Category: Research

The present work is essentially a curated on-screen exhibition consisting of about a hundred and sixty contemporary and posthumous portraits of Sir Francis Bacon.

The exhibits are arranged chronologically in five categories: paintings, engravings, statues, medals and ephemera. There are no page numbers as such, however, each work is numbered to facilitate cross-referencing between the portraits. This is essential because, with only a few exceptions, all of the many posthumous works were derived from portraits made during Bacon's life-time.

The simple raison d'être behind this selective compilation of the portraits of Francis Bacon is that it needed to be done, however inadequately. Four hundred years after his death, Bacon's writings are in wider circulation than ever. For anyone reading about or researching his life and works, especially Baconians, this online gallery hopes to provide a convenient and more or less comprehensive guide to his most significant portraits. The process of selection was based on several criteria. A handful of artists were impossible to research due to the absence of any available information about them or their work and had to be deleted from the inventory. Certain engravings of Bacon's image are so numerous and often so similar to each other that a representative selection had to be made. Visual appeal was not necessarily a criterion of selection, however some images have been culled on admittedly subjective aesthetic grounds.

The University of St Andrews and The National Gallery, London, are pleased to announce a fully funded 4-year Collaborative Doctoral Studentship starting in September 2026 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) scheme.

Since its foundation in 1903, the Burlington Magazine has played a pivotal role in the British art world. This PhD will use the newly acquired and catalogued Burlington Magazine Archive at the National Gallery to make a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the art world and its development in twentieth-century Britain. The student will have the opportunity to shape their own research area in relation to the diverse areas covered by the Burlington, including histories of art history, the art market, museum history, and publication.

The project will be jointly supervised by Dr Sam Rose (St Andrews), Dr Jack Hartnell (National Gallery), and Dr Nicholas Smith (National Gallery). 

The Cultural Work of the Early Modern Dutch Portrait examines how portraits of Amalia van Solms, Princess of Orange (1602–1675), functioned as active cultural agents that connected people across time and space, participating in domestic, national, and international politics throughout the seventeenth century.

This interdisciplinary study reveals how portraits served as powerful tools beyond mere facial records, actively negotiating relationships, building bridges, engendering communities, soothing egos, evoking memories, and constructing fame. Through engaging with gender studies, collecting and display history, Dutch art history, architectural history, and reception theory, the book challenges assumptions about what portraits accomplished, for whom, and in what spaces. By focusing on Amalia van Solms as a case study, readers gain insights into how portraits functioned as links in larger social chains and discover the sophisticated cultural work these images performed. The study promotes a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that clarifies early modern women’s contributions to seventeenth-century art, architecture, and politics while revealing the remarkable capacity of portraits to shape social and political landscapes.

This Residency will support an early-career researcher with a strong interest in Scottish art to undertake in-depth curatorial research on a work, or group of works, from the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation’s collection. The successful applicant will make significant use of the PMC’s Archives & Library during their research, as well as the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation’s collection and network, and be given academic and curatorial support from both institutions. They will then develop a proposal for a display suitable for the PMC’s Display Room.

The National Portrait Gallery holds the world’s most significant public collection of Tudor and Jacobean paintings. Between 2007 and 2012, its transformative research project ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ generated unprecedented heritage-science data on 120 portraits from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. A central element of the project was the taking of paint samples, mounted as cross-sections, to investigate paint composition and structure. However, images and detailed metadata from these cross-sections are not currently in formats suitable for broad dissemination.

The missing piece: sharing cross-sections from the ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ project is a research initiative supported by Heritage Science Data Service Small Grants Programme. You will take a key role delivering the project, with responsibility to identify cross-sections produced during the original research; extract relevant metadata from the reports; re-photograph samples; review and align metadata with the new images; and prepare the full dataset for sharing with HSDS for wider dissemination.

UCL History of Art is seeking to appoint a full-time Lecturer (Grade 8) specialising in art and visual cultures, c.1300–1700. The successful appointee will have a relevant PhD and a track record of publications and research excellence in their field. They will join a thriving department with close links to London’s museums and gallery networks and a university with a vibrant and diverse research culture that is consistently ranked one of the top ten universities globally.

One of the two teenage boys featured in the portrait is of African heritage, representing an very early full-length depiction of a black figure in English art.

The rare nature of the portrait has inspired a major research project with the National Portrait Gallery to identify both the boys.

