Damaged & Destroyed: A new online spotlight feature

The new online feature, Damaged & Destroyed, focuses on three stories that have emerged from the Centre's photographic archive.

Each story is centred on an artwork (or set of artworks) that have been damaged or destroyed. The first offers a glimpse into the work and tragic life of the largely forgotten eighteenth-century artist Hugh Robinson; the second looks at four portraits of women associated with a titled Scottish family, the Rothes, which were totally destroyed during a high-profile warehouse fire in 1997; and the third looks at a damaged sketchbook by the nomadic Georgian artist George Chinnery.

Each of these stories offers a distinct point of entry into the Paul Mellon Centre’s rich photographic archive and uses them to suggest some of the values and limitations of such archives. The photographic archive is due to be published online in 2021 and is made up of more than one hundred thousand reproductions of paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures.