British colonial legacies in the Benin Empire.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, a redesign of the journal, which had originally been planned for this business year, was rescheduled for 2022. This will, among other things, implement improvements identified by the user-experience testing carried out on the journal’s website in February 2020.

Sonia E. Barrett, Table No. 2, 2014, rope, table and packing foam. Image courtesy of Bruno Weiss (all rights reserved)

British Art Studies

July 2020–June 2021

British Art Studies, Issue 17: Elizabethan and Jacobean Miniature Paintings in Context

September 2020

Edited by Catharine MacLeod and Alexander

Marr

Articles

‘An Early Impresa Miniature: Man in an Armillary Sphere (1569)’, by Alexander Marr

‘Lively Limning: Presence in Portrait Miniatures and John White’s Images of the New World’, by Christina Faraday

‘Game of Thrones: Early Modern Playing Cards and Portrait Miniature Painting’, by Karin Leonhard

‘Negotiating a Courtship between Courts: Hilliard’s Prayer Book Portraits of Queen Elizabeth and the Duc d’Anjou’, by William Aslet

‘A Portrait of the Miniaturist as a Young Man’, by Edward Town

‘Isaac Oliver and the Essex Circle’, by Catharine MacLeod

‘Portrait of an Unknown Lady: Technical Analysis of an Early Tudor Miniature’, by Polly Saltmarsh

‘A Very Proper Treatise: Specialist Knowledge for a Non-Specialist Public’, by Annemie Leemans

‘Secrets of a Silent Miniaturist: Findings from a Technical Study of Miniatures Attributed to Isaac Oliver’, by Christine Slottved Kimbriel and Paola Ricciardi

British Art Studies, Issue 18 November 2020

Articles

‘Women in Fur: Empire, Power, and Play in a Victorian Photography Album’, by Sarah Parsons

‘The Lost Cause of British Constructionism: A Two-Act Tragedy’, by Sam Gathercole

‘Aubrey Beardsley in the Russian “World of Art”’, by Sasha Dovzhyk

‘Making a Case: Daguerreotypes’, by Steve Edwards

Conversation Piece

‘The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis’, convened by Sria Chatterjee

Cover Collaboration

‘Climate and Culture Beyond Borders’, by Worm: art + ecology, featuring contributions by Michael Leung, Sonia E. Barrett, The Bonita Chola (aka Angela Camacho), INTERPRT, and Angela Chan

Victor Ehikhamenor, The King Returning from Holy Aruosa Cathedral, 2018, rosary beads, bronze statuettes, and thread on canvas, 116 × 71 in. Image courtesy of Victor Ehikhamenor (all rights reserved)

British Art Studies, Issue 19 February 2021

Articles

‘Spratt’s Flaps: Midwifery, Creativity, and Sexuality in Early Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture’, by Rebecca Whiteley

‘Millais’s Metapicture: The NorthWest Passage as Distillate of Arctic Voyaging from the Anglosphere’, by Mark A. Cheetham

‘John McHale, Marshall McLuhan, and the Collage “Ikon”’, by Rachel Stratton

Conversation Piece

‘Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum’, convened by Dan Hicks

Cover Collaboration

‘Royal Religion Series’, by Victor Ehikhamenor

Fellowships and Grants

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the award remits were changed ahead of the autumn 2020 funding round to better fit the global situation. The Event Support Grant remit was altered to allow institutions to also include costs for hosting online and virtual events; the Research Support Grant remit was changed to allow individuals to claim ‘at home’ research costs; and the Curatorial Research Grant remit was altered to allow institutions to put the funding towards new projects with current staff, or towards existing projects that may have been delayed by the pandemic. The Event Support and Research Support remit changes were continued in the spring 2021 round. In the autumn 2020 round, despite some applications being received, no Collaborative Project Grants were awarded as the proposals were not deemed suitable to the remit.

At the start of 2021, it was decided that another round of the Research Continuity Grants and Research Continuity Fellowships would be awarded in response to the Covid-19 crisis. These were awarded in June 2021. The Conservation Fellowship for the academic year 2020–21 of £25,000 was awarded to Gainsborough’s House, towards the conservation and research of their Cedric Morris collection and three Gainsborough portraits.

Paul Nash, Mineral Objects, 1935, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B1998.21.1

Fellowships and Grants

July 2020–June 2021

Autumn 2020

At the October 2020 meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded:

Conservation Fellowship

Gainsborough’s House was awarded £25,000 towards the conservation and research of the Cedric Morris collection and three Gainsborough portraits

Curatorial Research Grants

Art UK was awarded £30,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project ‘Art UK Sculpture: Completing the Recording of Public Sculpture’

Glynn Vivian Art Gallery was awarded £20,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project ‘Imperial Subjects (Post) Colonial Conversations between Britain and South Asia’

Kingston Museum was awarded £40,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project ‘Making Muybridge Visible: An Online Catalogue’

National Museums Liverpool was awarded £40,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project ‘666: Black Girl Magic’

Touchstones Rochdale was awarded £32,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project ‘Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s: The Legacy of Jill Morgan’

Digital Project Grants

Afterall was awarded £40,000 towards the digital mapping of the legacies of the slave trade in contemporary art through its ‘Black Atlantic Museum’ project New Architecture Movement was awarded £10,000 towards preserving, collating and providing digital access to its archives through its ‘Digital Archive’ project

Pallant House Gallery was awarded £30,000 towards creating a searchable database and online exhibition of its collection of British Pop art through its ‘Unlocking British Pop Art’ project

Event Support Grants

Leamington Spa Art Gallery was awarded £1,500 towards the online lecture series ‘In Sickness and in Health: Art and Medicine in Britain’

Ruskin School of Art was awarded £1,500 towards the online conference ‘Biotic Resistance: Eco-Caribbean Visions in Art and Exhibition Practice’

Publication Grants

Afterall was awarded £7,000 towards publishing Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court

Nicola Baird, Sarah MacDougall and Ben Uri Gallery and Museum were awarded £7,700 towards publishing Becoming Gustav Metzger: The Early Years, 1945–1959

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art was awarded £7,000 towards publishing Sutapa Biswas

Dordrechts Museum was awarded £5,000 towards publishing In the Light of Cuyp: Aelbert Cuyp & Gainsborough – Constable – Turner

Duke University Press was awarded £8,500 towards publishing Detour to the Imaginary: Stuart Hall’s Writings on the Visual Arts and Culture

Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi was awarded £300 towards publishing Emotion, Mission, Architecture: Building Hospitals in Persia and NorthWestern British India, 1865–1914

Jasmine Hunter Evans was awarded £550 towards publishing David Jones and Rome: Reimagining the Decline of Western Civilisation

William Fowler and Strange Attractor Press were awarded £8,500 towards publishing Towers Open Fire: The Queer Film Worlds of Antony Balch

Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède were awarded £1,750 towards publishing British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges and Responses Since the Industrial Revolution

LUX was awarded £6,000 towards publishing Annabel Nicolson: Fire Works

Ian Massey and Ridinghouse were awarded £8,500 towards publishing Queer St Ives and Other Stories

Ella S. Mills was awarded £2,200 towards publishing Black Women Artists: Voices of Resistance, Strategies of Creation

John Webber, Burial Ground in the South Seas, c. 1777, oil on paper on panel. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.672

MK Gallery was awarded £8,500 towards publishing Ingrid Pollard – Carbon Slow Turning (working title)

Joseph Monteyne was awarded £1,700 towards publishing Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres

Norfolk Museums Service was awarded £3,650 towards publishing A Passion for Landscape: Rediscovering John Crome

Sophie Read and MIT Press were awarded £8,500 towards publishing Soane the Lecturer

Emma Roodhouse and Colchester & Ipswich Museums Service were awarded £8,500 towards publishing John Constable: Made in Suffolk (working title)

Amy Thomas and MIT Press were awarded £8,500 towards publishing Rebuilding the City of London: Architecture, Planning, and Finance, 1945–93

Simona Valeriani was awarded £3,000 towards publishing The Royal Albert Hall: Building the Arts and Sciences

Zhengfeng Wang was awarded £150 towards publishing Central Market in Hong Kong: Urban Amenities in a Speculative Field

Verity Wilson and Reaktion Books were awarded £8,500 towards publishing Dressing Up: The Culture of Fancy Dress in Britain, 1837–1953

Ada de Wit was awarded £3,000 towards publishing Grinling Gibbons and the Golden Age of Woodcarving: The Netherlands and Britain, 1650–1700

Research Support Grants

Rhian Addison was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Transient and Established: The London Studios of Landscape Artists George Morland and John Constable’

Laia Anguix Vilches was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Rediscovering John Martin: An Apocalyptic Taste in PostWar Britain’

Lucy Bailey was awarded £350 for research on ‘Walter Fawkes’ (1769–1825) Collection of Modern Watercolours by British Artists’

Susie Beckham was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Names, Origins and Receptions: An analysis of the unpublished memoir of “The P.R.B. & Walter Howell Deverell” and further select Pre-Raphaelite source material in the Huntington Library’

Eva Bentcheva was awarded £1,000 for research on ‘Itinerant Abstractions: The Work of Prafulla Mohanti’

