Introduction

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

Having weathered the storm of the global pandemic of 2020–21, this year saw the Centre and its staff beginning the process of returning to Bedford Square, and cutting back on the forms of home working that had become so familiar during successive lockdowns. Even so, it was clear that attitudes to work had profoundly changed over the course of the pandemic, and that there was a new demand on the part of colleagues for more flexible employment arrangements. Consequently, the Centre – like so many other institutions in this period – introduced a new set of working practices that enabled many full-time staff members to work up to two days a week from home. This hybrid arrangement proved both practical and popular, and was quickly accepted as the norm.

Once we had seen our premises at Bedford Square coming back to life, and having ensured that all our core activities were fully up and running, my senior colleagues and I spent much of the year undertaking a thoroughgoing strategic review of the Centre’s structures, policies and personnel. This seemed appropriate for three reasons: it allowed us to reflect on how we might best go forward in the ‘new normal’ circumstances of the post-pandemic era; it enabled us to look carefully at the full raft of our policies and procedures, including those in the crucial areas of equality, diversity and inclusion; and it also gave us a period of self-reflection after nearly a decade’s worth of rapid growth, during which our ambitions, activities and staff numbers had expanded in a dramatic way.

This led, first of all, to a reorganisation of the Centre’s senior management structure in the autumn of 2021. My own title of Director of Studies was simplified to that of Director; Sarah Victoria Turner took on the newly created role of Deputy Director; Sarah Ruddick became Chief Financial Officer; and a new role of Head of Research and Learning was created and subsequently filled by Dr Sria Chatterjee, who arrived at the Centre in January 2022.

In the spring of 2022, this new senior leadership team embarked on an extensive series of organised conversations with groups of colleagues from every area of the Centre, which canvassed opinion on their challenges, priorities and aspirations. Through this process, and through a series of follow-up conversations and consultations, we were able to develop a new set of Centre-wide strategic priorities for 2022–25, which we summarised under three headings: Connecting, Sustaining and Creating. We were also able to make great progress in developing a series of new and improved policies and procedures, including a new equality, diversity and inclusion policy and action plan. Finally, we were able to agree upon a series of changes to our team structures and reporting lines, and a set of new appointments in our Learning, Digital, HR, Finance, Operations and Library and Archive teams.

This intensive period of institutional reflection, review and reorganisation helped give the Centre, as it emerged from the last vestiges of the Covid-19 pandemic, a welcome sense of solidity and confidence.

We ended the year proud not only of our progress in renewing ourselves as an organisation, but also of the range of activities and achievements chronicled in this report. Especially notable in this regard was the publication of our digitised photographic archive in November 2023, which represented the culmination of a major research project led by the Centre’s Digital Manager, Tom Scutt. This resource makes available, for free, digital reproductions of our archive of approximately 100,000 reference photographs of British paintings, decorative paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. It also features a series of specially commissioned essays that suggest the archive’s interest and relevance for contemporary users, together with a sequence of films that approach the archive from different points of view, including those of an artist, a conservator and a curator.

Another major development for the Centre was the successful launch in the spring of 2022 of our New Narratives programme of awards, which are designed to help diversify the field of British art studies, and to provide transformative levels of support for graduate students and early career scholars. The grants include an MA/MPhil Studentship, a Doctoral Scholarship and an Early Career Fellowship, and we were delighted to make awards to three wonderful scholars: Peter Miller, Nicholas Brown and Jareh Das. We look forward to watching the progress of this highly talented trio of inaugural awardees, and to making sure that this ten-year, £2m programme continues to flourish. Finally, we were delighted to collaborate with our colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art in organising an especially high-profile series of Paul Mellon Lectures. The series was devoted to the topic of ‘The Museum and Gallery Today’, and was delivered by a stellar group of museum directors. In these turbulent times, it was both bracing and inspiring to hear their reflections on the institutions they run and on the challenges and opportunities of a new, post-pandemic curatorial era.

Mark Hallett Director