Current research
My research interests are in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British landscape and genre painting, with a particular emphasis on the representation of the poor and the relationship of art to its social and political context. I have curated exhibitions and displays at Tate Britain, the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, the Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, and Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance.
My most recent publications include Where the Sea Meets the Land, a book on images of the coast in the nineteenth century, and a monograph on the artist John Brett. My new book, Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870, has just been published by Sansom and Company.
Please see below for a full list of publications.
research students
I am currently supervising two research students:
Robert Wilkes (co-supervised with Dr Dinah Roe) is working on the life and work of Frederic George Stephens.
Mary Thompson is working on "The Elderly in Portraits in England and the USA, 1870-1910."
Robert Wilkes (co-supervised with Dr Dinah Roe) is working on the life and work of Frederic George Stephens.
Mary Thompson is working on "The Elderly in Portraits in England and the USA, 1870-1910."
Former research students
-Dr Virginia Flew (co-supervised with Dr Matthew Craske) graduated in 2017. Her thesis is on "How the Culture of Exhibitions and the Print Market transformed Landscape Painting in the Late Eighteenth Century."
Dr Mary O'Neill graduated in 2016. Her thesis on "Paintings and Photographs of Fisherfolk and Fishing Practices in West Cornwall, 1860-1910" was an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral project, in association with Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, where she curated an exhibition: Model Citzens: Myths and Realities (14 June - 6 September 2014)
Publication: Cornwall's 'Fisherfolk': Art and Artifice (Sansom and Company, 2014)
Dr Caroline Palmer (co-supervised with Dr Harry Mount) is currently Western Art Print Room Supervisor in the Ashmolean Museum.
Publications:
"Brazen Cheek: Face-Painters in Late Eighteenth-Century England," Oxford Art Journal (2008) 31(2): pp. 195-213.
"Colour, chemistry and corsets: Mary Philadelphia Merrifield's Dress as a Fine Art", Costume Journal, 47:1, January 2013, pp. 3-27.
"'I Will Tell Nothing that I Did Not See': British Women's Travel Writing, Art, and the Science of Connoisseurship, 1776-1860", Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51.3 (2015), pp. 248-68.
With Colin Harrison and Katherine Wodehouse et al, Great British Drawings, exh. cat. (Ashmolean Museum), 2015.
ed., with Carly Collier, "Discovering Ancient and Modern Primitives: The Travel Journals of Maria Callcott, 1827-28", Walpole Society, vol. 78 (2016).
"'A fountain of the richest poetry': Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and the rediscovery of early Christian art", Visual Resources, 33. 1-2 (2017), pp. 48-73.
Dr Fiona Mann graduated in 2012 and is now a freelance researcher. In December 2017 she was invited to give the McDougall Lecture on watercolour painting at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Publications:
"Rossetti's Watercolours: Materials and Technique", The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Vol. XIII, No 3 (Autumn 2005), pp.19-29.
"A ‘born rebel’: Edward Burne-Jones and watercolour painting 1857-1880" - The Burlington Magazine, October 2014.
"Lifting the ‘Universal veil’ of anonymity: Writers on Art in the British Periodical Press, 1850-1880" - The British Art Journal, Winter 2014-15.
“’Shilling vade-mecums’: Watercolour Manuals and the Advancement of Watercolour in Britain 1850-1880”, in Christoph Krekel, Joyce H. Townsend, Sigrid Eyb-Green, Jo Kirby, Kathrin Pilz (eds.), Expression and Sensibility. Art Technological Sources and the Rise of Modernism, Archetype Publications, (forthcoming) April 2018.
Dr Nancy Langham-Hooper graduated in 2012. She is currently an Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research is on John Rogers Herbert.
Publications:
“James Collinson’s For Sale and To Let: The Vulnerable Woman” The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Summer 2009, p62-68.
