We are seeking a full-time, permanent Curator of Fine Art who will support the Senior Curator to care for and share York Art Gallery’s designated, nationally significant Fine Art collection.   

The post will report to the Senior Curator of York Art Gallery and will lead on developing and delivering high-quality, audience-focused exhibitions and displays. The postholder will be responsible for caring for, sharing and developing York Art Gallery’s historic and contemporary Fine Art collection through research, interpretation and management.  

You will have a relevant degree and postgraduate qualification or equivalent experience, and a substantial practical knowledge of working with Fine Art collections. You will be creative and adaptable, with demonstrable experience of exhibition development and delivery, as well as knowledge of documentation systems and conservation issues.  

Using this collection housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a case study, the catalogue discusses the function of miniatures, their material presence, the circumstances in which they were made and aspects of their later history. The homes and studios of the most successful painters, as sumptuous as those occupied by oil painters, often passed from one generation to another: here, one key property in Covent Garden is described and illustrated. In this book, for the first time, a number of specialist artists’ suppliers are identified, showing where ivory could be obtained and enamel plates prepared and fired. The links between enamelling for clock and watch faces and enamelling for miniatures are demonstrated. The illicit practice within the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art trade of duplicating old miniatures, a topic generally avoided in the literature, is addressed here. Miniatures are difficult to display in museums, but recently-developed photographic methods of identifying pigments are also proving to be a way of introducing a new audience to this multilayered subject. Eighteen years after Ken Thomson’s death, there could not be a more opportune moment to highlight his collection.

Scent is a key motif in paintings by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements. Fragrance is visually suggested in images of daydreaming figures smelling flowers or burning incense, enhancing the sensory aura of ‘art for art’s sake’. Scent was also implied in Victorian painting to evoke hedonism – pleasure in exquisite sensations – and a preoccupation with beauty; or to reflect the Victorian vogue for synaesthesia (evoking one sense through another) and the penchant for art, like scent, to evoke moods and emotions.

Motifs of scent and smell intersected with the most vociferous discourses of the day, including sanitation, urban morality, immigration, race, mental health, faith, and the rise in women’s independence. Many 19th- and early 20th-century notions about smell – that it is the manifestation of disease, that rainbows radiate the fragrance of dewy meadows, or that highly-perfumed flowers are asphyxiating – seem outlandish today.

Yet this exhibition demonstrates how an understanding of these and other largely forgotten ideas about smell bring to the fore significant aspects of these extraordinary artworks.

Long remembered only for her relationship with the Prince of Wales (later George IV) – who fell in love with her on stage as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale – in recent decades Mary Robinson has been reclaimed as one of the most important and overlooked writers of the late 18th century. This exhibition will trace the extraordinary journey of her life and artistic development from the most famous woman in England to social outcast, exploring her hard-won second career as one of the most popular and influential writers of her day.

Rare and early editions of her writing – from the debut novel that sold out by lunchtime on the day it was published to her impassioned argument for women’s rights – are brought together with scant surviving manuscript material from collections and archives across the UK. These will be interpreted alongside the portraits, engravings and caricatures through which her image was circulated and her reputation both shaped and ruined. Her compelling biography enables reflections on the complexity of female celebrity and sexuality, at the time and in society today.

MOU is staging a first: an international exhibition dedicated to an exceptional woman, Margaret of Parma, daughter of Charles V and Johanna Van der Gheynst, in her hometown of Oudenaarde.

Portraits and splendid objects that Margaret cherished or commissioned will be brought together for the first time in 500 years. A magnificent banquet evoking “the feast of the century” will be organized for the occasion. All further enlivened by contemporary interventions by photographer Lieve Blancquaert and lutenist Floris De Rycker.

Margaret of Parma (1522–1586) was no minor figure: she was governor of the Netherlands during a turbulent time at the beginning of the Eighty Years’ War. She was also a society figure in Italy. Moreover, she was a true art lover and patron. It is high time this fascinating figure was given her proper place in history.

Typically Dutch – that’s how many people see Rembrandt and his work. Unlike many artists of his era, Rembrandt never travelled abroad. But make no mistake. A lot of the world is reflected in his etchings, from lions, exotic shells and turbans, to mountainous landscapes and Italian buildings.

The Rembrandt & the world exhibition will take you on a journey past more than forty of Rembrandt’s etchings from the Rembrandt House Museum collection, etchings that always reveal something that is not typically Dutch. Discover where Rembrandt got his knowledge and inspiration, and how worldly-wise (or unworldly?) he really was. 

Two unpublished portraits by Lavinia Fontana - By Antonio Ernesto Denunzio

The ‘Madonna del Baraccano’: Francesco del Cossa’s reworking of a miraculous fresco - By Julie Hartkamp

Guercino’s ‘Moses’: a recent addition to the artist’s ‘prima maniera’ - By Letizia Treves

New documents for Vincenzo Foppa and Ludovico Brea in Liguria - By Michela Zurla

Leonardo da Vinci’s Burlington House Cartoon: a new hypothesis - Shorter notice by Per Rumberg

Parmigianino, Damiano Pieti and the beauty of architecture in the ‘Madonna of the long neck’ - Shorter notice by Mary Vaccaro

A newly discovered Anguissola portrait - Shorter notice by Emanuele Lugli

Even more about the Andrea Vendramin collection - Shorter notice by Lauren Murphy

Oliver James Watson (1949–2023) - By Mariam Rosser-Owen

Arts Minister Sir Chris Bryant said:

This painting was once owned by our first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and was hanging for several years in 10 Downing Street, so Watteau’s Le Rêve de L’Artiste has a fascinating connection to British History, offering us insights into the tastes and development of art in Britain in the 18th century. It portrays the artist’s dream, but perhaps its surreal fantasia inspired political dreams as well. Either way, it is an important and unusual work by a genius.

I hope a UK buyer has the opportunity to purchase this work so it can continue to be studied and enjoyed by the public.” 

As the British expanded their territorial control and economic exploitation of the Indian subcontinent over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, portraits of Indian sitters became increasingly visible in London’s exhibitions.

In responding to such portraits, critics gave voice to imperial anxieties around race, colonisation and gender. Because most elite Indian women lived in seclusion shielded from public view, their portraits acquired a special charge of voyeuristic allure, just as accounts of visiting the zenana or women’s quarters provided a centrepiece of much British travel writing.

This lecture explores two portraits of upper-class Indian women that were exhibited at the Royal Academy during this period: Francesco Renaldi’s Portrait of a Mughal Lady (painted in 1787, exhibited in 1791), and George Richmond’s Maharani Jind Kaur (painted 1863, exhibited 1865).

Bookending a seventy-year period of immense political upheaval, these portraits and their reception reveal the transformation in the relationship between British colonisers and Indigenous elites, as expressed in the popular fascination with the lives of upper-class Indian women.

Focusing on debates around adornment, visibility and women’s political power, a paired analysis of these two portraits offers a new vantage point on the development of both British and Indian art under colonialism.

We are looking for three Curators to join our team on a full time basis, working 36 hours per week. These are maternity cover roles, for 12 months.

You will join the South team, made up of six Curators and two Collections Managers. You will be responsible for the collections at, and relating to, one or more magnificent London houses and earlier sites, depending on the portfolio. Working under the direction of the Senior Curator, you will manage and develop the collections at these properties along with the historic interiors and will provide professional curatorial input into all proposed re-developments and events at these sites.