Georgian Provocations Series II, Panel Discussion

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’.

Paris Spies-Gans is an historian and historian of art with a focus on women, gender and the politics of artistic expression. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, the Lewis Walpole Library and Princeton University.

In her work, Paris prioritises the study of women artists and their writings, paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints and more. Her projects illuminate how women have navigated sociopolitical barriers to participate in their societies through diverse forms of intellectual and creative expression, even with the obstacles they regularly faced – and especially at moments of political revolution and change. Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in June 2022.

Martin Myrone is Head of Grants, Fellowships and Networks at the Paul Mellon Centre. Before joining the Centre in 2020, Martin spent over twenty years in curatorial roles at Tate, London. His many exhibitions at Tate Britain have included Gothic Nightmares (2006), John Martin (2011), William Blake (2019) and Hogarth and Europe (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.

Esther Chadwick is a lecturer in art history at the Courtauld, where she specialises in eighteenth-century British art. She studied art history at the University of Cambridge and completed her doctorate at Yale University in 2016. Before joining the Courtauld, she was a curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. Esther’s research addresses the materiality and agency of printed images, the role of art in the age of revolutions and the visual culture of the circum-Atlantic world. She is working on a book that examines the formative role of printmaking in the work of British artists of the late eighteenth century. Exhibition projects have included Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain (Yale Center for British Art, 2014) and A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti and Toussaint Louverture (British Museum, 2018).

Nicholas Robbins is a lecturer in British Art at University College London, and is currently writing a book on the aesthetic, scientific and cultural history of climate in nineteenth-century Britain. His recent article re-examining the relationship of John Constable and Luke Howard’s meteorological aesthetics received the 2022 Emerging Scholars Award from the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

Nika Elder specialises in North American art, inclusive of African-American art, from the colonial period to the present. Her research and teaching focus on the mutually constitutive relationship between art and race. She is the author of William Harnett’s Curious Objects: Still-Life Painting after the American Civil War (forthcoming Autumn 2022, University of California Press) and has published essays on nineteenth-century and twentieth-century American art in the Archives of American Art Journal, Art Journal and the Routledge Companion to African American Art. Her second book focuses on Anglo-American painter John Singleton Copley and the transatlantic slave trade. Related research articles appear in Art History and Winterthur Portfolio. She is an Assistant Professor at American University in Washington, DC, the Field Editor for American art at caa.reviews and chair of the 2023 Feminist Art History Conference.

Martin Postle is Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre. Martin has published on a wide range of eighteenth-century artists including Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, Johan Zoffany and Richard Wilson. He was recently commissioning editor and contributor to the major PMC research project, Art and the Country House, published online by the Centre in November 2020. Martin is currently engaged upon the research and writing of a catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby.