All Issues
Summary In the spirit of enquiry and experimentation, we have created a new platform for British Art Studies. The key drivers for this change have centred on issues of accessibility, equity, and environmental impact.
Summary A case study of Camerawork (1979-1985) thinks through the questions and challenges posed by representing periodicals in exhibitions and publications.
Summary This article is the first sustained examination of Ben Nicholson’s engagement with architectural painting.
Summary Examines how documentary sources provide insight into the identity, voice, and experiences of a Black sitter in an early modern British portrait.
Summary Positions the architectural historian Gavin Stamp as an exemplar of the activist-scholar tradition, and the British New Right.
Summary A visual essay places Frank Bowling’s Middle Passage (1970) paintings in conversation with Caribbean and Guyanese literary voices.
and Rosie Cooper
Sarah Victoria Turner
Summary In this interview, Charwei Tsai discusses the creation of over 200 ceramic vessels during her Wysing Arts Centre residency, drawing connections to Li Yuan-chia’s LYC Museum, and exploring spirituality.
Summary Argues that J.M.W. Turner’s watercolour contains disguised allusion to the Tory government’s persecution of the political satirist William Hone, as well as corruption tied to the Earl of Lonsdale.
Summary Argues that through his self-portraits, L.S. Lowry negotiated the contradiction between his artistic ambitions and pressure to earn a wage in the context of shifting expectations around masculinity in twentieth-century Britain.
Summary Victorian shell mosaics known as sailors’ valentines, crafted by Afro-Barbadian women, embodied creolised material culture and served as a form of cultural and economic agency within the colonial tourism industry of Barbados.
Summary Explores how contemporary artists in Scotland, inspired by Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), engage with the persistent legacies of sugar’s violent histories, linking imperial pasts with present artistic and activist expressions.
and Jala Wahid
Summary Jala Wahid in conversation about her work and the politics that underpin it, discusses imperialist violence, apocalyptic images, monumental conflict, questions of time, and the politics of nationhood.
Summary Contributors discuss monuments as sites of social antagonism, examining their roles in colonialism, national identity, and public memory.
Summary This article makes use of multimedia elements such as film, animation, and moving images to better understand the spatial dynamics, display techniques, and creative processes behind the exemplary surviving print room.
Summary How is queer eroticism figured in artworks that might also deny it? This article attends to John Everett Millais’s ambivalent proximity to lesbian desire through an analysis of The Vale of Rest (1859) and other works.
Summary Analyses the debates about the professionalisation of the study of British art, focusing on the activities of the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, and its attempts to establish art history as an academic discipline in Britain.
Summary Offers technologies like 3D scanning, printing, CNC milling, and digital remixing as disruptive, but not destructive, analogues to historical reproduction methods such as casting and copying.
Summary Nigel Henderson’s photographs of Kenneth Martin’s abstract mobiles in a North London children’s hospital suggest a new way of understanding British constructionism.
Summary This feature documents the visual cultures of the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common in an “anarchival curatorial experiment”.
Summary A short film explores artist Jacqueline Bishop’s depiction of the market woman, a pervasive, yet overlooked figure in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, on a set of newly decorated ceramic plates.
Summary Traces the evolution of Gustav Metzger’s aesthetic theories from a period of intense experimentation with materials, technology, and scientific processes in the 1960s to his Remember Nature project in 2015.
Summary Examines photography’s emergence in St Andrews through its ties to the British Empire, with David Brewster’s writings revealing the imperial frameworks behind the technology’s adoption.
Summary Virginia Woolf’s “Solid Objects” and Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy inspire analysis of Becky Beasley and Lucy Skaer’s art, exploring themes of life, death, and found objects.
Summary Argues that Trinitarian imagery was employed to construct a distinctive memory of the Black Prince, one that served to bolster the claims of his son Richard II.
Summary Suggests that John Kay’s satirical portrait of William Forbes of Callendar should be understood as a complex burlesque allusion which engages with prints after European Old Master and contemporary British history paintings.
Summary Demonstrates that Langdon Coburn’s experimentation with radical aesthetics began earlier than previously thought and was instigated by his friendship with English science fiction writer H.G. Wells.
and Justin McCann
Summary This special issue examines the Thames as a cultural and environmental force, focusing on its impact on nineteenth-century art, industry, and colonial legacies.
and Danielle Thom
Summary This collaborative article explores the lasting effects of the aesthetic and spatial implications of London’s West India Docks, and the ways in which these persist in influencing the site and its communities today.
Summary Traces the history of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee through three objects: James McNeill Whistler’s print Tilbury (1887), a photograph taken aboard the HMY Victoria and Albert during the Naval Review, and a Royal Worcester commemorative scent bottle.
Summary Explores the expression of the pastoral in William Morris’s printed designs, arguing that his patterns are indirect representations of the landscape he most admired: the rural reaches of the Upper Thames.
Summary Considers representations of a fire that broke out at Cotton’s Wharf in Tooley Street, London, in 1861 as a case study that reveals a debate about the status of Britain as a global power.
Summary Giving voice to women’s presence beneath the surface of James McNeill Whistler’s images, this article suggests how, as “involuntary neighbours”, they made sense of the watery, arterial world of the Thames.