."John Rogers Herbert (1810-90) and the New Palace of Westminster," British Art Journal (2011)
"The Pre-Pre-Raphaelite: John Rogers Herbert, R.A. (1810-1890), The Burlington Magazine, May 2014.
“Unrolled: John Rogers Herbert (1810-1890) and the monumental Moses in the National Gallery of Victoria”, Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, No. 54, December 2015, p71-81.
"‘You May See it or Not’: John Rogers Herbert, R.A. and the New Palace of Westminster ". Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion. Eds. Ben Quash, Aaron Rosen and Chloe Reddaway. London: IB Tauris, 2016. pp102-114.
"Edith Courtauld’s ‘Memories of the First Palm Sunday’", Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Special Edition: Pre-Raphaelitism and Australasia, March 2018 (forthcoming)
Dr Mary O'Neill graduated in 2016. Her thesis on "Paintings and Photographs of Fisherfolk and Fishing Practices in West Cornwall, 1860-1910" was an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral project, in association with Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, where she curated an exhibition: Model Citzens: Myths and Realities (14 June - 6 September 2014)
Publication: Cornwall's 'Fisherfolk': Art and Artifice (Sansom and Company, 2014)
Dr Caroline Palmer (co-supervised with Dr Harry Mount) is currently Western Art Print Room Supervisor in the Ashmolean Museum.
Publications:
"Brazen Cheek: Face-Painters in Late Eighteenth-Century England," Oxford Art Journal (2008) 31(2): pp. 195-213.
"Colour, chemistry and corsets: Mary Philadelphia Merrifield's Dress as a Fine Art", Costume Journal, 47:1, January 2013, pp. 3-27.
"'I Will Tell Nothing that I Did Not See': British Women's Travel Writing, Art, and the Science of Connoisseurship, 1776-1860", Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51.3 (2015), pp. 248-68.
With Colin Harrison and Katherine Wodehouse et al, Great British Drawings, exh. cat. (Ashmolean Museum), 2015.
ed., with Carly Collier, "Discovering Ancient and Modern Primitives: The Travel Journals of Maria Callcott, 1827-28", Walpole Society, vol. 78 (2016).
"'A fountain of the richest poetry': Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and the rediscovery of early Christian art", Visual Resources, 33. 1-2 (2017), pp. 48-73.
Dr Fiona Mann graduated in 2012 and is now a freelance researcher. In December 2017 she was invited to give the McDougall Lecture on watercolour painting at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Publications:
"Rossetti's Watercolours: Materials and Technique", The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Vol. XIII, No 3 (Autumn 2005), pp.19-29.
"A ‘born rebel’: Edward Burne-Jones and watercolour painting 1857-1880" - The Burlington Magazine, October 2014.
"Lifting the ‘Universal veil’ of anonymity: Writers on Art in the British Periodical Press, 1850-1880" - The British Art Journal, Winter 2014-15.
“’Shilling vade-mecums’: Watercolour Manuals and the Advancement of Watercolour in Britain 1850-1880”, in Christoph Krekel, Joyce H. Townsend, Sigrid Eyb-Green, Jo Kirby, Kathrin Pilz (eds.), Expression and Sensibility. Art Technological Sources and the Rise of Modernism, Archetype Publications, (forthcoming) April 2018.
Dr Nancy Langham-Hooper graduated in 2012. She is currently an Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research is on John Rogers Herbert.
Publications:
“James Collinson’s For Sale and To Let: The Vulnerable Woman” The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Summer 2009, p62-68.
."John Rogers Herbert (1810-90) and the New Palace of Westminster," British Art Journal (2011)
"The Pre-Pre-Raphaelite: John Rogers Herbert, R.A. (1810-1890), The Burlington Magazine, May 2014.
“Unrolled: John Rogers Herbert (1810-1890) and the monumental Moses in the National Gallery of Victoria”, Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, No. 54, December 2015, p71-81.
"‘You May See it or Not’: John Rogers Herbert, R.A. and the New Palace of Westminster ". Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion. Eds. Ben Quash, Aaron Rosen and Chloe Reddaway. London: IB Tauris, 2016. pp102-114.