Louise Box was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Documenting Judy Egerton (1928– 2012): an Australian-born British Art Historian and Her World’

Emily Burns was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Painters and Picturemakers: The Painter-Stainers’ Company during the Civil Wars and Interregnum, c. 1640–1660’

Ludovico Centis was awarded £1,500 for research on ‘Reyner Banham’s Tracks in the Age of Brexit’

Peter Christensen was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘The Architectural Patent: Inventing Modernity’

Anais Da Fonseca was awarded £1,000 for research on ‘Itinerant Abstractions: The Work of Prafulla Mohanti’

Elizabeth Deans was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Sketchbook, and His Architectural Formation’

Brian Dillon was awarded £1,500 for research on ‘Sometimes a Mere Foundation’

Nora Epstein was awarded £1,400 for research on ‘Visual Commonplacing: The Transmission and Reception of Printed Religious Images in Reformed England and Scotland’

Lucia Farinati was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Audio Arts – A Polyvocal History of the British Sound Magazine’

Alicia Foster was awarded £600 for research on Nina Hamnett (for Eiderdown Books)

Clarisse Godard Desmarest was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘William Burn’s Pioneer Scots Baronial houses’

Andrew Hodgson was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Xeroxing Surrealism: TRANSFORMAcTION and Collage as Aesthetic Continuity’

Eleanor Jones was awarded £450 for research on ‘Intimate Portraits, Surreal Experiments: Lee Miller and Barbara Ker-Seymer’

Eve Kalyva was awarded £2,000 for supplementary archival research for the manuscript ‘A Guide to Early Conceptual Art Exhibitions in Britain, 1969–1979’

Silvano Levy was awarded £1,650 for research on ‘Mary Wykeham: Surrealist out of the Shadows’

Samuel Love was awarded £600 for research on ‘Glamour, English Art, and the Re-Enchantment of High Society, 1918–39’

Eva Charlotta Mebius was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘The Reception of British Art at the Stockholm Exhibition, 1897’

Siddharth Pandey was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘A “Little England” in the Indian Himalayas: Perceiving Shimla, the Summer Capital of Imperial India’

Rianna Jade Parker was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Master Painters of the British Caribbean: The Early Intuitives in Jamaica’

Robert Wilkes was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘British Artists in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Representations of the Brazilian Landscape’

Christopher Williams-Wynn was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Problems of Social Function: Art, Interaction and the Cybernetic Techniques of Stephen Willats in the 1970s’

Andrew Wyld Research Support Grants

Caroline Douglas was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Retouching the Archive: Encountering the Paper Calotype’

Claire Spadafora was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘The Early Work of a “Raphael secundus”: William Kent in Italy and England, 1709–1724’

Spring 2021

At the March 2021 meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded:

Senior Fellowships

Steve Edwards (Birkbeck) was awarded £40,000 for the project ‘Daguerreotypes: Patents, Persons & Portraits’

Tanya Harrod was awarded £40,000 for the project ‘Extreme Culture: The Artistic and Political Lives of Margaret and Rolf Gardiner’

Kate Retford (Birkbeck) was awarded £40,000 for the project ‘Cutting and Pasting: Making Print Rooms in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1840’ (Note: this award was declined)

Kathryn Ann Smith (New York University) was awarded £40,000 for the project ‘Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible’

Mid-Career Fellowships

John Munns (University of Cambridge) was awarded £15,000 for the project ‘The Art of Norman England’

Robert Proctor (University of Bath) was awarded £15,000 for the project ‘Percy Thomas: Modern Architecture as National Service’

Lucy Reynolds (University of Westminster) was awarded £15,000 for the project ‘When Film Threads through a Sewing Machine: Film, Video and Feminism in London from Reel Time (1973) to Johnny Panic (1999)’

Hope Wolf (University of Sussex) was awarded £15,000 for the project ‘Sussex Modernism’

Postdoctoral Fellowships

Meg Bernstein (Yale Institute of Sacred Music) was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘A Living Church: Building the English Medieval Parish, 1150–1300’

Tom Bromwell (University of York) was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘Visions of an Ending: Eschatology, Apocalypse, and Millennium in Interwar British Art and Visual Culture’

Alistair Cartwright (Birkbeck) was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘The Architecture of the Rented World: Unmaking and Remaking the Terraced House in Postwar London, 1945–65’

Edwin Coomasaru was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘Masculinity and Apocalypticism in British Art, 1967–2020’

Lotte Crawford was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘The Modern Craftsman’s Fingers, From the Handloom to Innovations in Indigo: Two Studies on Anglo-Indian Textile Relations of the 1910s’

Emily Doucet (University of Toronto) was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘Compressing Correspondence: The Airgraph and Photography’s Colonial Networks’ (Note: this award was declined)

Nicolas Helm-Grovas (King’s College London) was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Metalanguage and Counter-cinema’

Richard Hudson-Miles was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘1968: British Art and Culture in a Year of Revolutions’

Laurel Peterson was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘Making Spaces: Art in the Whig Country House, 1688–1745’

Ben Pollitt was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘In Sympathy’s Wake: Dissonance and Attachment in John Webber’s Atlas’

Alexandra Quantrill (Columbia University) was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘Electric Women: The TechnoFeminist Modernism of the Electrical Association for Women’

Jennifer Shurville was awarded £10,000 for the project ‘Drawing the Invisible: Diagrams and the Generation of Knowledge in Medieval England, c.1200–1400’

Junior Fellowships

Tobah Aukland-Peck (The Graduate Center, CUNY) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project ‘Mineral Landscapes: The Mine and British Modernism’

Meghaa Ballakrishnen (Johns Hopkins University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project ‘Abstraction by Analogy: Nasreen Mohamedi, Geeta Kapur, and the Subject after Feminism, 1950–1990’

Zoë Dostal (Columbia University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project ‘Rope, Linen, Thread: Gender, Labor, and the Textile Industry in EighteenthCentury British Art’

Hannah Kaemmer (Harvard University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project ‘Expertise and Empire: Fortification Building and the Board of Ordnance during the English Restoration’

Mirna Mederal (University of Zagreb) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project ‘The Collector: Research into Provenance of Artworks from the A. T. Mimara Collection’

Sarah Weston (Yale University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project ‘Wild Form: Shape, Number, and the Romantic Reinvention of Space’

PMC Research Collections Fellowship

Hans Hönes was awarded £10,000 for research on the project ‘Fundaments of Knowledge: Art History in Britain, c.1940–70’

Rome Fellowship

Tommaso Zerbi was awarded £20,000 to spend time at the British School at Rome to research the project ‘Gothic Revival Atop the Heirlooms of Antiquity: Villa Mills and the Palatine Hill, c.1818–1926’

Event Support Grants

Association for Art History was awarded £1,500 to support the online event ‘Global Britain: Decolonising Art’s Histories’

Ben Uri Gallery and Museum was awarded £1,500 to support the online event

‘Becoming Gustav Metzger’

Furniture History Society was awarded £1,500 to support the society’s online lecture programme

International Curators Forum was awarded £1,500 to support the online event ‘Liberation Begins in the Imagination’

National Museums Liverpool was awarded £1,500 to support the online event ‘Curating Queerly: Documenting British LGBT+ Art Exhibitions’

Royal College of Art was awarded £1,500 to support the online event ‘PhD Programme, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art’

Royal College of Art was awarded £2,000 to support the symposium ‘Watchwords: John Furnival and Text (as) Art’

University of York and Tate Britain were awarded £1,500 to support the online event ‘The Spatial 18th Century: Rethinking Urban Networks and Maps’

Research Support Grants

Siobhan Angus was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Camera Geologica: Materiality, Resource Extraction, and Photography’

Abigail Breeze Barrington was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Patrons and Muses: Women in the Arts, 1580–1630’

Deepthi Bathala was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Transporting Landscapes: Objects and Spaces of Global Food Transfers’

Eloise Bennett was awarded £1,300 for research on ‘Material Threads, Ink Lines – Women’s Concrete Poetry in Britain, 1960–80’

Sonali Dhanpal was awarded £1,850 for research on ‘Mapping the Architecture of Bangalore City’

Inga Fraser was awarded £1,920 for research for the exhibition ‘Bloomsbury and Cinema’

Marta Herrero was awarded £1,770 for research on ‘Women Artists and Female Philanthropy: Artists’ Benevolent Fund, 1810–1900’

Jenny Lund was awarded £1,970 for research on ‘Helen Chadwick’s Early Super-8 Film Domestic Sanitation (1976)’

Julie Park was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘18th-Century ExtraIllustrated Books and the Art of Writing’

Andrey Shabanov was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘The Impact of Britain’s Pioneering Museum of Art and Design on Europe and Russia’

Gemma Shearwood was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Commemorating Imperialism in Westminster Abbey, 1661–1832’

Zachary Stewart was awarded £1,500 for research on ‘Collaborative Gothic: Perpendicular Architecture, Identity, and Community in the English Parish Church, 1350–1550’

Frederika Tevebring was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Matriarchal Past and Modernist Futures at the 1951 Festival of Britain’

Dustin Valen was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Climate, Bathing, and Architecture in NineteenthCentury Britain’

Ellice Wu was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘The Performative Muse: Angelica Kauffman’s London SelfPortraits, 1766–1781’

Allison Young was awarded £2,000 for research on ‘Solidarity: Gavin Jantjes, Anti-Apartheid, and the Postwar Avant-Garde’

Summer 2021

At the June 2021 extraordinary meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded:

Research Continuity Grants

International Curators Forum was awarded £10,000 to support the project ‘An Anthology of British-Caribbean Art, Part Two’

Royal Pavilion and Museums Trust was awarded £10,000 to support the project ‘Chinese Export Wallpaper at the Royal Pavilion and Museums Trust’

Towner Art Gallery was awarded £10,000 to support the project ‘A Life in Art: Lucy Wertheim, Patron, Collector and Gallerist and Reuniting the Twenties Group: From Barbara Hepworth to Victor Pasmore’

Research Continuity Fellowships

Sara Ayres was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Prince George of Denmark’s Grand Tour: Art, Collections and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Restoration England’

Alison Bennett was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Material, Visual, and Architectural Cultures of Christianity in Colonial Uganda’

Richard Birkett was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Donald Rodney’s “Autoicon”: Human as Hybrid-Auto-Instituting-LanguagingStorytelling Species’

Madeline Boden was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘The First Covenant: Victorian Art and the Old Testament, c.1850–1897’

Tiffany Charlotte Boyle was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘BlackScottish-Artist-Filmmaker: Revisiting Maud Sulter’s “Gallus Pictures”’

Robyne Calvert was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art’

Laura Castagini was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs – An Exhibition History’

Nicole Cochrane was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Buying Bonaparte: Material Cultures of Napoleon in the British Imagination in the Long Nineteenth Century’

Jackson Davidow was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Surviving the Blitz: Photography and Health Activism in 1980s London’

Cathryn Enis was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Tibor Reich and the S400 Textile Collection’

Daniel Fountain was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Crafted with Pride: Queer Craft and Contemporary Activism in Britain’

Ashley Gallant was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Radical Art Practice: Copyright and the Future of Public Collections’

Elisabeth Gernerd was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Lady in Silver: Navigating a Political Life in Silk and Paint’

Melissa Gustin was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Unquiet Grandeur: Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and the Imitation of Antiquity’

Francesca Kaes was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘The Art of the Blot: Alexander Cozens’s “New Method” as Intermedial Practice’

Nilina Lal was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Constructing Calcutta: Empire and the Making of the Capital of British India, 1880–1911’

Hannah Lee was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘“Your Most Obedient and Faithful Servant”: Peregrine Tyam and the Representation of Black Sitters in Early Modern British Portraiture’

Hanna Mazheika was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Stuart Portraiture and Art Collecting in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’

Caroline McGee was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Crafting Catholic Opulence: Oppenheimer of Manchester and Decorative Church Mosaics, 1874–1965’

Emma Merkling was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Imponderable: Physics, Mathematics, Psychical Research, and Evelyn De Morgan’s Spiritualist Art, 1885–1914’

Lisa Newby was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Vital Disorder: Collage and Cultural Identity in London’s Postwar Artworld’

Gabriella Nugent was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘African Modernists at the Slade School of Fine Art, c.1945–1965’

Anna Reid was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘The Day is Bright and Open: Lucy Skaer’s Green Man’

Alice Sage was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Visual Vocabularies of Dreaming in First World War Postcards’

Christine Slobogin was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Dickie Orpen and the Visual Culture of Second World War Plastic Surgery in Britain’

Sylvia Theuri was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Moments and Connections: Re-viewing the 1983 PanAfrikan Exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum’

Rebecca Tropp was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Accommodating the Picturesque: Colonial Influences on Issues of Permeability’

Beth Williamson was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Art and Education: The Modernist Networks of William Johnstone’

Rixt Woudstra was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Designing a “New Britain”: Colonial Architecture, Protest, and the End of Empire’

Wen Yao was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Stella Snead as a Surrealist World Traveller: Mobility and Representation in her Paintings, Photographs, Collages and Writings’

Shijia Yu was awarded £5,000 to support research on ‘Paper Peepshows and the Intermediality of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture’

Research Continuity Grant awarded project Chinese Export Wallpaper at the Royal Pavilion and Museums Trust

Learning Programme

Yale in London

Yale in London did not run in 2021 due to the pandemic.

Graduate Summer School

The Graduate Summer School did not run in the summer of 2020 due to the pandemic.

Public Lecture Course

In autumn 2020, the Centre ran a five-week series titled Ceramics in Britain, 1750 to Now. This was originally scheduled to run in the spring of 2020. Convened by Helen Ritchie, Curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Ceramics in Britain featured 30-minute lectures delivered by Patricia Ferguson, Catrin Jones, Florence Tyler, Simon Olding and Neil Brownsword. Topics included satire on ceramics; Josiah Wedgwood; blue and white ceramics; Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada; and the ceramic heritage of North Staffordshire.

In spring 2021, the Centre ran a six-week series that focused on the work and legacy of William Hogarth. Taking advantage of the online format, the Hogarth series incorporated filmmaking to allow the audience to enjoy close-up views of the artworks being discussed. The series was convened by Mark Hallett and featured 30-minute lectures delivered by Hallett, Meredith Gamer and Elizabeth Robles. Topics included Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, Industry and Idleness and the Four Stages of Cruelty. The final two lectures looked at contemporary responses to the works of Hogarth by artists Lubaina Himid and Yinka Shonibare.

Neil Brownsword, Yongjun Cho at work, FACTORY, Icheon World Ceramic Centre, South Korea, 2017. Image courtesy of Korea Ceramic Foundation

Plan, Prepare, Provide: Art Teachers’ Residential

In 2021, the Centre began funding the ‘Plan, Prepare, Provide: Art Teachers’ Residential’ programme. Plan, Prepare, Provide was launched in 2017 by the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, in partnership with the Association for Art History, to promote the teaching of art history in schools.

Plan, Prepare, Provide offers a unique opportunity for teachers and their schools to improve the delivery of both academic and practical art lessons. The programme encompasses an annual three-day residential; stand-alone CPD sessions for the network of alumni and applicants; and a targeted follow-on Postgraduate Certificate in ‘Developing Teachers’ Research and Practice’.

Since its inception, this unique programme has supported 120 teachers from more than 100 different schools and colleges from across the United Kingdom. The combined average weekly student reach of teachers who have engaged in Plan, Prepare, Provide is 20,500 students. It is our hope that through this programme the Centre can raise the profile of the study of art history among students.

Networks

The co-convenors of the Doctoral Researchers Network (DRN) for the academic year 2020–21 were Charlotte Joy Johnson and Evelyn WhorrallCampbell. Through an events programme that acknowledged the multidisciplinary approach many young researchers are now taking, the network expanded its membership and attracted more students from other disciplines, whose research nevertheless overlaps with British art history. The DRN saw fifty-nine new members join from institutions across the USA, UK and Europe. A higher proportion of new members were practice-led PhD and Collaborative Doctoral Award students completing their PhDs with arts institutions, which indicates the success of the network’s efforts to diversify the disciplines it serves.

The Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN) was co-convened by Maddie Boden and Shijia Yu, and held events on such topics as: persevering as an unaffiliated researcher; short-term contracts; and curating during the pandemic. The ECRN grew by forty-two members and lost only four, who said they no longer identified as early career researchers. Due to the pandemic, the ECRN and DRN continued to run their events online throughout the year covered by this report. This enabled a far greater geographical reach than would have been possible for in-person events, with attendees and speakers from North America and mainland Europe. The two networks organised a total of thirteen events over the year, with the shared aim of supporting their members to research, develop their professional and academic skills, and facilitate a space for peer-to-peer knowledge and expertise sharing. Between 2020 and 2021, the combined membership of the networks has increased by more than 100, and now totals 416 people.

Lubaina Himid, A Fashionable Marriage, as installed in The Place is Here, Nottingham Contemporary, 2017.

Photograph by Andy Keate

Write on Art

The fourth cycle of Write on Art was launched in autumn 2020 in partnership with Art UK. The judges for the 2020–21 cycle were author Emma Dabiri, writer and broadcaster Alastair Sooke, Turner Prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid and Director of the Whitechapel Gallery Iwona Blazwick. After a bumper year last year, our submission numbers normalised to pre-pandemic levels. In total, we received 214 submissions across both categories: 138 in the Years 12/13 category and 76 in the Years 10/11 category.

The winners of the 2020/21 cycle were:

Years 12/13

First place: Aoife Hogan on Children and Chalked Wall 3 by Joan Eardley

Second place: Hanifah Smith on All Will Be Forgotten by Chris Wilson

Runners-up: Jasmine Donaldson on Melanie and Me Swimming by Michael Andrews; Maisie Fraser on We Are Making a New World by Paul Nash; Penelope Ogieriakhi on Jazz by Anthony Frost

Years 10/11

First place: Variaam Tratt on Preserve ‘Beauty’ by Anya Gallaccio

Second place: Hannah Bugeja on Lilith by John Collier

Runners-up: Taya Minchington on Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene by Simeon Solomon; Ella Male on Nameless and Friendless by Emily Mary Osborn; Ava Winter on 1939 by Hans Feibusch

Robert Smirke, The Seven Ages of Man: The Lover, ‘As You Like It’, II, vii (detail), 1798–1801, oil on panel. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund, B1975.5.10

Archives and Library

Throughout much of the year, the Archives and Library, along with the rest of the Centre, were closed to the public due to the coronavirus pandemic. With staff working almost exclusively from home, it was difficult to continue various projects within the Archives and Library remit. These projects will be revisited in 2021–22.