Summary Considers the significance of South London for James McNeill Whistler, particularly the line of Battersea factories that he viewed and depicted repeatedly from his home on Cheyne Walk from the 1860s.
Summary Explores how the Thames became a site where gas manufacture and ballooning came together to provide new forms of experience, spectacle, and economic opportunity as well as deadly risk and toxic effluent.
Summary Highlights the work of participants in the exhibition Another Crossing, with an introduction by its guest curator Glenn Adamson.
Summary The spectres of history and the possibilities of the future haunt this special issue of British Art Studies, which challenges readers to rethink the British decorative arts.
Summary Explores how the Renaissance may have posed a more malleable, self-assertive antidote to the pressures of twentieth-century fashion, and the systems it upheld.
Summary Looks at the dialogue between microscopical arranged slides that became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century and the design theories of Owen Jones.
Summary Describes the approach taken to interpreting, in a gallery setting, a set of silver with a troubling history.
and Joseph Mizhakii Zordan
Summary Examines the uses and meanings of white “Cherokee clay”, among Cherokee and British potters, and between their respective political and cultural worlds.
Summary This article reappraises a set of ceramic portrait medallions that served to educate and promote what it meant to be a woman in the late eighteenth century.
Summary Contextualises the production, purchase, and display of specimen tables in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Summary Dissects the development of the “blackamoor” as a decorative category through case studies of objects at Ham House, Knole, and Dyrham Park.
Summary What can a suit tell us about gender, sex, and class in post-war Britain?
Summary Investigates the transformation of porcelain shards washed up on the beaches of St. Croix from island debris into artworks and decorative objects.
Summary Discusses how the Cherokee visitors to London became such a spectacle by studying three wax statues that were made in their image.
Summary Combines colonial era ceramic techniques and contemporary themes including gun violence, fossil fuel geopolitics, and the influence of big tech.
Summary Curators and academics discuss the challenges of displaying and interpreting race and empire in a decorative arts gallery.
and Roberto Visani
Summary This interview presents a discussion about the artist’s ongoing confrontation with the visual archive of slavery through the cardboard slave kits series.
Summary For this feature, curators were asked to revisit and revise an object label they had previously written.
Summary A case study considers how gallery design and interpretation can enhance engagement with the colonial histories of glass objects.
Summary Contributors respond to the provocation of correlating art and art history with idea of the “nation”. Responses from Jenny Gaschke, Sarah Gould, Gill Perry, Francesco Ventrella, Kimberly Lamm, Jackson Davidow, Isobel Harbison, Edwin Coomasaru, James Alexander Cameron, Imogen Hart, Corinne Fowler and Alexander Massouras.
and Ming Tiampo
Summary The first part of the Slade, London, Asia feature presents a narrative history that takes the Slade School of Fine Art as the starting point for a global microhistory.
and Liz Bruchet
Summary The second part of the Slade, London, Asia feature brings together materials from multiple institutional and personal archives in Asia and the United Kingdom.
Summary Explores the imaginative purchase of the historical and the antiquarian as Gustav Metzger learned to live, work, and practise as an artist outside the cosmopolitan centre.
Summary Considers Zarina Bhimji’s work in relation to surrealist and second-wave feminist artists through her interest in affect, memory, and the symbolic representation of enigmatic childhood and domestic objects.
Summary This feature brings together historians of art and historians of medicine to explore the production and reception of Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy.
with Ludmilla Jordanova
and William Schupbach
Summary Three films discuss the production, use, and circulation of anatomical images and texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Wellcome Collection.
Summary Tracks the networks of specialists with whom Maclise was associated, from Cork and the capitals of Scotland, England, and France, across the Atlantic to Philadelphia and Boston.
Summary An examination of Maclise’s rendering of the interior and exterior of the Black body considers the relationship between aesthetics and race in mid-nineteenth-century anatomical illustration.
Summary Argues that it is plausible and meaningful to take Maclise’s anatomical illustrations, and the figures depicted therein, as queer objects of queer desire.
Summary Contextualises the collaborative effort behind the publication of Maclise’s The Anatomy of the Arteries within the broader landscape of nineteenth-century anatomical publishing networks.
Summary Traces the US reception of Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy and outlines its impact on American medical publishing, pedagogy, and practice.
Summary Presents a reading of Millais’s painting as a “metapicture” that looked ahead to the planting of the British flag at the North Pole and also to today’s treatment of the Arctic in contemporary art.
Summary Considers John McHale’s writing and art practice as an evolving response to Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology.
Summary Obstetric Tables stood out among midwifery guides of the period for its coloured lithographic illustrations, mobilised by the construction of paper flaps.
Summary Contributors respond to the provocation that the concept of object “life-histories” in museums has masked the colonial violence inherent in their collections.
Summary Victor Ehikhamenor’s Royal Religion series fuses Catholic rosaries, coral beads, and bronze statuettes to explore the hybrid history of garments worn by the Benin monarch.
Summary Examines the afterlife of Aubrey Beardsley in Russia, focusing on his admirers among the World of Art group, led by Sergei Diaghilev, and the circulation of Beardsley’s images through their journal Mir iskusstva.