"Edith Courtauld’s ‘Memories of the First Palm Sunday’", Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Special Edition: Pre-Raphaelitism and Australasia, March 2018 (forthcoming)
Publications
Books
- Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England, 1780-1890, Yale University Press, 1993.
- Edited, with Michael Rosenthal and Scott Wilcox, Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750-1880 (Studies in British Art 4), Yale University Press, 1997.
- Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century British Art, Djanogly Art Gallery/Lund Humphries, 1998.
- With Judith Cook and Melissa Hardie, Singing from the Walls: the Life and Work of Elizabeth Forbes, Sansom and Company, 2000.
- Edited, with Steven King, The Dress of the Poor 1750-1900: Old and New Perspectives, special issue of Textile History, May 2002.
- Edited, with William Vaughan, English Accents: Interactions with British Art , 1776-1855, Ashgate, 2004.
- With Charles Brett and Mike Hickox, John Brett in Cornwall, Sansom and Company, 2006.
- Where the Sea Meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Sansom and Company, 2007.
- With Ann Sumner, Objects of Affection: Pre-Raphaelite Portraits by John Brett, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 2010.
- John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter, Yale University Press, 2010.
- With Wendy Baron et al, The Art of Jeremy Gardiner, Lund Humphries, 2013.
- Edited, with Janette Kerr, The Power of the Sea: Making Waves in British Art 1790-2014, Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2014.
- An essay and catalogue entries in Gemma Brace, ed., Air: Visualising the Invisible in British Art, 1760-2017, Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2017.
- With Joanna Selborne, William Henry Hunt: Country People, London: The Courtauld Gallery, 2017.
- Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870, Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2017.
Chapters
- With Michael Hickox, “Sermons in stones: John Brett’s The Stonebreaker reconsidered”, in Ellen Harding, ed., Reframing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays, Scolar Press, 1996.
- “Seaside Visitors: Idlers, Thinkers and Patriots in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain”, in Susan Anderson and Bruce Tabb, eds., Water, Leisure and Culture: European Historical Perspectives, Berg Publishers, 2002.
- "Images of Rural and Sea-side Life" in Victorian Paintings from the Royal Holloway Collection, London, Art Services International, 2008.
- "Dreaming of the Marriage of the Land and Sea": Samuel Palmer and the Coast", in Simon Shaw-Miller and Sam Smiles, ed., Samuel Palmer Revisited, Ashgate, 2010.
- "Cranbrook and Modernity" in The Cranbrook Colony: Fresh Perspectives, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2010.
- “Our English Coasts: Defence and National Identity in Nineteenth-century Britain” in Tricia Cusack, ed., Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012
- "Visions of the Beach in Victorian Britain", in Ursula Kluwick, ed., The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015.
Journal articles
- “John Linnell and Samuel Palmer in the 1820s”, Burlington Magazine, CXXIX, March 1982.
- “Boundless harvests: representations of open fields and gleaning in early nineteenth century England”, Turner Studies, Summer 1991.
- “Rural virtues for urban consumption: cottage scenes in early Victorian painting”, Journal of Victorian Culture, Spring 1998.
- “Smugglers, Poachers and Wreckers in Nineteenth-century English Painting”, Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, University of Montpelier III, no. 61, April 2005.
- "John Brett's Christmas Morning, 1866", Burlington Magazine, CL, no. 1269, December 2008.
- “A mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre”: Samuel Palmer and the moon”, Burlington Magazine, CLIV, no. 1310, May 2012
- "John Constable, John Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites", British Art Journal, XVI No. 1, Summer 2015, pp. 78-87.
- "John Brett: A Pre-Raphaelite Imperialist", Special issue of Visual Culture in Britain, eds. Colin Cruise and Amelia Yeates, 2015. http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/5k79FUBdVNbaEs4GBkSz/full