Print, Politics and Industrialisation : Graphic Landscape

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’.

Felicity Myrone is Lead Curator of Western Prints and Drawings at the British Library. She joined the Library as Curator of Topography and led a project cataloguing and digitising George III’s maps and views, the King’s Topographical Collection and a related research project, Transforming Topography. One outcome of the latter is the British Library webspace, Picturing Places. She was awarded a 2019–20 Paul Mellon Centre Mid-career Fellowship for Art in the Library, investigating how the fused and intertwined institutional histories of the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library have shaped attitudes to prints and drawings. Her current project is writing a book with the support of a 2021 Getty Foundation Paper Project grant. This will be the first handbook/guide to the British Library’s prints and drawings in Printed Books, Manuscripts, Music and Maps. 

Amy Concannon is Manton Senior Curator, Historic British Art at Tate, where she oversees holdings including Constable, Blake and Turner and has curated a range of exhibitions including Turner’s Modern World (2020), William Blake (2019) and Late Turner (2014). Her PhD thesis (2018) used Constable as a starting point to explore the visual culture of the urban landscape in the early 1800s, focusing on Salisbury, Bristol, Brighton and Lambeth. Before joining Tate in 2012 she worked at Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, where she is now a Trustee.

Lizzie Jacklin is Keeper of Art at Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums where she works across the Hatton and Laing galleries. Her current exhibition at the Hatton explores the screen-printing method in relation to the gallery’s historic associations with Pop Art. She has previously held curatorial roles at Tate Britain where she contributed to the research publication J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, at the V&A, the Courtauld Gallery and the Hunterian, and is particularly interested in works on paper. Her book highlighting Tate’s extensive print collection is to be published in autumn 2021.

Morna O'Neill is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Walter Crane: The Arts and Crafts, Painting, and Politics (Yale University Press, 2011) and Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915 (Yale University Press, 2018). Her current research addresses the conjunction of artistic and industrial materials and methods in the decades before the Great Exhibition of 1851. This proposed talk draws upon research for this project, as she positions Constable, Lucas and their fraught collaboration on English Landscape in relationship to the use of steel plates and contemporary debates about the industrialisation of printmaking.