Category: Research

Funded by the Rick Mather David Scrase Foundation, the bursaries will support travel to major collections anywhere in the world to view works of Western art on paper from the Renaissance to 1900.

Such travel will typically form part of a post-graduate project but may include curatorial research.

Awards for travel within Europe are expected to be £2000–£2500 and awards for intercontinental travel £3000–£3500.

Fashionable equivocation of gender: a portrait of a lady in hunting garb - By Valerio Zanetti

Artemisia Gentileschi in England - By Niko Munz

Projects, plans and politics: a Scottish architectural tour by Lord Mar and James Gibbs in 1712 - By Margaret Stewart

Benjamin West’s ‘lost’ history painting - By Adam D.C.B. Chen

Ludwig Pollak, Denis Mahon and Guercino’s ‘Mystical ecstasy of St Francis’

Nehemiah Partridge: an early colonial American portrait painter in Jamaica

We seek a dynamic and self-motivated individual with expertise in the ‘Global Renaissance’ (defined temporally as c. 1400 to c. 1650) to facilitate research and engagement work in relation to a major exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, which addresses the theme of sensory experiences and exchanges across the early modern world (co-curated by Geraldine A. Johnson and Leah R. Clark). The working title of the exhibition is ‘Sensory Wonders of the Renaissance World’ and the opening is planned for June 2027. The post is based at the University of Oxford’s History of Art, Faculty of History, based in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford OX2 6AH.

The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) offers short-term fellowships to support research projects that engage substantively with the museum’s collections. These awards are open to academics, curators, doctoral candidates, and independent scholars seeking funding for up to four weeks of on-site research. [...]

Fellowships provide US $5,000 for a four-week research period, with funding prorated for stays of two to four weeks. This stipend is intended to cover all associated costs, including travel, lodging, and daily expenses.

Nicholas Hawksmoor’s dream of a new Oxford, though only partially realized between 1708 and 1736, remains one of the most striking examples of the architecture of knowledge from the early modern period. This was a time of erudite experimentation on paper and in stone. Academics and Hawksmoor as their chosen architect, alongside a range of other figures, envisaged a network of streets, paths, gates, and squares connecting newly designed colleges and libraries, as well as the university press. Complementing the feverish activity on the multiple construction sites, the study, collection, and dissemination of architecture was profoundly reshaped by a variety of types of knowledge and practical expertise. Building, thinking, and learning were more tightly intertwined in early eighteenth-century Oxford than ever before at a renowned university as it pivoted from medieval to modern. The graphic legacy of this intense activity remains with us in an abundance of drawings, prints, and treatises, many of which are published here for the first time.

A total of 22 internationally renowned experts from nine countries present the miniature portrait from different perspectives, discussing the private use of miniatures, special depictions, and messages conveyed by miniatures. Significant but little-known museum collections are introduced alongside insightful information about the living conditions of the artists active at the time. Lastly, aspects regarding the production techniques for miniatures are examined.

This fourth volume publishes the presentations given at the 2024 conference held by the Tansey Miniatures Foundation. Interested individuals from all over the world come together in Celle every two to three years at these conventions on the portrait miniature to discuss this special genre of portrait painting.

Not Lady Jane Grey but Mary Nevill Fiennes, Lady Dacre

An attribution for the portrait of Sir Arthur Hopton and his secretary

Hogarth’s house at the Golden Head, Leicester Fields: Robert LS Cowley

The Welshman in A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth (1697–1764)

Canaletto, the Sandby brothers and ‘Mr Crowle’: Philip Steadman

The life of Charles Philips (1703–1747) with a checklist of his works

Lorenz Natter (1705–1763)

Sketches Taken at Print Sales by Paul Sandby (1731–1809)

Identifying a mystery portrait by Arthur Devis (1712–1787)

The Flight Out of Egypt by Richard Dadd (1817–1886)

An undocumented portrait of Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst

Did Ben Nicholson and Jim Ede take advantage of Alfred Wallis?

Carel Weight during the Allied occupation after the Second World War

Framing Sheila Fell (1931–1979) as a social realist

‘Impressions in Watercolour: JMW Turner and his Contemporaries’

Neo-Impressionists at the National Gallery, London

Sir Francis Carruthers Gould, pioneering cartoonist

The Museum Curatorial Assistant will partner with the curator in routine duties of the curatorial department. These include both supporting and conducting independent research on the permanent collections of Spanish and Texas art, for exhibitions and publications, as well as performing administrative duties. They will be expected to support long-term relationships and collaborations with internationally recognized museums, investigate the provenance of the permanent collection, participate in conferences (to be determined in consultation with the curator), curate exhibitions, advise on acquisitions, administer the Moss/Chumley Award, interact with museum patrons, and cultivate relationships with galleries and dealers, among other duties.