Summary Contributors consider whether the ecological crisis demands a fundamental transformation in the way art history is structured and taught.
Summary The Pitfour photographs illuminate the tension between the early progressive uses of photography, particularly by women, and the often-repressive contexts that shaped their production.
Summary Case studies of the 1961 IUA Congress and Victor Pasmore’s Peterlee project trace the decline of British constructionism amid changing cultural discourses.
Summary Argues that daguerreotypes must be understood as image-thing amalgams, paying particular attention to the construction and marks on their cases and frames.
Summary Worm: art + ecology curates this feature, showcasing the work of four artists alongside their own practice to explore justice in environmental and climate issues.
Summary Moss Rain Paradox is a research project that examines the UK’s imminent water scarcity issues and responds to a spectrum of climate perspectives.
Summary Explores Sonia E. Barrett’s sculptural interventions using furniture made from tropical hardwoods linked to colonial wealth, which confront and critique dominant narratives of race, gender, and environmental exploitation.
Summary Standing with the Wang Chau villagers resisting eviction by the Hong Kong government, these works capture their collective farming, jackfruit festival, activism, and daily co-learning through paintings, photos, and anecdotes.
Summary Documents and archives the work of Indigenous and Afro-descendant organisers using vibrant, accessible images focused on anti-colonial, climate, and social justice issues.
Summary Investigations that utilise geospatial analysis and architectural methodologies to reconstruct cases of environmental violations.
Summary Assesses the iconography, attribution, and sitter’s identity of one of the earliest impresa miniatures: Man in an Armillary Sphere (1569).
and Alexander Marr
Summary Introduction to a special issue reassessing English portrait miniature paintings by Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver.
Summary While John White’s images have often been placed in the long tradition of European watercolours, a more convincing view situates them within the Elizabethan vogue for limning.
Summary Examines the symbolic use of playing cards in the creation of portrait miniatures, suggesting they employed courtly imagery to express social affiliations, political loyalties, and ties of affection.
Summary Presents the first full-length study of the small book of prayers belonging to Queen Elizabeth I in relation to the miniatures it contained by Nicholas Hilliard of the queen herself and François Hercule, duc d’Anjou.
Summary Provides both a broad context for Nicholas Hilliard’s formative years and offers a plausible scenario as to how he acquired the skills that made him the most successful miniaturist of his generation.
Summary Argues that the patronage of Isaac Oliver by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and his circle was central to both the development of the artist’s practice and to Essex’s campaign for power at court.
Summary An art-historical and technical analysis of the Yale Center for British Art’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, proposes an attribution and Princess Mary (later Mary I) as the sitter.
Summary Discusses the authorship and audience of England’s first printed recipe book which is entirely dedicated to the practice of limning.
and Paola Ricciardi
Summary A collaborative research project by the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Hamilton Kerr Institute sheds light on the materiality of Isaac Oliver’s artistic practice.
Summary This editorial affirms British Art Studies’ commitment to anti-racism by pledging to elevate Black voices, critically examine the entanglement of British art with colonialism and white supremacy, and implement structural changes in publishing practices.
Summary Contributors consider the role that decorative objects, which have long been deemed as “superfluous”, played in shaping and negotiating our political, social, and economic needs, wants, and desires, both past and present.
Summary Considers a series of encounters with printed, painted, and sculpted portraits by a range of viewers with different political and religious inclinations during the 1650s.
and Martin Myrone
Summary Considers a series of encounters with printed, painted, and sculpted portraits by a range of viewers with different political and religious inclinations during the 1650s.
and Paul Messier
Robert Hixon
with photography by Richard Caspole
Summary This feature explores the photography of Bill Brandt from the perspective of the physical print, drawing attention to its material qualities and practical functions.
and John Cooper
Summary Introduction to a series of texts examining St Stephen’s Chapel at the Palace of Westminster.
Summary Siscusses the creation of a digital reconstruction of St Stephen’s Chapel as it appeared in 1360, exploring how virtual modelling serves both as a research tool and a means of public engagement, while reflecting on the methodological challenges and interpretive decisions involved in visualising this lost medieval space.
and James Jago
Summary Examines how varying degrees of historical evidence influenced the digital reconstruction of St Stephen’s Chapel across three periods, highlighting how the modelling process itself reveals both the known and the unknown aspects of the building’s history.
and Lloyd de Beer
David Saunders
Catherine Higgitt
Summary This article presents recent imaging and scientific analyses of mid-fourteenth-century wall painting fragments from St Stephen’s Chapel, revealing insights into their creation techniques, workshop practices, and the historical context of their preservation and display at the British Museum.
Summary This feature presents an illustrated lecture delivered by artist Laura Grace Ford in conjunction with a conference and exhibition on William Blake at Tate Britain.
and John Wyver
Summary Two short films and an essay explore the aesthetic and historical qualities of Bert Hardy’s wartime and post-war photography for Picture Post.
Summary This essay traces how Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and his wife Ethel Mairet’s photographs and studies of craft in India and Ceylon in the 1900s relate to Charles and Ray Eames’s 1958 India Report.
