Current research
My publications to date have been on 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, the Higgins Bedford, and Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance.
My most recent publications include a monograph on the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter John Brett, and a book on trees in British art: Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870 (2017).
My current project is an exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite drawings and watercolours at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for which I am guest curator (opening delayed by current lockdown, hopefully open in April, May and June 2021). I am also doing research on trees and environmental issues in American painting and writing of the first half of the nineteenth century, covering the artists Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, and the writer Henry David Thoreau.
Illustration: Thomas Cole, Lake with Dead Trees (1825). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio.
Please see below for a full list of publications.
My most recent publications include a monograph on the Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter John Brett, and a book on trees in British art: Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870 (2017).
My current project is an exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite drawings and watercolours at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for which I am guest curator (opening delayed by current lockdown, hopefully open in April, May and June 2021). I am also doing research on trees and environmental issues in American painting and writing of the first half of the nineteenth century, covering the artists Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, and the writer Henry David Thoreau.
Illustration: Thomas Cole, Lake with Dead Trees (1825). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio.
Please see below for a full list of publications.
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.
- With Gemma Brace and Rachael Nee, Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art, 1692-2019, Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2019
- Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2021
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.
- "Bewick and Landseer: The Chillingham Cattle in Art", in Paul G. Bahn and Vera B. Mutimer, eds., Chillingham: Its Cattle, Castle and Church, Fonthill Media, 2016
- “ The first balloon flights: art and science” and catalogue of selected loan works, in Gemma Brace, ed., Air: Visualising the Invisible in British Art, 1768-2017, Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2017
- “Picturing Work”, in Deborah Leigh Simonoton and Anne Montenach, eds., A Cultural History of Work in the Enlightenment, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018
- “A Breath of Fresh Air: Constable and the Coast”, in Matthew Ingleby and Matthew P. M. Kerr, eds., Coastal Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018
- “Representations of Leisure, 1800-1920”, in Jan Hein Furnée, ed., A Cultural History of Leisure, Vol. 5, The Age of Empire, London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2021
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