The Public Study Room was opened three days per week whenever government guidelines permitted. Staff continued to liaise with external colleagues and professional bodies on a regular basis in order to keep up to date with relevant responses to coronavirus and to plan for the regular public service changes that were required.

Despite only being open for forty-eight days during the year, with room for only four readers per day due to social distancing and with many readers unwilling or unable to travel, reader numbers were steady. When possible, staff went to the building to answer remote enquiries, and this service was extremely popular and answered a real and urgent need for many.

Staff also embarked on a major project to review and revise public access to the Centre’s Archives and Library services generally, the aim being to ensure that the collections are readily available to anyone who is unable to visit the Public Study Room in person. This project supports the Centre’s wider equity, diversity and inclusion aims. As a result, significant changes will be made to public service provision. Alongside enhanced remote enquiries and digital copying services, we aim to ensure that the information about our collections online will be accessible and appropriate for the widest possible audiences, encompassing both academic and non-specialist interests.

Alongside conducting extensive research in the field, liaising with colleagues in other institutions and attending workshops and training sessions, the Archives and Library also took part in the Archives and Records Association National Distance Enquiry Survey, where users who made enquiries with repositories across the country were asked their views on the service provided. The results pertaining to the Paul Mellon Centre were overwhelmingly positive, with 95 per cent of respondents rating our service ‘good’ or ‘very good’.

PMC Research Collections Fellowships

The first of the Centre’s Research Collections Fellows embarked on their research projects during the year. The first recipient, Joshua Mardell, was awarded the fellowship in spring 2020 for the project ‘Finding a Historiography for Gavin Stamp’, but his start was delayed due to the pandemic. The spring 2021 recipient, Hans Hönes, also began his project ‘Fundaments of Knowledge: Art History in Britain c.1940–70’, looking across various archive collections in the Archives and Library.

Archive Students from University College London (UCL)

The Archives and Library hosted four students from UCL’s postgraduate Archives and Records Management course on their work placement in May 2021. This was the first time the Centre had taken part in the initiative. Due to the pandemic, the placement was entirely virtual, with students being supported by Centre staff and completing the project remotely. The students wrote research guides with the aim of facilitating the widest possible access to the Centre’s extensive and complex holdings on particular artists. Thirtythree guides were completed for artists including Kneller, Gainsborough and Hockney. They will be made available online.

Drawing Room Displays

There was only one Drawing Room Display during 2020–21. ‘New Books from the Paul Mellon Centre’ was an informal display of the nine titles published by the Centre during the previous year. Put together by Bryony Botwright-Rance and Jenny Hill, with assistance from Emily Lees and Tom Powell, it was on view until 27 August 2021. There was no accompanying booklet.

Collections in Focus

Three online ‘Collections in Focus’ features were created over the year.

‘Damaged & Destroyed’ was launched in July 2020. This feature consists of three stories of preservation and loss from the PMC’s Photographic Archive, written by Freddie Pegram.

‘The Paul Oppé Library and Archive’, written by Anthony Day and Lucy Kelsall, was launched in February 2021. This feature explores the life and work of Paul Oppé, describes the Centre’s acquisition of his library and archive, and provides a detailed study of both collections.

‘The Leicester Galleries and its Exhibition Catalogues’ went live in April 2021. Written by Emma Floyd, it focuses on the donation of Leicester Galleries catalogues to the Centre by Peter and Renate Nahum in 2020. It explores the history of the gallery and covers three main themes: the gallery’s exhibitions during the First World War; its promotion of European art in the 1920s; and its exhibitions of sculpture throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Staff

Anthony Day completed a nine-month contract to catalogue Paul Oppé’s personal papers in April 2021. He then embarked on an additional six-month contract to plan a workshop on Oppé, due to take place in October 2021, and to publicise the Oppé papers, focusing particularly on the non-art-historical content visible in the online catalogue.

In July 2020, Lucy Kelsall embarked on a temporary contract to undertake the cataloguing of some of the Library’s smaller donations. Natasha Held left her post as Assistant Librarian in January 2021 and, after advertising and interviewing, Lucy Kelsall was appointed in her place, taking up the post in March 2021. An experienced cataloguer, Lucy joined the Cataloguing & Classification Committee of ARLIS/ UK & Ireland in spring 2021.

Library

A total of 301 new books and exhibition catalogues were acquired and accessioned during the year.

A number of previously received donations were accessioned into the collection and fully catalogued during the year. Lucy Kelsall, first as a project cataloguer and then as Assistant Librarian, completed a number of projects: the Brinsley Ford collection (100 titles); Geoffrey Beard’s library (50 titles); books from the Wilson Centre for Photography (64 titles) and Charles S. Rhyne’s library (50 titles). The Librarian catalogued the Paul R. Joyce collection of pamphlets (80 titles) and the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation’s library (250 items). The completion of the latter project was celebrated with the online event, French Art and Scotch Ideas: The Scottish Enlightenment and The Dawn of Modernity in French Art, in February 2021.

In addition to the completed projects, staff embarked on some largerscale cataloguing projects. The Assistant Librarian catalogued most of the exhibition catalogues on British artists in the Brian Sewell library (1,700 of 2,800 titles were catalogues). The Librarian started cataloguing the Michael Liversidge and Giles Waterfield libraries. This exceptional cataloguing output has considerably reduced the cataloguing backlog. All the Library’s catalogue records are also exported to Library Hub Discover.

The Centre’s extensive collection of auction catalogues was completely catalogued on the Library’s online catalogue during the year. This entailed an import of nearly 6,000 records of unbound auction catalogues, and the completion of a project undertaken by the Archives and Library cataloguer to catalogue, from scratch, the Library’s bound sequences of auction catalogues. These bound catalogues include those formerly belonging to William Roberts and Ellis Waterhouse (5,000 titles) and the art dealers Arthur Tooth & Sons (3,000 titles). The completion of this project and the overhaul of the relevant webpages has led to a huge increase in requests for these catalogues, some of which are very rare or heavily annotated with prices and buyers’ names.

Archive

Four archive collections were offered to the Centre from private donors during the year. Following careful assessment against the Centre’s published Archive Collection Policy Statement and, in some cases, an on-site appraisal, one collection was declined and three were put on hold due to the pandemic (which made travelling to assess material impossible). These offers will be revisited when restrictions are lifted.

Cataloguing of the Paul Oppé personal papers was completed, and the resulting descriptions were published online on the Centre’s website, Archives Hub, The National Archives’ Discovery and Archives Portal Europe in April 2021.

Significant work was carried out with regard to the appraisal and cataloguing of two of the Centre’s most valuable and important collections: the Frank Simpson and Ben Nicolson archives. Work on both collections will be completed by the end of 2021 and resulting descriptions published online.

Institutional Archive

Due to coronavirus restrictions, work on an institution-wide records audit and the implementation of Preservica (a system designed to assist with the challenges of preserving electronic records) was suspended until 2021–22. A small amount of work was undertaken to review and transfer key records –such as minutes of meetings – to the Institutional Archive.

GDPR

The Archivist, Records & Data Protection Manager continued to work with staff to ensure that both new Centre initiatives and everyday working practices were compliant with GDPR. This work encompassed all areas of Centre activity but particularly focused on the British Art Network, Early Career Researchers Network and Doctoral Researchers Network, publications (payment of royalties) and events (recording proceedings).

British Art Network

The British Art Network (BAN) was established in 2012 by Tate, originally as a means of building scholarly capacity in the UK museum sector and celebrating a shared national collection. In 2018, the Paul Mellon Centre became a partner host of BAN along with Tate, leading to a significant expansion of activity and a programme aimed at better reflecting the range and variety of curatorial work in British art today.

BAN’s 2020–21 programme saw these ambitions and commitments deepen and significantly develop. BAN supported ten Research Groups covering topics including new groups on Working Class British Art; British South-Asian Visual Art Post-Cool Britannia; and Race, Empire and the PreRaphaelites; as well as existing groups on Queer British Art; Black British Art; and British Landscapes, alongside seminar series, ‘Itinerant Imaginaries’ and ‘Irish Modernisms’. We supported the continuing activities of the Early Career Curators Group from 2019–20, and welcomed curators following a revised programme of activities under the new title of Emerging Curators Group (ECG). The 2020–21 ECG group reflects BAN’s commitment to expanding definitions of the curatorial, with a membership that includes freelance researchers, writers, artists and programmers as well as curators in museum or gallery settings. BAN additionally partnered with the Understanding British Portraits and European Paintings Pre-1900 networks to deliver the three-part conference Museum Collections on Prescription: Health, Wellbeing and Inclusivity, and supported a collaboration between the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute and the Black British Art research group resulting in the ‘Curating Nation’ seminar series. Across activities there has been an emphatic focus on intersectional, global and decolonial themes, including collaborations aimed at actively connecting work in their respective areas. The continuation of activity in online form created opportunities to make events more widely accessible, both live and through legacy recordings, and BAN has demonstrated a practical commitment to access and inclusion with additional bursary support and funding for research leads and ECG members. In line with these programmatic developments, BAN’s membership continued to grow and diversify, with more than 1,000 members by June 2021, including new members from the US, Europe, India and Australia.

In March 2021, we were able to welcome four new members to the Steering Group, ensuring that the range of professional experience and engagement, academic expertise and backgrounds represented should better reflect the current field of British art curating. BAN’s governance principles and mission statements were reworked to reflect our expanded understanding of the curatorial field, and a web developer was appointed to develop a new BAN website to give the programme and membership greater visibility. In 2021, BAN’s quarterly newsletter took on an expanded form, featuring critical essays and interviews, helping further demonstrate the network’s commitment to expanding definitions of British art, acknowledging complex historical truths and their present-day resonances, and communicating the continuing public value of British art collections and curatorial expertise.

British Art Network July 2020–June 2021

All events during this period were delivered online

British Art Network Research Group Events

2020

18 September British Women Artists, 1750–1950, ‘Visualising Our Field’

21 September Post-War British Painting in Regional Collections, ‘Absence: Absent from History/Absent from the Gallery’

23 September British Drawings, ‘Drawing and Art Education post-1850’

28–29 September Queer British Art & Black British Art, joint meeting

23 November British Landscapes, ‘Tate Liverpool’s Radical Landscapes’

10 December British Landscapes, ‘Commissions in Conversation –Landscapes in Lockdown’

2021

21 January The Re-Action of Black Performance

28 January Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘Objects in Focus: Decolonising Victorian Art and Design?’, workshop

11 February British Landscapes, ‘Mapping the Landscape’

15 February Post-War British Painting in Regional Collections, ‘Auditing Diversity among John Moores Painting Prize Winners’, collective taskforce workshop

25 February Working-Class British Art

11 March British Women Artists, 1750–1950, Introducing ‘Mapping British Women Artists’ Creative Spaces, 1750–1950’

19 March Northern Irish Art

31 March British Landscapes, ‘Landscape Art and Mental Wellbeing’

7 May British Landscapes, virtual tour of Natural Encounters at Leeds Art Gallery

11 May British South-Asian Visual Art Post Cool Britannia, ‘The Body, the Home of Unseen Landscapes’

27 May Working Class British Art, ‘The City in British Art’

27 May Race, Empire and the PreRaphaelites, ‘Artists in Dialogue: Contemporary Responses to Nineteenth-Century Art, Design and Empire’, workshop

22 June Post-War British Painting in Regional Collections, ‘Transnational Histories’, workshop

Early Careers Curators Group 2020

2 July CPD workshop and seminar planning

3 September Seminar: ‘Curating, Care and Community’

25 September Seminar feedback session

Emerging Curators Group 2021

24 February Workshop: ‘Navigating the Curatorial’

15 March Workshop: ‘Curator as Changemaker’

14 April Workshop: ‘Research Skills’

6 May Workshop: ‘Art Language’

21 May ECG Research Workshop

British Art Network Conference 2021

April, Museum Collections on Prescription: Health, Wellbeing and Inclusivity

Conference organised in collaboration with the Understanding British Portraits Network and the European Paintings Pre-1900 Network

15 April ‘Nothing About Us Without Us – Disability, Inclusivity and Engagement’, seminar convened by Tony Heaton

22 April ‘The Curatorial and the Cultural Encounter in Hospital Contexts’, seminar convened by Catsou Roberts

29 April ‘Arts and Culture for Health and Wellbeing and Inclusivity’, seminar convened by Errol Francis

British Art Network Seminar Series 2020–2021

2020

November, Decolonising British Art

Organised by the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute. The series of four events looked at recent and historical exhibition practices and curatorial strategies with partners including Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Birmingham Museums Trust, and Iniva (Institute of International Visual Art).

3 November ‘Objects of Attention’

5 November ‘Decentering Three Collections’

11 November ‘The Past is Now: Experimental Approaches Towards Decolonising the Museum’

12 November ‘Revisiting Veil, Reviewing Revisions’

2021

April–May, Curating Nation

A series of three workshops exploring how existing narratives of British art might be expanded through curatorial and art-historical interventions.

Conceived by Hammad Nasar, hosted by UAL Decolonising Arts Institute and developed in collaboration with British Art Network’s Black British Art research group, with additional support from BAN.

21 April ‘What Does a National Collection Look Like?’

28 April ‘What Stories of British Art Travel?’

5 May ‘What Narratives of British Art are Being Co-Produced Internationally?’

From June, Itinerant Imaginaries

Online gatherings exploring collective and disparate work by Black artists and artists of colour living in Britain and the diaspora. Organised by Creating Interference with Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster.

7 June Keynote: Françoise Vergès (public educator, writer, activist)

8 June In Conversation: Sepake Angiama (Artistic Director, Iniva), Rose Nordin (graphic designer and illustrator)

8 June Panel Discussion: Troubling Collections

Programme continues to November 2021

From June, Irish Modernisms

Seminar series organised by CCA Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry to coincide with the exhibition, ‘Irish Modernisms: Legacies of Modernism in the North’.

23 June ‘Irish Modernisms: Ireland’

Programme continues to August 2021

Special Projects

Art and the Country House

The research project Art and the Country House, headed by Dr Martin Postle as project leader and commissioning editor, was published online by the Centre in November 2020. Focusing upon the collection and display of works of art in the British country house from the sixteenth century to the present day, it comprises eight case studies: Castle Howard, Yorkshire; Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire; Mells Manor, Somerset; Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute; Petworth House, West Sussex; Raynham Hall, Norfolk; Trewithen, Cornwall; and West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

Among one of the most ambitious online publishing projects to be undertaken by the Centre, Art and the Country House involved research and writing by more than forty scholars, including academics, curators, conservators, independent scholars, postgraduate students, and country house owners and custodians. In total, the publication includes more than fifty collections-based essays, on topics ranging from paintings and tapestries to prints, drawings and contemporary art installations. Themed essays include country house visiting and tourism; women’s collecting and display strategies; the evolution of picture and sculpture galleries; and recent perspectives on the politics of art patronage and display. Of the eight houses investigated, six included the cataloguing of works of art, comprising some 650 objects. In addition to the essays and catalogues, the publication includes the transcriptions of inventories, picture lists and archival material.

Finally, six films were especially made for Art and the Country House by Jonathan Law. Each film focuses imaginatively on different subjects relating to the project, including archival research, memorials, sculpted memorials, and the use of the country house in screen narratives, including the haunted staircase.

The online platform for the project was created by Keepthinking and managed by Alice Read, Digital Producer at the Paul Mellon Centre. Aside from Dr Postle, the delivery team for the project consisted of the Centre’s Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani, together with Editor Emily Lees, Research Assistant Freddie Pegram, and Digital Manager Tom Scutt.

London, Asia

The London, Asia research project is co-led by the Paul Mellon Centre’s Deputy Director for Research Sarah Victoria Turner, and Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar. By convening workshops, talks and conferences along three research strands – exhibitions, institutions and art schools – the London, Asia research project is working towards a more expanded and diverse narrative of British art. The project has built up a large, dynamic and international community of researchers, artists, curators and educators who regularly interact through events and meetings. It was established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, in 2016, and after the successful completion of phase one in June 2019, the project was awarded a further two years of funding by the Board of Governors to support a second phase of activity. An ambitious conference, organised as a series of online events and digital commissions – London, Asia, Art, Worlds – marked the end of phase two in June 2021. By excavating historical entanglements and relational comparisons that link London and Asia, the conference questioned the boundaries of national and regional histories and explored new distributive and decolonial models of writing art histories. The conference was co-convened by Hammad Nasar, Ming Tiampo (London, Asia Research Fellow and Professor of Art History, Carleton University) and Sarah Victoria Turner.

London, Asia has had a transformational impact on the Paul Mellon Centre’s research culture. The project has developed numerous collaborations with external partners to explore the role which London, and Britain more broadly, has played in the construction of art-historical narratives in Asia, and to reflect 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. Partners and institutions we have worked with include: Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong); the Barbican (London); the National College of Art (Lahore, Pakistan); Manchester Art Gallery; and the Slade School of Fine Art (London).

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Meem (detail), 1964. Oil on canvas. 91.5 × 91.5 cm. Image by Vipul Sangoi. Butcher Family Collection. Digital image courtesy Jhaveri Contemporary. Copyright the Estate Anwar Jalal Shemza

Digitising the Photographic Archive

Work continued on the project to digitise the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive. An extensive rights-management exercise was undertaken to identify suppliers of photography to the Archive and notify them of the imminent move to digital delivery. Responses to this initiative were overwhelmingly favourable, with the National Gallery, Tate and the Courtauld Institute of Art being among those to offer their full support. These prudent conversations have resulted in 55,000 images identified as derived from third-party suppliers being made available for remote consultation without restriction.