Summary Proposes a reinterpretation of Turner’s painting as an attempt to stage a certain crisis in the Enlightenment, at the level both of form and content—the blinding effect of too much light.
and Sarah MacDougall
Summary Describes a collaborative technical and art-historical study of paintings by Mark Gertler sparked by the discovery through X-radiography of a painted sketch for his masterwork Merry-Go-Round (1916).
Summary A visual essay explores the interplay between portraiture, politics, class, and race across Britain, Europe, America, and Australia, linking diverse visual and scientific practices.
Summary Explores how three 1976 publications functioned as alternative catalogues for a Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, highlighting the magazine’s role as a key site for art-historical experimentation.
introduced by Sarah Perks
Summary This feature showcases new work by James Richards that continues the artist’s investigation into the body and technology, as well as a short essay by curator Sarah Perks.
Summary Investigates the history of the joint exhibition of Jack B. Yeats and William Nicholson at the National Gallery in 1942.
Summary Considers how the industrial production of oil paint became a flashpoint for debates about the effect of capitalist modernity on painting in particular and society more broadly.
Summary Explores how three 1976 publications functioned as alternative catalogues for a Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, highlighting the magazine’s role as a key site for art-historical experimentation.
Summary Re-examines Harriet Hosmer’s Clasped Hands, challenging assumptions about the indexicality of life casts and instead proposing a dynamic relationship defined by nearness between cast and subject.
Summary This curatorial essay discusses an experimental performance programme, Being Present, which included three works by three artists from the Asia-Art-Activism Research Network.
Summary An artistic intervention originally performed as part of the exhibition Speech Acts at the Manchester Art Gallery in March 2019.
and Sarah Victoria Turner
Summary Introduces this special issue of British Art Studies, the first publication to emerge from the Paul Mellon Centre’s London, Asia research project.
Summary An introduction to the symposium Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900 to Now.
Summary Contributors respond to the idea that exhibitions provide an important lens through which to explore the entangled art histories of Asia and Britain.
and Sneha Ragavan
Summary Presents an interview with the founder and director of the non-profit organisation Raking Leaves, which publishes artist books with an emphasis on the geopolitical and cultural contexts of South Asia.
and Rattanamol Singh Johal
Summary The curator of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis in 2001 at Tate Modern looks back at this ambitious exhibition, discussing its development, challenges, and legacy.
and Hilary Floe
Summary An interview with David Elliott discusses his time as director the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, in particular his influential series of exhibitions under the title India: Myth and Reality.
Summary A personal article reflects on the history, impact, and legacy of the 1973 Instant Malaysia exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, London.
Summary Discusses the links between London and Kuala Lumpur during the 1960s and 1970s, through several exhibitions of Malaysian art organised at, or by, the Commonwealth Institute, London.
Summary A close reading of London’s Commonwealth Institute and its intriguing gallery floor plan of 1969, considering the interaction between display, exhibition graphics, and imperial change.
and Sanjukta Sunderason
Summary Explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan—Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan—to and through post-imperial London in the early 1950s.
Summary Focuses on the largely understudied Art of India exhibition held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London in 1931, which was hailed at the time as the first event of its kind in the West.
Summary Methods and findings from the ongoing research project Articulating British Asian Art Histories focuses on four exhibitions of South Asian women artists during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Summary An artistic intervention originally performed as part of the exhibition Speech Acts at the Manchester Art Gallery in March 2019.
Summary An artistic intervention originally performed as part of the exhibition Speech Acts at the Manchester Art Gallery in March 2019.
Summary This feature assembles archival material, text and images in a non-linear fashion to examine the experience of a single year of exhibitions in 1964.
and Alan Crookham
Summary A case study of art dealer Agnew’s presents a methodological discussion of how digital tools can be used to investigate circulation and transnational exchange in the historical art market.
Summary This feature reflects on the invisibility of women’s perspectives of domesticity in early post-war art, and the process of working with community groups to develop curatorial research.
Summary Explores how Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun’s experience of life on the home front as non-combatants and erstwhile pacifists in Britain informed their work during the Second World War.
Summary Case studies of three works related to the LYC Museum & Art Gallery in Cumbria explore how friendships inform shared practices, generate work, and socialise narratives.
Summary An account of Delia Derbyshire’s work in the 1970s after she left the BBC also includes an unreleased recording from an unfinished project in 1980.
Summary A short film explores the life and creative output of Delia Derbyshire, accompanied by an interview with the filmmaker.
Summary The first ever staging of Vernon Lee’s 1915 The Ballet of the Nations performed and filmed in 2018 brings the theatre of war to life.
Summary An introduction to the Theatres of War special issue
Summary A visual feature exploring the history of the publication of Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations (1915).
Summary A visual feature surveying the roots of the experimental theatre movement in Britain before the First World War.
and Claudia Tobin
Summary A visual feature that examines the history and output of several experimental theatre groups active in London around 1915.
Summary A visual feature that follows the fortunes of experimental “little theatres” in Britain into the 1920s.
and Pam Tait
Summary Production designer Pam Tait speaks with Ella Margolin about the costumes and set design of Impermanence’s The Ballet of the Nations.