‘An illustrious sculptress’: Marcello in London, 1863–67 - By Laura Chase

The history of Westmacott’s Waterloo Vase in the gardens of Buckingham Palace - By Peter T.J. Rumley

The early eighteenth-century monument to Jan Bonawentura Krasiński in Poland - By Konrad Morawski

‘La Galerie de Girardon’ revived: six lost works from the collection in the Hôtel Bondy, Paris - By Ana Cornelia Pade

New perspectives on fragments of terracotta sculpture associated with Pietro Torrigiano at Westminster Abbey - By Susan Jenkins, Charlotte Hubbard, Elizabeth Miller, Patrick Quinn

This volume is an oddity in the Corpus Rubenianum. Rather than being devoted to one particular project, or category of subject, it presents what at first sight might appear a miscellany of drawings. The works discussed here are indeed united only in the circumstance that they have proved difficult to associate directly with any particular painting or project undertaken by Rubens – and, for the most part, they remain so. Many of these ‘unrelated’ sheets have been relegated to the margins of Rubens scholarship as a result of their ambiguous status, whether because of uncertainties regarding their attribution, their subject-matter or their function (or all three).

The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World's Fair, is generally thought of as a giant trade fair, a showcase for empires and industry. However, it was also conceived to address a deep-rooted problem with British taste, which favoured European art and design over British. Julius Bryant's richly illustrated new book, which draws on the vast visual resources of the V&A's collections, establishes the centrality of works of fine art amongst the objects on show at the Great Exhibition. It also highlights the ways in which contemporary artists were commissioned to depict and record the Exhibition’s building and displays for reproduction in commemorative publications.

Through reproductions of period images from definitive official publications, commercial guides, souvenirs, music scores, poems and satirical periodicals, the book brings to life the 19th-century visitor’s experience of the first World’s Fair. 

Do you have an idea for a special issue of British Art Studies? 

British Art Studies invites proposals for themed special issues to be published in 2027 and 2028. We’re looking for projects that address major topics in the study of British art – ones that rethink familiar narratives, explore under-researched subjects, or test the boundaries of what ‘British’ art might mean. 

Each special issue is developed collaboratively with the British Art Studies editorial team, and contributing editors receive a fee of £1,000 on publication. 

He fought in the Napoleonic wars and is one of only nine Black soldiers known to have received the Waterloo Medal, the first British medal awarded to soldiers regardless of their rank.

Yet the story of Pte Thomas James has been overlooked for centuries.

Now the National Army Museum in London has identified James as the likely subject of an “extraordinarily rare” painting from 1821, which it has attributed to the artist Thomas Phillips, whose more typical sitters were Georgian luminaries such as the Duke of Wellington and Lord Byron.

The portrait will be unveiled to the public on Tuesday at the museum’s “Army at Home” gallery in Chelsea, where it will be placed on permanent display to highlight the service of James and other Black soldiers during the Napoleonic wars.

Michel Sittow was born in Reval c. 1469, today the Estonian capital city of Tallinn. Possibly trained in the workshop of Hans Memling in Bruges, he subsequently moved to work in the Iberian Peninsula, where he first held the position of court painter. This monograph undertakes research on this phase of his career. In the Kingdom of Castille, Michel Sittow was appointed painter to Queen Isabella and became a member of her household with an impressive annual salary. Thanks to the analysis of archival documents and formal and iconographical studies on Sittow’s paintings, it is possible to explain the court painter’s life circumstances and describe the benefits he enjoyed and the difficulties he faced. The Castilian period was crucial for Michel Sittow’s career since over the course of his professional life, he also resided at the courts of Philip the Fair, Margaret of Austria, Christian II of Denmark and Charles V, all relatives of his first royal patron. While serving European monarchs, he transferred Memling’s techniques and visual language beyond the Low Countries and developed his artistic practice and style. The analysis of the various contexts Michel Sittow worked in sheds light on his oeuvre and his possible privileged status as a courtier, which provided opportunities to establish a flourishing and ambitious career in northern and southern Europe.