Category: Research

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.

After their latest investigation, Popovici and Art Recognition concluded that the painting, while not the original The Bath of Diana, could be by Rubens and his studio. “It was an authenticity evaluation not a confirmation,” Popovici says. “We concluded that it is partially by Rubens. Our AI cannot know who did the rest but one possible interpretation would be the [artist’s] workshop contribution.”

Taddeo di Bartolo, Siena’s premier painter in the years around 1400, is the focus of a cultural history of a great Italian school in an understudied period. His patrons commissioned important fresco cycles and the most impressive polyptychs of the age. In part a travelogue, the text follows Taddeo (ca 1362-1422) from training in straitened times at Siena across central and northern Italy. Ten years of itinerancy drew him to various Tuscan centers, along the Ligurian coast from Genoa to Provence, probably to Padua, and into Umbria.  About 1399 he resettled at Siena to rapidly become the preferred painter of his commune. His mural cycles made a greater imprint on Siena’s civic iconography than has been acknowledged while his efficient Sienese shop produced outstanding panel paintings for, among others, the most dynamic religious orders. Until his last years he received grand commissions in and from beyond Siena. He drew a pope’s portrait and was employed by a cardinal at Rome. Attention to his production methods shows how his busy shop ensured variety in numerous paintings for mid-level clients by a flexible design system. Taddeo’s works, including rediscovered and reconstructed paintings, come alive in beautiful illustrations. This chronicle of an indefatigable and successful late medieval career positions the painter, his colleagues, and his patrons in their political, economic, and social circumstances. It provides new insights on Siena’s artistic culture at the start of the Renaissance.

UCL History of Art is seeking to appoint a full-time Lecturer (Grade 8) or Associate Professor (Grade 9) specialising in British art and material culture in its global and colonial contexts, c. 1650-1900. UCL History of Art has a long, distinguished engagement with the politics and aesthetics of British art and empire, as well as histories and theories of material culture, broadly understood. The successful appointee will have a relevant PhD and a track record of publications and research excellence in their field. The position will begin on 1 September 2025.

This book emphasises Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812-1895) — also known as Lady Charlotte Guest, née Bertie — as one of the most significant women in the history of collecting. An extraordinary collector, historian and philanthropist, Charlotte subverted gendered norms and challenged Victorian conventions. This new study establishes Charlotte’s contribution to ceramic history and cultural education, and demonstrates her influential role in transnational artistic networks.

Charting Charlotte’s eventful life, McCaffrey-Howarth focuses on her identity as a renowned connoisseur, whose donation of thousands of objects to the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum marked a pioneering move for a female benefactor. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector presents unique insight into the social and cultural world of Victorian England and the role of women within this.

Cristoforo de Predis at the Sforza Court - By Jeffrey Schrader

A portrait of an unknown woman by Titian - By Peter Humfrey and Paul Joannides

A Safavid ambassadress in Rome: the last testament of Teresa Sampsonia Shirley - By Alexandria Brown-Hedjazi

Additions to Ter Brugghen in Italy: ‘Christ bound to the column’ and ‘St John the Baptist in the wilderness’ - By John Gash

‘Two boys with a bladder’ in the J. Paul Getty Museum and Joseph Wright of Derby’s early candlelights - By Julia Siemon

Paul Sandby and Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn revisited - By Oliver Fairclough

Observations about the abandoned portrait beneath Gainsborough’s ‘Blue boy’ - By Christina Milton O'Connell

The period of Western art history known as “the Baroque” has traditionally been interpreted as a stylistic phenomenon. However, artistic production in Europe circa 1600–1750 was enabled by a proto-industrial world system dominated by Spain and Portugal, the Netherlands and later Britain. As a result, material culture became entangled in networks of trade, colonial rule and Catholic global mission stretching from Naples to Nagasaki.

This conference will broaden perspectives on the Baroque, embracing its transcontinental and multi-media character. By culturally decentring Europe and with materiality a special focus, the programme will recast the continent as a constituent part of an expanding artistic world driven by war, the exploitation of ecosystems and the first information technology revolution. Bringing together scholars and museum curators from the UK and internationally, the conference will demonstrate how objects can offer intimate insights into global histories often characterised by vast, impersonal economic forces.

In this monograph, author Alejandro Vergara-Sharp discusses what is known of Peeters’s biography while presenting the historical and cultural context behind her art, style, and techniques. Clara Peeters establishes the artist as a leader in her field by examining Peeters’s artistry and the material culture reflected in her paintings. This timely volume sheds light on the limitations that Peeters encountered because of her gender, and how she responded to them in her art, while assessing her importance as a painter of still life.