Summary Composer Robert Bentall speaks with the British Art Studies editorial team about the score he wrote for Impermanence’s The Ballet of the Nations.
and Joshua Ben-Tovim
Summary Writers, directors, producers, and dancers Roseanna Anderson and Joshua Ben-Tovim speak about choreographing Impermanence’s The Ballet of the Nations.
and Jack Offord
Summary Director of Photography, Jack Offord, talks to Ella Margolin about shooting and lighting Impermanence’s The Ballet of the Nations.
Summary An exhibition history of Landscape in Britain c.1750–1850 at the Tate Gallery in 1973, looks at how the curators set out to question received ideas about the rise of landscape painting in Britain.
Summary Introduces this special issue of British Art Studies, which focuses on landscape imagery as an area of study attracting new kinds of art-historical attention.
Summary Explores how landscape art has historically reflected ideological concerns and examines its evolving significance in contemporary global and postcolonial contexts.
Summary Drawing from scholarship in fire ecology and ethnohistory, this article suggests new approaches to art historical analysis of colonial landscape art.
Summary Contributors respond in a wide-ranging discussion on the evolving role of landscape art in contemporary culture, exploring how it intersects with literature, history, and environmental concerns.
and David Alesworth
Summary This feature with David Alesworth showcases five details from his recent projects that suggest the range of different questions we may pose to landscapes now.
Summary Explores the attunement of Paul Nash’s work to pioneering early to mid-twentieth century geophysical research in England—connections that have not yet been fully recognised.
Summary Traces the life of a representationally elusive and stubborn landscape, the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, through various forms of visual culture.
Summary Studying watercolours from the Virginian residence of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, this feature analyses the concept of “displacement” as a contribution to landscape studies.
Summary Considers the presence of the pond in the work of two artists: one contemporary and the other a historical English landscape artist, both of whom are attentive to a range of hydrologies.
Summary Through the “Anthroposcenic”, this article explores how landscape becomes emblematic of processes deemed to mark an Anthropocene epoch.
Summary Drawing on examples of installation, film, photography, and performance, this article explores the significance of the island theme in contemporary British art.
Summary Examines how eco art, land art, and landscape interact within the Anthropocene, focusing on artists bringing natural landscapes into galleries and institutional frameworks.
and Val Williams
Summary Presents a new research project by the artist Corinne Silva and the curator and writer Val Williams retracing the footsteps of W.G. Hoskins and F.L. Attenborough for their 1948 guidebook Touring Leicestershire.
Summary This feature with David Alesworth showcases five details from his recent projects that suggest the range of different questions we may pose to landscapes now.
and Peter Trippi
Summary Contributors explore artists’ studio-houses as creative spaces that shaped personal identities, artistic collaboration, and cultural influence, extending beyond mere domestic settings.
Summary Contributors explore artists’ studio-houses as creative spaces that shaped personal identities, artistic collaboration, and cultural influence, extending beyond mere domestic settings.
and Peter Trippi
Summary Introduces a group of articles and features on artists’ houses by considering the Alma-Tademas’ studio-houses, their influence on art, design, and early cinema.
Summary Addresses how Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall embodies a complex synthesis of Islamic art and British Aestheticism, revealing tensions between historical authenticity and artistic restoration.
and Mary Roberts
Summary Five short films made by Jonathan Law with texts selected by Mary Roberts highlight the atmospheric materiality of the studio-home of Frederic Leighton.
Summary This article considers the art of Gilbert and George in relation to the concept of the threshold, placing their work in the context of a pervading sense of crisis in 1970s Britain.
Summary Suggests Williams’s Amerindian focus is best understood in terms of a “hauntological” mode of abstraction critically responsive to the moment of decolonisation.
Summary The editorial to this issue describes work by the journal’s editors on another project, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018.
Summary Argues that Constable’s Hadleigh Castle can be understood as fundamentally engaged with scientific ideas arising in contemporary geology and meteorology.
Summary Examines the coverage of the visual arts by the BBC’s Monitor, exploring its place in the evolution of approaches to art on British television and assesses its impact on the post-war art support system.
Summary Pippa Oldfield reflects on curating an exhibition of war photography by women and the research involved in recovering the work and experiences of women photographers.
Summary Examines Alexander Davison’s patronage of history painting, exploring his ambitions for social advancement and the genre’s public–private role in early nineteenth-century Britain.
Summary A short film exploring Paul Nash’s diverse works across media, emphasising interconnected themes of pattern, design, and nature, advocating for a unified interpretation.
Summary Looks at Lionel Wendt’s photography, highlighting the interplay between colonialism, pearl fisheries, coerced labour, and the aesthetic allure of pearlescence and shimmer.
Summary Describes how illustrations from James Cook’s Pacific expeditions were widely circulated through eighteenth-century British magazines and shaped public perceptions of the Pacific.
Summary Contributors respond to the influence of 1960s London style cults on art, focusing on their innovative blending of fashion, music, and self-expression within broader cultural and social contexts.
with photography by Richard Caspole
Summary This feature explores Clare Twomey’s Made in China installation at the Yale Center for British Art.
