Category: Research

This PhD will explore the lives and careers of people who painted and decorated working-class and lower-middle-class homes and lodging houses in the early modern period. The project will involve extensive archival research in numerous British collections. The successful candidate will also be involved in the museum's upcoming redisplay of the early modern period rooms.

This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Matthew Walker (Assistant Professor in Architectural History), Dr Frank Salmon (Associate Professor in the History of Art) at Cambridge; and, at the Museum of the Home, by Marina Maniadaki (Exhibitions and Project Manager) and Louis Platman (Curator and Research Manager).

This lecture examines a series of plantation landscapes made in seventeenth-century colonial Dutch Brazil. Taking up the concept of the necropastoral, this paper investigates how these seemingly idyllic scenes indicate the enormous human and environmental degradation perpetuated by the forcible extraction of labour from enslaved African people and of sugar from the Atlantic Forest.

During the period of the Dutch colonization of a portion of northeastern Brazil, Post painted the first representations of the “New World.” After his return to the Netherlands, he continued painting Brazilian themes but with fantastical elements, as seen in Landscape with Anteater, in which an anteater and an armadillo appear larger than life. Even more fanciful than the oversized creatures is the painting’s depiction of Black people living in relative harmony with Indigenous people and European colonists, giving the false impression that the violence and conflicts of slavery and colonialism did not exist there.

This is a call for applications to a Summer School in Antwerp/Brussels and Cambridge/London from Tuesday 1st July to Thursday 10th July. 

The focus will be Southern Netherlandish Art, 1500-1700. The summer school is organised by the History of Art Department and Trinity Hall, the University of Cambridge, and the Rubenshuis, Antwerp. The programme is kindly funded by the Government of Flanders. [...]

The programme aims to bring together 12 promising emerging researchers to explore Southern Netherlandish Art through lectures by experts in the field and guided tours of museum collections, churches, and private collections in stately homes. The summer course will present a unique opportunity to expand the participants' networks in Belgium and England.

Born a little over a hundred years apart, Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745) and John Constable (1776-1837) both used drawing to pursue projects of intense introspection. Richardson made a sequence of self-portraits in which he explored the process of his own ageing with pathos and wit, while Constable parted from his family home in Suffolk with a series of intensely emotional drawings of significant places. In this lecture, Dr Owens will look at drawing’s role in soul-searching and taking stock.

The School welcomes applications from prospective temporary faculty with expertise or experience in the following areas of Art History:

Ancient Greece and Rome, Architecture, Graphic Design, and Medieval Art.

Angiviller took part in the education of the future Louis XVI and his brothers. The King is fond of him and in full confidence shares with him a privacy which allows truthful advices. At his accession on the throne, in 1774, he appoints Angiviller Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi, a minister of arts and architecture with extended powers. He will remain in charge until the Revolution. His role is major. He is responsible for all the royal and state residences (Palais du Louvre, Tuileries, Versailles, Fontainebleau, Saint-Cloud…). He buys the hunting domain of Rambouillet on behalf of the king and develops there the Etruscan style, in fashion since the discovery of Herculanum. Thanks to the king of Spain, he develops there the breeding of Merino sheep in a model farm, which still exists nowadays. He reorganizes the manufactures of Sèvres and of the Gobelins, presides over the Académie de peinture et de sculpture, the Académie de France in Rome with the Premier Peintre Pierre’s assistance. He is the founder of the Museum, today Musée du Louvre, which because of the Revolution will only open under Napoleon. He orders its construction within the Louvre palace, following Hubert Robert’s ideas, constitutes its collections, by major acquisitions in sales or private collections. [...]

Who can apply?
Any graduate student who has been accepted into a full-time Art History MA, MPhil or PhD course of study worldwide, beginning the next academic year. PhD students are welcome to apply for any year in their programme. Applications will be considered from students who will focus/are focusing their studies on European and British painting of the Renaissance and Baroque periods (c. 1400–1700).

What does The Klesch Collection Scholarship include?
-Payment towards the yearly cost of the university fees.
-A paid internship at the collection for a minimum of 1 month.

