Martin Myrone

As Head of Grants, Networks & Learning, Martin has scholarly oversight of the Centre’s Grants & Fellowships programme and the two Networks run from the Centre – the Doctoral Researchers Network and the Early Career Researchers Network. He also acts as Convenor for the British Art Network. Supported by the Paul Mellon Centre and Tate, the Network has a membership of over one thousand three hundred specialists working in the field of British art curating. He is a member of the Centre’s Senior Leadership Team.

Before joining the Paul Mellon Centre in 2020, Martin spent over twenty years in curatorial roles at Tate, London, latterly as Senior Curator, Pre-1800 British Art. His many exhibitions at Tate Britain have included Gothic Nightmares in 2006, John Martin in 2011, British Folk Art in 2014, William Blake in 2019 and Hogarth and Europe in 2021. His research and publications have focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, with a special interest in artistic identity and artists’ labour, class, cultural opportunity and gender. His many published works include Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810 (2005) and Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain (2020), both published by the Paul Mellon Centre.

After undergraduate studies at University College, London, Martin studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He was awarded an MA in the History of Art in 1994 and his PhD in 1998. He was a long-serving member of the AHRC Peer Review College, has acted as expert advisor to MLA, ACE and DCMS, taught art history at the University of York and the Courtauld Institute and supervised a range of doctoral projects on British art history and theory from the seventeenth century to the present day. He is a trustee of Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury.

Selected publications

Books and exhibition catalogues

With Alice Insley, eds., Hogarth and Europe, Tate Britain, 2021

Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2020

With Amy Concannon, eds., William Blake, Tate Britain, 2019

With Mark Hallett and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1740, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2016

With Ruth Kenny and Jeff McMillan, British Folk Art, Tate Britain, 2014

ed., John Martin: Apocalypse, Tate Britain, 2011

ed., Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination, Tate Britain, 2006

Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750-1810, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2005

With Michael Rosenthal, eds., Thomas Gainsborough, Tate Britain, 2002

With Lucy Peltz, eds., Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–1850, Ashgate, 1999

Essays and chapters

‘Painting’ in Jeffrey W. Barbeau, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion, Cambridge University Press 2021, pp. 311–330

With Anna Cooper, ‘The Social Economics of Artistic Labour: A Technical Case Study of Henry Monro’s Disgrace of Wolsey (1814)’, British Art Studies, Issue 16 (June 2020) https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-16/coopermyrone

'Coda: Romantic Illustration and the Privatization of History Painting’ in Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews and Mary L. Shannon, eds., Romanticism and illustration, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 298–302

‘Blake the Artist: at Tate and Abroad’ in Morton D. Paley and Sibylle Erle, eds., The Reception of William Blake in Europe, 2 vols, Bloomsbury Academic 2018, vol. 2, pp. 685–698

‘Blake the Painter’, in Sarah Haggarty, ed., William Blake in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 70–78

‘William Blake as a Student of the Royal Academy: A Prosopographical Perspective’, Blake an Illustrated Quarterly, 51:2 (Fall 2017) http://blakequarterly.org/index.php/blake/issue/current

‘Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State’, British Art Studies, Issue 5 (3 April 2017), https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-05/mmyrone

‘William Blake’s Sodomites’ in Diana Dethloff et al., eds., Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman, UCL Press 2015, pp.136–145, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/burning-bright

‘"Something Too Academical": The Problem with Etty', in Sarah Burnage, Mark Hallett and Laura Turner, eds., William Etty: Art and Controversy, York Museums Trust, 2011, pp. 47–59

'The Body of the Blasphemer' in Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly, eds., Queer Blake, Palgrave Macmillan 2010, pp. 74–86

‘Henry Fuseli and Gothic Spectacle’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 70:2 (2007), pp. 289–310

‘The Sublime as Spectacle: The Transformation of Ideal Art at Somerset House’ in David Solkin, ed., Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House, 1780–1836, Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 2001, pp. 77–91