Summary Biographical entries for the women portrayed in Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s set of fifty plates of “famous women” accompany an article that examines the place of this playful work in the artists’ oeuvres.
Hana Leaper
and Carmen Hermo
filmed by Jonathan Law
Summary Judy Chicago and the Feminist Art Collective discuss their work in a filmed conversation, reflecting on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Famous Women dinner service.
Summary A “One Object” feature examining the Alcester staff terminal, an eleventh-century walrus ivory crozier head distinguished by its uncommon double-volute form, detailed carvings of Christ’s Passion, and rich symbolism of pastoral authority.
Summary A “One Object” feature examining a thirteenth-century tin ampulla depicting the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, highlighting its function as both a wearable container for holy water and a symbol of personal devotion, crafted for pilgrims visiting Canterbury.
and Jessica Berenbeim
Summary The editorial to this special issue on medieval art and architecture examines the evolving concepts of invention, visual difference, and historical perceptions of novelty in medieval works.
Summary Medieval invention blended rationality and mystery, with art sometimes perceived as possessing persuasive or supernatural forces, though most often rooted in social conventions, rules, and playful creative processes.
Summary Explores how innovation in English Gothic architecture was shaped by risks, constraints, structural failures, and the relationship between masons and their patrons.
Summary Scholars have long conflated Gothic architects into a generalised figure – this article critiques that framework and suggests alternatives for understanding medieval designers.
and Nicholas Webb
Summary Analyses the design and construction of Wells Cathedral’s lierne vaults using digital scanning to reveal varied processes and experimentation during construction stages.
Summary A study of the relationship between medieval church porches and the porches of King Solomon, highlighting the inventive ways medieval designers interpreted prototypes from written sources
Summary Examines the significance of medieval “recreated Jerusalem” sites, and specifically the Jerusalem Chamber in the abbot’s house at Westminster Abbey, where Henry IV died in 1413.
Summary Explores why sedilia – the ceremonial seats of the priest, deacon, and subdeacon placed to the south of the altar – became so popular in England, through a consideration of trends in English architecture.
Summary Considers whether the earliest surviving example of side-by-side effigies of a married couple in the British Isles was intended to assert the legitimacy of a claim to the earldom of Menteith.
Summary Considers the significance of the image of the Tree of Jesse that appears in stained glass in the chapels of New College, Oxford and Winchester College, both founded by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester.
Summary Argues that the Chichester seal matrix was intentionally designed to reference legal and biblical authority, positioning the cathedral as a “temple of justice”.
Summary Explores the fifteenth-century reinvention of Getty Ms. 101, a late Romanesque picture book that was reconfigured as a devotional manual.
Summary An investigation into the only known English example of a Wound Man image, positioning the picture as a site not just of surgical knowledge but of a broader medico-artistic entanglement.
Summary Contributors discuss the potential of 3D modeling for public engagement, research, teaching, and museum display and consider benefits and challenges of digital replicas in preserving, interpreting, and increasing access to objects.
and Naomi Speakman
Summary Examines how physical handling sessions and 3D digital reproductions of medieval artefacts—such as the Alcester Crozier and pilgrim badges—demonstrate the growing importance of digital technologies in facilitating scholarly and public engagement with museum collections.
Summary A “One Object” feature examining a fifteenth-century badge depicting a hood filled with cherries and its role as a pilgrim souvenir reflecting medieval devotional and cultural practices.
Summary A “One Object” feature examining a fourteenth-century copper-gilt and enamel morse from Warden Abbey, highlighting its significance as both a liturgical vestment clasp and a testament to medieval monastic identity and craftsmanship.
Summary Explores how free access to the British Museum’s sculpture galleries shaped art education and reinforced middle-class dominance in early nineteenth-century Britain.
Summary Close analysis discloses Hockney’s repertoire of artistic and literary allusions in Rocky Mountains (1965), and the meanings and associations these may have encapsulated.
Summary Resituates A Short Flight within the context of aviation in London before the First World War, when 120,000 people attended the meeting at Hendon Aerodrome over the Easter weekend of 1914.
Summary What does it mean to draw a slum? Lowry, one of the few artists to take up this question, adopted a notably uninflected manner, descriptive, but not dramatic.
Summary Introducing a feature on the Hereford Screen, one of the most complex and intricate choir screens of the Victorian era.
Summary Explores the Victorian revival of choir and rood screens, their theological significance, and artistic evolution, accompanied by three films illustrating their impact on sacred spaces and Christian worship.
Summary Examines Skidmore and Scott’s Hereford Cathedral screen, its historical context, and connections to their work at Lichfield and Salisbury, addressing eighteenth-century “improvements”.
Summary Reveals the dynamic, mutually reinforcing relations among choir screens, the spaces they inhabited, and the liturgical objects that animated those zones.
Summary Describes how digital documentation of Hereford Cathedral and the Hereford Screen has revealed standpoints within the cathedral that would have dramatically impacted the appearance of the screen.
Summary In focusing on the musical culture connected with Hereford Cathedral, this article enriches the interpretation of the restored Hereford Screen in its secular setting at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Summary Examines the collaboration between architect George Gilbert Scott and metalworker Francis Skidmore, comparing their metalwork screens at the cathedrals of Hereford, Lichfield, and Salisbury.