A series of short essays was commissioned for the online platform to outline its continued relevance as a historical resource. Bendor Grosvenor writes on the uses of the collection in the identification and reattribution of works of art; Paris Spies-Gans (Harvard University) discusses the historical gender biases and omissions intrinsic in the collection; Martin Postle (PMC) outlines how images can be helpful in the preservation and restoration of damaged works; and Anjalie Dalal-Clayton (UAL) and Ananda Rutherford (Tate/UCL) consider the historical implications of Eurocentric, racist, outmoded and other problematic terminology used in cataloguing historic collections. Additionally, a series of short films was produced to demonstrate the archive in use from the points of view of an artist, an archivist, a curator, a dealer, a photographer and a conservator.

Staff also continued to contribute to the PHAROS (International Consortium of Photo Archives) initiative, taking a key role in addressing copyright, contractual and other permissions issues, and writing up and publicising the outcomes of the intellectual property workshop held at the Centre in March 2020. A report summarising proceedings, conclusions and action points was published on the Centre’s website in November 2020 and further publicised through a number of channels, including the National Museums Directors Conference and the Archives and Records Association.

Still from The Conservator

Image courtesy of Shelbourne Films

Generation Landscape

This research project is founded upon the simple fact that a stellar collection of British landscape artists – including J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Girtin and John Sell Cotman – were born within just a few years of each other (1775 in the cases of Girtin and Turner; Constable in 1776; and Cotman in 1782). Generation Landscape is intended to explore the benefits – and confront the problems – of studying this group of artists and other contemporary landscape practitioners, as part of a distinctive artistic generation. It is also designed to look afresh at the kinds of landscape imagery produced by these artists and their contemporaries.

Generation Landscape encompasses and complements detailed new research on a number of the individual practitioners listed above. The period covered by this report saw work continuing on a new online catalogue of Thomas Girtin’s works, written by Dr Gregory Smith, which is due to be published by the Centre in 2022. The year also saw the Centre’s Director, Mark Hallett, pursuing research towards a major Tate Britain exhibition on Constable and Turner, scheduled to open in late 2025. Discussions were also taken forward regarding the possibility of the Centre publishing a digital edition of John Constable’s correspondence.

As noted above, Generation Landscape also aims to chart the trajectories of this famous cohort of landscape artists in relation to one another, and in relation to a shared set of interests, experiences and circumstances. To this end, this year planning began for a series of conferences and research programmes, which will look at how these practitioners and their works responded in both comparable and contradictory ways to the artistic, cultural, political and environmental challenges thrown up by their era. The first such conference, entitled British Artists and Generational Identity, was due to take place in the summer of 2020, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. The spring of 2021 saw the publication of a call for papers for a second conference programme, entitled Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series in Britain, c.1775–1850, to be held in November of the same year.

John Constable, Hampstead Heath looking towards Harrow, 1821–1822, oil on paper laid on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.141

Staff Activities

Mark Hallett Director of Studies

This year saw Mark Hallett beginning a sustained programme of research on John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. This research, which itself feeds into the wider Generation Landscape project mentioned earlier in this report, is designed to have a number of outcomes.

Most importantly, it will lead to a major exhibition on Constable and Turner, to be held at Tate Britain in the winter of 2025–26. This display, which will be co-curated by Hallett, will mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of both artists, and will feature loans from across the world. It will also be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, written by Hallett and co-curator Dr Amy Concannon.

This research on Constable and Turner is also designed to lead to a series of publications, including an ambitious new biographical study of Constable and an in-depth analysis of Turner’s famous print series, Liber Studiorum Hallett also plans to co-edit a book of scholarly essays on Constable’s letters. The year also saw Hallett write and co-create two films on the artist William Hogarth, which were produced as part of the Centre’s spring 2021 Public Lecture series, Artist in Focus: William Hogarth. He also worked with the distinguished curator Catherine Lampbert on an edited book of essays focusing on the portrait drawings of the artist Frank Auerbach. Hallett continued to serve on Tate Britain’s Advisory Council.

Frank Auerbach, Head of Charlotte Podro, 1982, oil on paper, 76.2 × 57.1 cm. © Frank Auerbach / Image courtesy of Marlborough Gallery

Sarah Victoria Turner Deputy Director for Research

Dr Turner went on parental leave from January to December 2020. On her return to the Centre, she embarked on researching, writing and recording the second series of the Sculpting Lives podcast with Jo Baring (Director of the Ingram Collection), with six episodes on historic and contemporary women sculptors scheduled for release in autumn 2021.

Working in collaboration with Dr Amy Tobin (Curator of Exhibitions, Events and Research at Kettle’s Yard and Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Cambridge) and Hammad Nasar (Senior Research Fellow, PMC), Dr Turner is developing an exhibition for Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge entitled Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends. Developed as an outcome of the PMC’s London, Asia research project, it will be accompanied by a catalogue and digital publication. It focuses on the extraordinary efforts and vision of the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia to create the LYC Museum & Art Gallery in the village of Banks, astride Hadrian’s Wall, in the northwest of England between 1973 and 1982, and the impressive and far-reaching networks of artists he created in doing so.

During this period, Dr Turner also researched a chapter for the first monograph on the Bangladeshi-born, London-based sculptor Rana Begum, which will be published by Lund Humphries in September 2021.

Dr Turner was also invited to give a number of talks at virtual events outside the Centre, including at the Art Workers’ Guild. In addition she was a judge of the ARTiculation Prize, which encourages young people to access art history through a spoken word competition. Dr Turner is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Advisory Council of the Warburg Institute in London.

Martin Postle Deputy Director for Grants and Publications

Dr Postle’s research activities were centred principally on the completion of research and editing of the Centre’s online publication, Art and the Country House, which was launched in November 2020. In the spring of 2021, he began to undertake preliminary research on a projected catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby, to be published by the Paul Mellon Centre. Dr Postle continued to serve on the following committees and boards: the UK government’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest; International Advisory Board, The British Art Journal; the Council of the Attingham Trust; and Trustee of the Catalogue Raisonné of Works by Philip de László. In January 2020, Dr Postle joined the Board of Trustees of Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham.

Appendix

Cumulative List of Publications since 1970 (SBA: Studies in British Art series)

Print Publications

1971

Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols.

John Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough (published for the PMC in USA only)

1972

John Hayes, Gainsborough as Printmaker (published for the PMC in USA only)

1973

Eric Adams, Francis Danby: Varieties of Poetic Landscape

1974

Albert Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle, 2 vols.

1975

Leonée and Richard Ormond, Lord Leighton

Hans Hammelmann, Book Illustrators in Eighteenth Century England

Robert R. Wark (ed.), Discourses on Art: Sir Joshua Reynolds

1976

M. H. Port, The Houses of Parliament

Edward Mead Johnson, Francis Cotes (Phaidon, published with the help of PMC)

Andrew Saint, Richard Norman Shaw

Miklos Rajnai and Mary Stevens, The Norwich Society of Artists, 1805–1833

1977

Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner (rev. edn 1984), 2 vols.

Nicholas Penny, Church Monuments in Romantic England

Robin Gibson, Catalogue of Portraits in the Collection of the Earl of Clarendon (privately published for PMC by BAS Printers Ltd)

1978–84

K. Garlick and A. MacIntyre (eds.), The Diary of Joseph Farington, 16 vols.

1978

Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France & Holland

1979

Anthony Quiney, John Loughborough Pearson

William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art

George P. Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism

1980

Kathryn Moore Heleniak, William Mulready

Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret MacDonald, Robin Spencer and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols.

1981

William L. Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry

John Ingamells, The English Episcopal Portrait, 1559–1835: A Catalogue (privately for PMC)

Mansfield Kirby Talley, Portrait Painting in England: Studies in the Technical Literature before 1700 (privately for PMC)

Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols.

Virginia Surtees (ed.), The Diary of Ford Madox Brown

1982

Hugh Brigstocke, William Buchanan and the 19th-Century Art Trade (privately for PMC)

Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture

1983

Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture

Louise Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond

1984

Graham Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 2 vols.

Terry Friedman, James Gibbs

1985

Richard Dorment, Alfred Gilbert

Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 4 vols.

1987

Cecily Langdale, Gwen John

Michael McCarthy, The Origins of the Gothic Revival

Cecilia Powell, Turner in the South: Rome, Naples, Florence

1988

Stephen Deuchar, Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History

Bernard Smith and Alwyne Wheeler (eds.), The Art of the First Fleet & Other Early Australian Drawings

Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768

Felicity Owen and David Blayney Brown, Collector of Genius: A Life of Sir George Beaumont

1989

Clive Wainwright, The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home, 1750–1850

1991

Christopher Gilbert, English Vernacular Furniture, 1750–1900

1992

Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment

David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England

Douglas D. C. Chambers, The Planters of the English Landscape Garden

Karl Friedrich Schinkel; David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann (eds.), ‘The English Journey’: Journal of a Visit to France and Britain in 1826

Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547

Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England

1994

Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination

Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism, 1900–1939

John Schofield, Medieval London Houses

Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape

Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block: Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

1995

Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 (3rd edn.)

David Bindman and Malcolm Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre

Brian Allen (ed.), Towards a Modern Art World: Studies in British Art 1 (SBA 1)

Lucy Gent (ed.), Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (SBA 2)

Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960

M. H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London, 1851–1915

Giles Worsley, Classical Architecture in Britain: The Heroic Age

Paul Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400

Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler, Drawings, Pastels and Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonné

1996

Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (eds.), Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (SBA 3)

Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III

Graham Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 2 vols.

Ian C. Bristow, Interior House-Painting Colours and Technology, 1615–1840

Ian C. Bristow, Architectural Colour in British Interiors, 1615–1840

Charlotte Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature: British Landscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Brian T. Allen and Larissa Dukelskaya (eds.), British Art Treasures from Russian Imperial Collections in the Hermitage

1997

John Ingamells (ed.), A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800, compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive

Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558–1625

Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century

Timothy Clayton, The English Print, 1688–1802

Jeffrey M. Muller and Jim Murrell (eds.), Edward Norgate: Miniatura or the Art of Limning

Ronald Paulson (ed.), The Analysis of Beauty: William Hogarth

Robert R. Wark (ed.), Discourses on Art: Sir Joshua Reynolds

Deborah Frizzell, Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo Documents, 1932–1942

Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne and Scott Wilcox (eds.), Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–1880 (SBA 4)

1998

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits; The Complete Paintings, Vol. I

Evelyn Newby, The Diary of Joseph Farington: Index

Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society

James Ayres, Building the Georgian City

1999

Ellen D’Oench, ‘Copper into Gold’: Prints by John Raphael Smith (1751–1812)

Tim Barringer and Elizabeth Prettejohn (eds.), Frederic Leighton: Antiquity, Renaissance, Modernity (SBA 5)

Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth

Howard Colvin, Essays in English Architectural History

Michael Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough

Katharine Lochnan (ed.), Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot (SBA 6)

Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England

Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 1480–1680

Peter Fergusson and Stuart Harrison, Rievaulx Abbey

Alastair Smart; John Ingamells (ed.), Allan Ramsay: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings

2000

Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art

John Summerson, Inigo Jones (rev. edn.)

Lisa Tickner, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century

Ruth Bromberg, Walter Sickert, Prints

Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer

Roy Strong, The Artist & the Garden

Chris Brooks, The Albert Memorial: The Prince Consort National Memorial; its History, Contexts and Conservation

Carol Gibson Wood, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment

David Mannings and Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, 2 vols.

John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe (eds.), The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds

Alastair Grieve, Whistler’s Venice

Christine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture, 1660–1815

John Bold, Greenwich: An Architectural History of the Royal Hospital for Seamen and the Queen’s House

Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College

2001

John Hayes (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden, 1700–1840

Allen Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (2nd edn.)

G. E. Bentley Jr, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake

Eileen Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors

Edward McParland, Public Architecture in Ireland, 1680–1760

James Hyman, The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War, 1945–60

David Solkin (ed.), Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836

Debra N. Mancoff (ed.), John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (SBA 7)

2002

Pauline Croft (ed.), Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils, 1558–1612 (SBA 8)

Alex Kidson (ed.), Those Delightful Regions of Imagination: Essays on George Romney (SBA 9)

David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (eds.), The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940 (SBA 10)

Sara Stevenson, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill

Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1600–1940

Larissa Dukelskaya and Andrew Moore (eds.), A Capital Collection: Houghton Hall and the Hermitage, with a Modern Edition of Aedes Walpolianae

Michael J. K. Walsh, C. R. W. Nevinson: This Cult of Violence

Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in Bath

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the 1890s; The Complete Paintings, Vol. II

Vaughan Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders

2003

Emmanuel Cooper, Bernard Leach: Life & Work

Colum Hourihane, Gothic Art in Ireland, 1169–1550

Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome

John Summerson; Howard Colvin (ed.), Georgian London

Robyn Asleson (ed.), Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812 (SBA 11)

Edward Chaney (ed.), The Evolution of English Collecting: The Reception of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods (SBA 12)

Kathryn A. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping: An Architectural History

Simon Thurley, Hampton Court: A Social and Architectural History

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Later Portraits; The Complete Paintings: Vol. III

Anthony Quiney, Town Houses of Medieval Britain

John Schofield, Medieval London Houses

2004

G. E. Bentley, Jr, Blake Records (2nd edn.)

Peter Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London

Bruce Laughton, William Coldstream

Susan J. Barnes, Nora De Poorter, Oliver Millar and Horst Vey, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings

Sanford Schwartz, William Nicholson

David J. Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905

Sue Malvern, Modern Art, Britain and the Great War

Fiona Donovan, Rubens and England

Veronica Franklin Gould, G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian

Julian Holder and Steven Parissien (eds.), The Architecture of British Transport in the Twentieth Century (SBA 13)

Giles Worsley, The British Stable: An Architectural and Social History

Paul Binski, Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300

John Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors

Susan Foister, Holbein and England

2005

Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain

Alastair Grieve, Constructed Abstract Art in England: A Neglected Avant-Garde

Richard Wendorf, After Sir Joshua: Essays on British Art and Cultural History (SBA 15)

Paula Henderson, The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

Martin Hammer, Bacon and Sutherland: Patterns of Affinity in British Culture of the 1940s

Chris Miele (ed.), From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939 (SBA 14)

Edward Morris, French Art in NineteenthCentury Britain

Anne Middleton Wagner, Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture

Daniel Abramson, Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694–1942

C. Paul Christianson, The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London

Michael Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence

Martin Myrone, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810

Matthew Hargraves, Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791

Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England

2006

Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in EighteenthCentury England

Angela Rosenthal, Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility

Frank Salmon (ed.), Summerson & Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography (SBA 16)

Christopher Wright, with Catherine Gordon and Mary Peskett Smith, British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections

Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols.

Wendy Baron, Sickert: Paintings & Drawings

Peter Draper, The Formation of English Gothic: Architecture and Identity, 1150–1250

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874–1882; The Complete Paintings, Vol. IV

John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds.), Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (SBA 17)

2007

Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod (eds.), Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II (SBA 18, published by Yale University Press, New Haven)

Giles Worsley, Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition

The Knight of Glin and James Peill, Irish Furniture

John Harris, Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages

Gill Perry, Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre, 1768–1820

Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State and Identity in Britain, 1939–1945

Judy Egerton, George Stubbs, Painter: Catalogue Raisonné

Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting

Anna Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers

Diana Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain

Thomas P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court

Maurice Howard, The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England

2008

Matthew Craske, The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720–1770

Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 (4th edn.)

Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement

Philip Temple (ed.), Survey of London Vol. XLVI: South and East Clerkenwell and Vol. XLVII: Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville

Vaughan Hart, Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone

Andor Gomme and Alison Maguire, Design and Plan in the Country House: From Castle Donjons to Palladian Boxes

David H. Solkin, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early NineteenthCentury Britain

Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Paintings

Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings

Judith A. Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870–1914

Helen Pierce, Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England

2009

Cinzia M. Sicca (ed.), John Talman: An Early Eighteenth-Century Connoisseur (SBA 19)

Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Venetian Figures and Landscapes, 1898–1913; The Complete Paintings, Vol. VI

Rachel Stewart, The Town House in Georgian London

Ingrid Roscoe, Emma Hardy and M. G. Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660–1851

Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640

Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice: “The Paradise of Cities”

Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery

Celina Fox, The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment

Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in 18th-Century Rome, 2 vols.

Paula Murphy, Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture: Native Genius Reaffirmed

Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight

Christiana Payne, John Brett: Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter

Andrew Saint, Richard Norman Shaw (rev. edn.)

Mary Bennett, Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols.

Morna O’Neill and Michael Hatt (eds.), The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design, and Performance in Britain, 1901–1910 (SBA 20)

Grace Brockington, Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900–1918

Tomás Ó Carragáin, Churches in Early Medieval Ireland

Philip Temple, Survey of London: The Charterhouse (Monograph 18)

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1883–1899; The Complete Paintings, Vol. V

Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in PostReformation Britain

Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman (eds.), Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (SBA 21)

Morna O’Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics, 1875–1890

2011

John Goodall, The English Castle: 1066–1650

Richard Fawcett, The Architecture of the Scottish Medieval Church, 1100–1560

Sharman Kadish, The Synagogues of Britain and Ireland: An Architectural and Social History

Elizaveta Renne, Sixteenth- to Nineteenth-Century British Painting: State Hermitage Museum Catalogue

Terry Friedman, The Eighteenth-Century Church in Britain

John E. Crowley, Imperial Landscape: Britain’s Global Visual Culture, 1745–1820

Mary Webster, Johan Zoffany

David Coke and Alan Borg, Vauxhall Gardens: A History

Geoff Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829

Allen Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement

Vaughan Hart, Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings

Peter Fergusson, Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the Age of Becket

Patrick Noon, Richard Parkes Bonington: The Complete Drawings

2012

Nancy Rose Marshall, City of Gold and Mud: Painting Victorian London

Cinzia Maria Sicca and Louis Waldman (eds.), The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance: Art for the Early Tudors (SBA 22)

María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui Alpañés and Scott Wilcox, The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmorland, An Episode of the Grand Tour

