Artist in Focus: William Hogarth, Live Q&A

Mark Hallett is Märit Rausing Director at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Between 2012 and 2023 he was Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Prior to taking up that position, Mark worked in the History of Art department at the University of York. Appointed as lecturer in 1994, he became a professor in 2006 and was Head of Department between 2007 and 2012.

Mark’s scholarly research has focused on British art from the seventeenth century onwards. Books he has written and edited include The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (Yale University Press, 1999); Hogarth (Phaidon Press, 2000); Eighteenth Century York: Culture, Space and Society (edited with Jane Rendall, Borthwick Institute, 2003); Faces in a Library: Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Streatham Worthies' (The Watson Gordon Lecture 2011, National Galleries of Scotland, 2012); Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic ideals and Experiences in England, 1769–1848 (edited with Sarah Monks and John Barrell Ashgate, 2013); Reynolds: Portraiture in Action (Yale University Press, 2014); and Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 (edited with Nigel Llewellyn and Martin Myrone, Yale University Press, 2016). He also co-edited the major online publication, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018 (Paul Mellon Centre, 2018).

Mark has also been involved in curating numerous exhibitions. He co-curated the 2007 Tate Britain exhibition Hogarth and co-authored the accompanying catalogue with Christine Riding; he co-curated the 2011 York Art Gallery exhibition William Etty: Art and Controversy and co-edited the accompanying catalogue with Sarah Burnage and Laura Turner; he co-curated the 2015 Wallace Collection exhibition Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint and co-edited the accompanying catalogue with Lucy Davis. With his PMC colleague Sarah Victoria Turner, he curated the 2018 Royal Academy exhibition, The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, and co-authored the accompanying catalogue. He curated George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field, which opened at the Yale Center for British Art in October 2018, before travelling to the Holburne Museum, Bath, in February 2019. With Zuzana Flaskova and Rosie Ram, he co-curated the 2019-20 Tate Britain Spotlight Display Vital Fragments: Nigel Henderson and the Art of Collage, for which he also co-wrote a series of short films on Henderson’s collage-work Screen.

Mark has been the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and a Paul Mellon Centre Senior Fellowship. He was a Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge (2013–14) and a Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2014–16). He gave the British Academy’s ‘Aspects of Art’ lecture for 2019, titled ‘The Newspaper Man: Michael Andrews and the Art of Painted Collage’.

Meredith Gamer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she specializes in the art and visual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with a focus on Britain and the British Atlantic world. Her current book project, The Sheriff’s Picture Frame: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century Britain, examines the relationship between the visual arts and the spectacle of capital punishment in Hogarth’s London and beyond.

Elizabeth Robles is a researcher and lecturer in contemporary art in the History of Art Department at the University of Bristol. She is particularly interested in the formation of ideas around ‘black art’ across the twentieth century and is currently a British Academy postdoctoral fellow working on a project entitled Making Waves: Black Artists & ‘Black Art’ in Britain from 1962–1982. Most recently she co-edited the exhibition publication The Place is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain (Sternberg, 2019) alongside curator Nick Aikens. She also co-leads the British Art Network Black British Artists Research Group.

Jonathan Law is a filmmaker, researcher and lecturer who works with the Centre on a freelance basis. As Research Fellow and Filmmaker, Jonathan is responsible for developing and producing collaborative research-led film content for the Paul Mellon Centre’s research publications and for special public screenings. Some of his recent work includes The Famous Women Dinner Service: In Conversation With Contemporary Art (2019, 17min), The Atmospherics of Leighton House (2018, 6min) and short films for the award-winning digital publication The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018 (2018, various duration).

Amongst other current projects Jonathan is currently developing a film, with Rosie Ram and Mark Hallett, on the collage of Nigel Henderson, for display as part of the Tate Britain display Vital Fragments: Nigel Henderson and the Art of Collage (opening December 2019). Jonathan regularly contributes peer-reviewed film content to British Art Studies, the PMC’s award-winning, open-access online research journal.

Jonathan has produced films for institutions including the Yale Center for British Art (on the work of artists George Shaw and Nicola Hicks), Tate (on Barbara Hepworth), and the Heong Gallery at Cambridge University (on British modernist painting). His films have been screened at Tate Liverpool, the Esker Foundation in Calgary, the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz and at the Culture Capital Exchange Inside/Out festival in London.

Jonathan was recently Teaching Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, and has also taught Essay Filmmaking (The Derek Jarman Lab, Birkbeck College), Media and Film Production (University of West London), History and Philosophy of Photography (University of Kent), and Art History, Criticism and Communication (Central Saint Martins). Jonathan also delivered lectures and exhibition tours for ten years at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Jonathan’s scholarly research has been particularly focused on cinema and multisensory culture. He holds a PhD in History and Philosophy of Art from the University of Kent, a PGCHE from the University of Kent, an MRes in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium (University of London) and a BA in Fine Art from the University of Wolverhampton.