Turner’s ‘Staffa, Fingal’s Cave’: exporting ‘indistinctness’ - By Ian Warrell

‘The monarch of the glen’: painting for the new Houses of Parliament - By Stephen Duffy

The discovery of James Gibbs’s designs for the façade of Burlington House - By William Aslet

A serendipitous discovery: a lost Italian portrait from Horace Walpole’s miniature cabinet - by Adriana Concin-Tavella

The portraits of Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and her family by Paul van Somer - By Edward Town and Jessica David

The Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge seeks to appoint a permanent Assistant Professor in the History of Late Imperial Chinese Art (ca. 1200-ca. 1800). The Department welcomes applications from specialists in all mediums of art, including painting and the graphic arts, sculpture, metalwork, ceramics, and textiles, all of which are well represented in University collections. The successful candidate will be expected to take up appointment on or close to 1 September 2025.

This studentship will explore portraiture produced in connection with the East India Company between 1757 and 1857, to uncover new stories about the individuals impacted by, or involved in, British imperialism in South Asia, and to rethink the role of portraiture within ‘British’ art histories. 

This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Tom Young, the Courtauld, and Dr Alice Insley, Tate, and the student will be expected to spend time at both the Courtauld and Tate, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP funded students across the UK.

IWM holds a fascinating but under-researched collection of European fine and popular prints gathered by John Crichton-Stewart, the 4th Marquess of Bute, when he was a diplomat in Paris during the First World War and donated to the museum in the early 1950s. It contains around 3,600 predominantly French prints, representing all aspects of French patriotic print production of the period, most of them lithographs, as well as relief and intaglio prints, and some drawings. It is envisaged that the PhD project will focus on this collection, as well as the museum’s collection of British lithographs of the period, mainly instigated by the government’s War Propaganda Bureau / Department of Information. These include the 1917 series Britain’s Efforts and Ideals by various artists and the work of soldier-artist Gerald Spencer Pryse.

The proposed investigation of these collections will fill in a curiously outstanding gap in the field. Both scholars of France and art historians have paid relatively little attention to lithography. Moreover, in both Britain and France, the cultural history of the conflict has often underplayed the specificities of artistic production in wartime.

The first monograph on the artist to be published in English, this book provides a long-overdue introduction to the life and work of Portuguese painter Josefa de Ayala, known as Josefa de Óbidos (1630-1684). One of the best known and most celebrated artists of the Portuguese baroque, she is the only early modern female artist to be credited with representing the art of a whole period and a geographical area. Her paintings encompass a diversity of religious and secular subjects in a variety of formats, from portraits to still lifes; small oils on copper to large church altarpieces; seemingly ‘feminine’ themes revolving around the Virgin Mary and female saints to gruesome portrayals of the Passion of Christ. Her oeuvre also includes engravings.

Peter Paul Rubens already had assistants working for him in his studio when he first gained admission to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1598. At this period too he began to co-operate with other masters, such as Jan Brueghel the Elder; a separate volume, dedicated to that collaboration, was published in 2016 (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XXVII (1): Jan Brueghel I & II). On his return from Italy in 1609, not only did Rubens’s studio assistants increase in number, so too did the co-operative projects that the artist undertook. Rubens continued to work with Jan Brueghel the Elder until 1621. When Brueghel died in 1625, his son Jan continued the partnership with Rubens until the latter’s death in 1640.

Similarly productive was the collaboration between Rubens and the still life and animal painter Frans Snijders. It began shortly after Rubens's return to Antwerp and is reflected in various large-format works for the courts of Brussels and Madrid [?], but also in smaller ‘cabinet’ paintings, some of which were executed by members of the respective workshops of the two masters. The collaboration soon extended to the studio of the animal painter Paul de Vos, whose sister Margriete had married Snijders in 1611. One such joint painting was still in Rubens’s possession at the time of his death and was listed in the 1640 catalogue of the works for sale from the artist’s estate. This document also reveals that, among the paintings by other masters that he owned, Rubens possessed a surprisingly large quantity by the Dutch landscape and genre painter Cornelis Saftleven. Rubens had worked with Saftleven during his stay in Antwerp at the beginning of the 1630s, and evidently appreciated his talent, even if this collaboration can be represented only by a single painting.

The present is devoted to Rubens’s fruitful partnership with Frans Snijders, as well as to his collaborations with Paul de Vos and Cornelis Saftleven. It thus contributes not only to the documentation of Rubens’s oeuvre, but also to the understanding of workshop practices and the lives and social networks of painters in the city of Antwerp.