Summary Provides a broad narrative of how the screens designed Gilbert Scott and Skidmore for the cathedrals of Hereford, Lichfield, and Salisbury, have been regarded since they were produced.
Summary In this film, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Head of Metals Conservation, Diana Heath, describes her involvement in the intricate conservation and restoration of the Hereford Screen.
Summary This editorial recaps the journal’s first year of publication, highlighting newly introduced features and looking ahead to upcoming work.
and Victoria Walsh
Summary Three reels of photographs taken by Nigel Henderson reveal a visual lexicon of New Brutalism that links the 1953 Parallel of Life and Art exhibition and the Hunstanton School project completed in 1954.
and Abram Fox
Summary Draws on quantitative methods to explore the gradual emergence of a tightly scheduled auction season in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, focusing on the sale of paintings.
Summary This article and the accompanying reconstruction explore methods for representing lost displays, with an emphasis on visualising uncertainty and the mediated nature of period images.
Summary Looking at the palliative, diplomatic role played by photographic portraiture following the Indian Rebellion (1857–59), this article assesses how photography engaged with warfare’s social upheavals.
Summary Analyses Duncan Grant’s mural for the Borough Polytechnic, and the painting’s linkage of naked homosociality to a subtle figuration of desire that echoes E.M. Forster’s “only connect” dictum.
Summary This article re-examines Rowlandson’s ambitious caricature of the French in the context of his training at the Académie Royale in Paris, as well as the rise of public exhibitions and market for comic prints.
Summary Contributors discuss whether the current interest in the 1970s will prove anything more than another passing curatorial revival and generate its own inventive forms of practice and theory?
Summary A selection of photographs by Martin Parr that have come to define particular notions of what Britishness looks like.
and Martina Droth
Summary Video-recordings made at the conference Photography and Britishness, held at the Yale Center for British Art in November 2016.
and Penelope Curtis
Summary This special issue examines how British sculpture was promoted, received, and transformed abroad from 1945 onwards, exploring the development and shifting meanings of the national category internationally.
Summary Explores how Herbert Read and others, with the British Council, established an international presence for Moore, Hepworth, and the postwar generation of “the Geometry of Fear”.
Summary Describes how Henry Moore’s 1955 exhibition in Yugoslavia—which travelled to Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, and Ljubljana—contributed to the country’s broader cultural liberalisation of the 1950s.
Summary Analyses the reception of Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre in Brazil, in the context of her participation at the V Bienal de São Paulo.
Summary Studies the impact of the Venice Biennale on the international reputation of British sculpture from 1948 to 1958, examining the impression it made on Italian sculpture during the 1950s.
Summary Gerard Byrne discusses his multi-media installation, 1984 and Beyond, staged amidst the Barbara Hepworth sculptures in Gerrit Rietveld’s Sonsbeek Pavilion.
Summary Analyses the transformation and internationalisation of British sculpture in the 1960s, highlighting generational shifts, new artistic tendencies, and global exchanges.
Summary A case study of the British Constructivist Art exhibition, which toured the USA and Canada in 1961 and 1962, highlights the problematic reception of the work in an American cultural context.
Summary Looks at the reception of the sculptor Reg Butler in the USA, and the overlooked role of the curator Addison Franklin Page, an important exponent of the American tradition of art education.
Summary Explores the genesis and exhibition in the New York of Gerald Laing and Peter Phillips’s sculpture Hybrid, and how it questioned the very parameters implied by the term “British Sculpture”.
Summary Investigates the international reception of Anthony Caro’s sculpture Prairie (1967), emphasising its significant impact in the USA compared to its relative neglect in the United Kingdom.
Summary Charts the development of an artistic dialogue with the “omnipresent” work of Britain’s most globally successful sculptor, Henry Moore, from Toronto to Mexico City, from Chicago to Hiroshima.
Summary In the 1970s, the mobility of British sculpture intensified at a time when the rubric of sculpture and a sense of what was specifically British in the visual arts were verging towards dissolution.
Summary Discusses the Boyle Family’s first international exhibition, contextualising it within European conceptualism and the legacies of high modernism, and the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Summary Considers the relevance of The British Avant Garde exhibition at the New York Cultural Center in 1971 to the reputation and discussion of British artists in the USA, and its impact in Britain.
Summary Explores how the 1976 Arte Inglese Oggi exhibition in Milan navigated tensions between traditional media categories and emerging conceptual practices in British art.
Summary Considers whether the 1979 British Council travelling exhibition to Paris, Un Certain Regard Anglais, was an accurate picture of English art practices at the end of the decade.
Summary Greg Hilty introduces the case studies in his 1980s section of “British Sculpture Abroad”. He also points to two exemplary instances of British sculpture’s expansion onto an ever wider global stage: Tony Cragg in Warsaw in 1988 and Richard Long in Paris in 1989.
Summary This essay examines how sculptural discourse was absent from British art shown outside of Britain in the 1990s, despite the international prominence of two distinct groups of British artists: the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs) and other British artists folded into a postcolonial or identity-based construction.