The painting, which has been at Penshurst Place since at least 1743, will go on display at the gallery in London from September.

The Rainbow portrait of Queen Elizabeth I: new discoveries - By Nicole Ryder

An unpublished portrait of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, by Godfrey Kneller - By Adam Busiakiewicz

‘On the Bowling Green at Oxford in ye year 1759’: a newly identified drawing by Marcellus Laroon the Younger - By Jay Robert Stiefel

Two paintings by Angelica Kauffman - By Yuriko Jackall

William Bell Scott’s ‘History of the art of pottery’ windows for the South Kensington Museum - By Emily Learmont

Observing the observers: ‘nature’s blue light’ over Windsor Castle, 1783 - Shorter notice by Ngaire Gardner

Finding Miss Gartside: the abstract visions of a pioneering colour theorist - Shorter notice by Alexandra Loske

Their direct ancestor, Beata Louise Schultz, was the painter’s first cousin who had moved to the Dutch colony of Berbice (modern-day Guyana) in 1768 after her husband was appointed governor. Archives showed that after Beata’s husband died in 1773, she decided to return to Amsterdam and wrote a letter to the Dutch government asking permission to bring two enslaved people who worked in her home. Their names were Michiel and Eleonora Susette, who was born in 1756 and was forced to work alongside her mother, Lucia Afiba.

Upon returning to Amsterdam, Beata commissioned her cousin to paint portraits of her son and daughter as well as of Eleonora Susette and Michiel [their last names are not known]. It was most likely intended as a keepsake of the pair, the museum noted. Eight months later, they were sent back across the Atlantic Ocean to Berbice.

This book examines the Court Beguinages, a fascinating group of semi-monastic female communities that were endemic to cities of the Southern Low Countries from the thirteenth century into the twentieth.

Their members, called Beguines, played fundamental social and religious roles in their communities, and they also became major patrons of art and architecture, building vast complexes and filling them with paintings, sculptures, prints, textiles, and all sorts of other decorative objects. As the first comprehensive and primary source-driven account of Court Beguinage visual culture, this study explores the historical importance of these institutions and reveals how the Beguines used buildings and images to support devotional practice, shape public perception, raise funds, and negotiate power relationships during the Counter Reformation.

This is a rare opportunity to shape research strategy at an internationally renowned institution with the chance to influence research across the UK museum sector. With a strong track record of world-leading research, you will ensure the Museum has one of the world’s most researched, accessible and visible collections. Working closely with the Trustee’s Collections and Research Committee, and over 100 researchers and curators across all Collection Departments, you will lead the development and delivery of a compelling Research Strategy that enriches understanding of the Museum’s collections, supports major projects, and fuels the next generation of researchers.

You will reimagine what it means to be a research-led international museum in the 21st century as the Museum embarks on the biggest redisplay of its permanent galleries in the past 150 years. To achieve this, you will build strong internal and external partnerships at the highest levels, champion research excellence, and secure significant external funding to advance the Museum’s ambitions.

This research will examine the collecting, knowledge production, and documentary practices of Sarah Sophia Banks (1744-1818), one of the most important antiquarian collectors of her time. It will interrogate Banks’s holdings at the British Library and elsewhere from a critical archival perspective, exploring these dispersed collections – and the taxonomies she devised for them – as maps of the social, intellectual, and imperial networks she inhabited.

This project will be jointly supervised by Dr Lucy Brownson and Prof Elizabeth Shepherd at UCL Department of Information Studies (UCL:DIS), and Felicity Myrone, Maddy Smith and Dr Alice Marples at the British Library.  The student will spend time with both UCL:DIS and the British Library and will become part of the wider cohort of AHRC CDP funded PhD students across the UK.

This doctoral project investigates the overlooked contributions of migrant labour to British craft and design during the long eighteenth century (c.1688–1837). Drawing on the V&A’s rich collections, uncatalogued departmental card indexes, and external archival sources, the project will reconstruct the creative communities that shaped Britain’s material culture. Using historical, curatorial, and digital humanities methods, the student will uncover both visible and invisible ‘migrant hands’ that contributed to furniture-making, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, and other craft industries.

The project will be jointly supervised by Dr Adam Crymble (UCL), Dr Spike Sweeting (V&A), Dr Jin Gao (UCL), and Dr Jenny Saunt (V&A). The student will spend time at both UCL and the V&A and will join the wider national cohort of CDP-funded researchers.