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).

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.

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.