Summary Examines how Henry Moore’s collaborations with I.M. Pei in the 1970s produced distinctive public sculptures in the USA, integrating biomorphic abstraction with late modern architectural spaces.
Summary In 1984–85, The British Show, an exhibition largely made up of New British Sculpture, was curated for Australia and New Zealand. This essay discusses the context and effects of the exhibition on art in Australia. It also seeks to define the sources of originality and innovation of the artists included.
Summary This essay traces the thought processes behind the composition of artists for the exhibition A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture since 1965 (1987-88). The exhibition introduced American museum audiences to the burgeoning activity in London in the 1980s and which foreshadowed even greater intensity in the following decade.
Summary Julian Heynen discusses a 1991 exhibition of new sculptures by Richard Deacon, presented at Haus Lange and Haus Esters in Krefeld.
Summary This paper shows that sculptors attracted much of the attention that was paid to emerging British artists during the 1980s. The group of young artists represented by the Lisson Gallery and collectively referred to at the time as the “New British Sculptors” were particularly successful in gaining coverage.
Summary The essay revisits the controversial 1997 exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, arguing that beneath its provocative surface and overt Britishness, it reflects a shared post-industrial sensibility and aligns with the gentrification of urban space in London, Berlin, and Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium.
Summary Richard Flood recounts the curatorial process behind preparing the 1995 exhibition Brilliant! New Art from London, held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Summary The essay examines the reception of the exhibition Real/Life: New British Art in Japan (1998–1999), highlighting its role in shifting Japanese exhibition practices from nationally centred displays to globally engaged presentations of contemporary art.
Summary Explores how Kapoor’s representation of Britain at the Venice Biennale challenged conventional notions of national identity and artistic categorisation, highlighting the complexities of postcolonial and diasporic influences in British art.
Summary Examines Mona Hatoum’s participation in the 1995 4th International Istanbul Biennial, highlighting how her work challenged Western-centric narratives and redefined the global perception of contemporary British art.
Summary This editorial highlights the journal’s international reach, open-access digital platform, and commitment to expanding British art studies through innovative methodologies.
Summary Explores how William Cantrill’s 1812 etchings dedicated to the Marchioness of Stafford used genre painting to mediate tensions from the Highland Clearances.
and Robyne Erica Calvert
Summary Contributors respond to the provocation that women artists are “still invisible”, examining their underrepresentation in British art and efforts to improve their visibility.
and Jens Stenger
Summary Examining six paintings from Canaletto’s English period from a technical perspective, this article details changes to the artist’s grounds, painting technique, and palette when working in England.
Summary Exploring the 3rd Duke of Dorset’s investment in Reynolds’s experimental paintings, this article views his risky patronage as a high-stakes gamble for social advancement.
Summary An interactive feature explores the “Longitude Problem” through Hogarth’s art, using images and illuminates its role in Georgian visual culture.
and Elaine Kilmurray
Summary Technical analysis and archival research uncover new insights into John Singer Sargents’s process in creating Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.
Summary This study of conversation piece portraits, argues that they replicated the experience of meetings hosts, replicating the experience of a private greeting tied to the rituals of hospitality.
and Mark Hallett
Summary An audio-visual conversation addresses Copley’s involvement with prints throughout his career, from his early years in Boston to the sale of his estate after his death in 1815.
Summary This feature presents animated images inspired by the renovation and temporary closure of Louis I. Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
Summary Examines the interplay between painting and design in both Pre-Raphaelite painting and the Arts and Crafts movement, contending that the former unleashed a radical possibility for decorative art.
Summary Argues that Prunella Clough’s late paintings engage with commodity forms reflecting Britain’s industrial history.
Summary The editorial for the inaugural issue of British Art Studies outlining the journal’s methodological approach to publishing art and architectural history.
Summary Contributors respond to the provocation that the concept of “British art” is inherently paradoxical, examining its validity through acts of making, viewing, and categorisation.
Summary Gainsborough and Reynolds were often perceived as rivals—this article argues that Charity Relieving Distress was an attempt to reconcile their approaches through the concept of charity.
Summary Re-evaluates the legacy of Magda Cordell McHale’s proto-feminist artworks, arguing for her important contribution to postwar British art and culture.
and Chi-ming Yang
photo-essay by Ken Gonzales-Day
Summary This collaborative piece explores the double life of an eighteenth-century bust by Francis Harwood, discussing its materiality and racial implications alongside a photo-essay and interview with artist Ken Gonzales-Day.
and James Boaden
with films by Jonathan Law
Summary A series of short films discuss the double-exposure images made by the photographer John Deakin in the 1950s and 1960s.
Summary This article examines the evolving concept of “ingegno” in Renaissance England, exploring its semantic shifts and impact on artists’ ingenuity and social status.
Summary Exploring Frederick H. Evans’s cathedral photographs, this article reveals how his preference for lantern slides reflects Swedenborgian mysticism, illuminating the religious stakes of his art.
Summary This feature examines British Art Show 8, discussing its evolution, curatorial choices, and significance in showcasing emerging trends in British contemporary art.