Mark Crinson, Stirling and Gowan: Architecture from Austerity to Affluence

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Square: Gardens in the Midst of Town

Emmanuel Cooper, Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter

John Martin Robinson, James Wyatt: Architect to George III

Stephanie Moser, Designing Antiquity: Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace

Tarnya Cooper, Citizen Portrait: Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales

Tanya Harrod, The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew: Modern Pots, Colonialism and the Counterculture

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1900–1907; The Complete Paintings, Vol. VII

Kathryn A. Morrison and John Minnis, Carscapes: The Motor Car, Architecture, and Landscape in England

Peter Harbison, William Burton Conyngham and His Irish Circle of Antiquarian Artists

Peter Guillery, Survey of London: Woolwich

2013

Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India

G. Alex Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, 1840–1870

Finola O’Kane, Ireland and the Picturesque: Design, Landscape Painting and Tourism, 1700–1840

Andrew Sanders, In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past

Christopher Rowell, Ham House: Four Hundred Years of Collecting and Patronage

Rosie Dias, Exhibiting Englishness: John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Formation of a National Aesthetic

Joseph Monteyne, From Still Life to the Screen: Print Culture, Display, and the Materiality of the Image in EighteenthCentury London

Anthony Geraghty, The Sheldonian Theatre: Architecture and Learning in Seventeenth-Century Oxford

Christine Stevenson, The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London

Melanie Doderer-Winkler, Magnificent Entertainments: Temporary Architecture for Georgian Festivals

Francis Haskell, The King’s Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and His Courtiers

Annette Carruthers, The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland: A History

Elizabeth McKellar, The Landscapes of London: The City, the Country and the Suburbs, 1660–1840

Mirjam Brusius, Katrina Dean, Chitra Ramalingam (eds.), William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (SBA 23)

Andrew Saint, Survey of London: Battersea: Part 1, Public, Commercial and Cultural

Colin Thom, Survey of London: Battersea: Part 2, Houses and Housing

2014

Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages

Mark Hallett, Reynolds: Portraiture in Action

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1908–1913; The Complete Paintings, Vol. VIII

Ruth Guilding, Owning the Past: Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640–1840

Emily M. Weeks, Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis and the Art of Orientalism

Elizabeth Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan

Art: Painting and Patronage at the Court of Elizabeth I

Michael Hall, George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America

Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350

Rachel Moss, Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume I: Medieval, c. 400–c. 1600

Nicola Figgis, Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume II: Painting, 1600–1900

Paula Murphy, Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume III: Sculpture, 1600–2000

Hugh Campbell, Livia Hurley, Rolf Loeber, John Montague and Ellen Rowley, Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume IV: Architecture, 1600–2000

Catherine Marshall and Peter Murray, Art and Architecture of Ireland, Volume V: Twentieth Century

Joanna Marschner, Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early EighteenthCentury Court

2015

David Brown (ed.), Durham Cathedral: History, Fabric and Culture

Malcolm Baker, The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Sigrid de Jong, Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory

Arthur MacGregor (ed.), The Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities: An Anglo-Irish Country House Museum

Alex Kidson, George Romney: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings

William Vaughan, Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall

Peter Cormack, Arts & Crafts Stained Glass

Giles Waterfield, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914

Elain Harwood, Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945–1975

David H. Solkin, Art in Britain, 1660–1815

Marina Lopato, British Silver: State Hermitage Museum Catalogue

Kathryn A. Morrison, John Cattell, Emily Cole, Nick Hill and Pete Smith, Apethorpe: The Story of an English Country House

Mark Laird, A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

2016

Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Magnificence at the Stuart Court

Susan Rather, The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era

Edgar Peters Bowron, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings

Eric Shanes, Young Mr Turner: The First Forty Years, 1775–1815

Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné

Patricia McCarthy, Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland

Marcia Kupfer, Art and Optics in the Hereford Map: An English Mappa Mundi, c.1300

Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn and Martin Myrone, Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 (SBA 24)

David Adshead and David Taylor (eds.), Hardwick Hall: A Great Old Castle of Romance

Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1914–1925; The Complete Paintings, Vol. IX

Elizabeth Einberg, William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings

2017

David Jacques, Gardens of Court and Country: English Design, 1630–1730

Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War

Ben Highmore, The Art of Brutalism: Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain

Penelope Curtis, Sculpture: Vertical, Horizontal, Closed, Open

Lynda Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain

Kate Retford, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in 18th-Century Britain

Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700

Philip Temple and Colin Thom (eds.), Survey of London Vols. LI and LII: SouthEast Marylebone, 2 vols.

Robin Simon with MaryAnne Stevens, The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections

Jill Francis, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales

John Holmes, The PreRaphaelites and Science

Morna O'Neill, Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915

Mark Hallett, George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field

Olivia Fryman (ed.), Kensington Palace: Art, Architecture and Society

2019

Hugh Belsey, Thomas Gainsborough: The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies after Old Masters

Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist

Paul Binski, Gothic Sculpture

Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Inventing Boston: Design, Production, and Consumption, 1680–1720

Patricia McCarthy, Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland

Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds and Sarah Perks (eds.), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989

David Cannadine (ed.), Westminster Abbey: A Church in History

Matthew Dimmock, Elizabethan Globalism: England, China and the Rainbow Portrait

Douglas Fordham, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770–1820

Sarah Thomas, Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition

2020

Cora Gilroy-Ware, The Classical Body in Romantic Britain

Vaughan Hart, Christopher Wren: In Search of Eastern Antiquity

Andrew Saint, Survey of London: Oxford Street, Volume 53

Roger Stalley, Early Irish Sculpture and the Art of the High Crosses

Lisa Tickner, London’s New Scene: Art and Culture in the 1960s

Martin Myrone, Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain

Thomas Crow, The Hidden Mod in Modern Art: London 1957–1969

Sam Smiles, The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The Artist and his Critics

Melody Barnett Deusner, Aesthetic Painting in Britain and America: Collectors, Art Worlds, Networks

Matthew Craske, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness

2021

Joseph Viscomi, William Blake's Printed Paintings: Methods, Origins, Meanings

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly, Daniel Cottier: Designer, Decorator, Dealer

Adriano Aymonino, Enlightened Eclecticism: The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland

Henrietta McBurney, Illuminating Natural History: The Art and Science of Mark Catesby

Digital Publications

2014

Paul Spencer-Longhurst, Richard Wilson: Online Catalogue Raisonné

2015

British Art Studies, Issue 1

2016

British Art Studies, Issue 2

Richard Stephens, A Catalogue Raisonné of Francis Towne (1739–1816)

British Art Studies, Issue 3: British Sculpture Abroad, 1945–2000, edited by Penelope Curtis and Martina Droth

British Art Studies, Issue 4

2017

British Art Studies, Issue 5

British Art Studies, Issue 6: Invention and Imagination in British Art and Architecture, 600–1500, edited by Jessica Berenbeim and Sandy Heslop

British Art Studies, Issue 7

2018

Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner, Jessica Feather (eds.), The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018

British Art Studies, Issue 8

British Art Studies, Issue 9

British Art Studies, Issue 10: Landscape Now

2019

British Art Studies, Issue 11: Theatres of War: Experimental Performance in London, 1914–1918 and Beyond, curated by Grace Brockington, in collaboration with Impermanence, with contributions from Ella Margolin and Claudia Tobin

British Art Studies, Issue 12

British Art Studies, Issue 13: London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories, edited by Hammad Nasar and Sarah Victoria Turner

British Art Studies, Issue 14

2020

British Art Studies, Issue 15

British Art Studies, Issue 16

British Art Studies, Issue 17: Elizabethan and Jacobean Miniature Paintings in Context, edited by Catharine MacLeod and Alexander Marr

Martin Postle (ed.), Art & the Country House

British Art Studies, Issue 18

2021

British Art Studies, Issue 19

Board of Governors

Governors

Susan Gibbons

Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communication, Yale University, and ex-officio Chief Executive of the Paul Mellon Centre

Stephen C. Murphy

Vice President for Finance & Chief Financial Officer, Yale University

Peter Salovey President and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology, Yale University

Scott Strobel

Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry (MB&B) and University Provost, Yale University

Members

Timothy Barringer

Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University

Marvin Chun

Dean of Yale College, Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology and Professor of Neuroscience, Yale University

Edward S. Cooke, Jr

Charles F Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Director of the Center of Study in American Decorative Arts and Material Culture; Professor of American Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies for History of Art, Yale University

Pericles Lewis

Vice President for Global Strategy and Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives and Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English, Yale University

Courtney J. Martin Director of the Yale Center for British Art

Jules D. Prown

Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus Director of History of Art, Yale University

Keith Wrightson

Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History, Yale University

Advisory council

Jo Applin

Courtauld Institute of Art

Tarnya Cooper

National Trust

Elena Crippa

Tate Britain

Caroline Dakers

Central Saint Martins

David Dibosa

Chelsea College of Arts

John Goodall

Country Life

Julian Luxford

University of St Andrews

David Mellor (until 30 June 2021)

University of Sussex

Lynda Nead

Birbeck

Christine Riding

National Gallery

Nicholas Tromans

Independent Art Historian