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Issue Overview
ARTICLERedesigning British Art Studies by Editorial Group

Summary In the spirit of enquiry and experimentation, we have created a new platform for British Art Studies. The key drivers for this change have centred on issues of accessibility, equity, and environmental impact.

Summary A case study of Camerawork (1979-1985) thinks through the questions and challenges posed by representing periodicals in exhibitions and publications.

ARTICLEBetween the Easel and the Mural by Robert Burstow

Summary This article is the first sustained examination of Ben Nicholson’s engagement with architectural painting.

Summary Examines how documentary sources provide insight into the identity, voice, and experiences of a Black sitter in an early modern British portrait.

Summary Positions the architectural historian Gavin Stamp as an exemplar of the activist-scholar tradition, and the British New Right.

ARTICLEFamily Matters by Grace Aneiza Ali

Summary A visual essay places Frank Bowling’s Middle Passage (1970) paintings in conversation with Caribbean and Guyanese literary voices.

Issue Overview

Summary Argues that J.M.W. Turner’s watercolour contains disguised allusion to the Tory government’s persecution of the political satirist William Hone, as well as corruption tied to the Earl of Lonsdale.

Summary Argues that through his self-portraits, L.S. Lowry negotiated the contradiction between his artistic ambitions and pressure to earn a wage in the context of shifting expectations around masculinity in twentieth-century Britain.

ARTICLESailors’ Valentines by Molly Duggins

Summary Victorian shell mosaics known as sailors’ valentines, crafted by Afro-Barbadian women, embodied creolised material culture and served as a form of cultural and economic agency within the colonial tourism industry of Barbados.

ARTICLESugar Time by Emma Bond

Summary Explores how contemporary artists in Scotland, inspired by Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), engage with the persistent legacies of sugar’s violent histories, linking imperial pasts with present artistic and activist expressions.

ARTICLEAncient Desires Interview between Charwei Tsai
and Rosie Cooper
Sarah Victoria Turner

Summary In this interview, Charwei Tsai discusses the creation of over 200 ceramic vessels during her Wysing Arts Centre residency, drawing connections to Li Yuan-chia’s LYC Museum, and exploring spirituality.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEOil Aesthetics and Imperial Violence interview between Edwin Coomasaru
and Jala Wahid

Summary Jala Wahid in conversation about her work and the politics that underpin it, discusses imperialist violence, apocalyptic images, monumental conflict, questions of time, and the politics of nationhood.

ARTICLEMonuments Must Fall convened by Edwin Coomasaru

Summary Contributors discuss monuments as sites of social antagonism, examining their roles in colonialism, national identity, and public memory.

Summary This article makes use of multimedia elements such as film, animation, and moving images to better understand the spatial dynamics, display techniques, and creative processes behind the exemplary surviving print room.

ARTICLEIs the Painting a Grave? by Ariel Kline

Summary How is queer eroticism figured in artworks that might also deny it? This article attends to John Everett Millais’s ambivalent proximity to lesbian desire through an analysis of The Vale of Rest (1859) and other works.

ARTICLEThe Rise and Fall of the “Clerks” by Hans C. Hönes

Summary Analyses the debates about the professionalisation of the study of British art, focusing on the activities of the Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, and its attempts to establish art history as an academic discipline in Britain.

Summary Offers technologies like 3D scanning, printing, CNC milling, and digital remixing as disruptive, but not destructive, analogues to historical reproduction methods such as casting and copying.

ARTICLEThe Expressive Unit of Constructionism by Sam Gathercole

Summary Nigel Henderson’s photographs of Kenneth Martin’s abstract mobiles in a North London children’s hospital suggest a new way of understanding British constructionism.

ARTICLEGreenham Common’s Archival Webs by Alexandra Kokoli

Summary This feature documents the visual cultures of the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common in an “anarchival curatorial experiment”.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEThe Market Woman’s Story by Jacqueline Bishop

Summary A short film explores artist Jacqueline Bishop’s depiction of the market woman, a pervasive, yet overlooked figure in Jamaican and Caribbean art and visual culture, on a set of newly decorated ceramic plates.

ARTICLEBeauty and Revolution by Elizabeth Fisher

Summary Traces the evolution of Gustav Metzger’s aesthetic theories from a period of intense experimentation with materials, technology, and scientific processes in the 1960s to his Remember Nature project in 2015.

ARTICLEInventing Provinciality by Luke Gartlan

Summary Examines photography’s emergence in St Andrews through its ties to the British Empire, with David Brewster’s writings revealing the imperial frameworks behind the technology’s adoption.

ARTICLEDeath and the Found Object by Margaret Iversen

Summary Virginia Woolf’s “Solid Objects” and Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy inspire analysis of Becky Beasley and Lucy Skaer’s art, exploring themes of life, death, and found objects.

Summary Argues that Trinitarian imagery was employed to construct a distinctive memory of the Black Prince, one that served to bolster the claims of his son Richard II.

ARTICLEExit, Pursued by John Kay by Wendy McGlashan

Summary Suggests that John Kay’s satirical portrait of William Forbes of Callendar should be understood as a complex burlesque allusion which engages with prints after European Old Master and contemporary British history paintings.

ARTICLECapturing Futurity by Margaret J. Schmitz

Summary Demonstrates that Langdon Coburn’s experimentation with radical aesthetics began earlier than previously thought and was instigated by his friendship with English science fiction writer H.G. Wells.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEIntroduction by Shalini Le Gall
and Justin McCann

Summary This special issue examines the Thames as a cultural and environmental force, focusing on its impact on nineteenth-century art, industry, and colonial legacies.

ARTICLE“The Surrounding Great Work” by Aleema Gray
and Danielle Thom

Summary This collaborative article explores the lasting effects of the aesthetic and spatial implications of London’s West India Docks, and the ways in which these persist in influencing the site and its communities today.

ARTICLEShips and Souvenirs by Shalini Le Gall

Summary Traces the history of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee through three objects: James McNeill Whistler’s print Tilbury (1887), a photograph taken aboard the HMY Victoria and Albert during the Naval Review, and a Royal Worcester commemorative scent bottle.

ARTICLEPrinted Ecologies by Sarah Mead Leonard

Summary Explores the expression of the pastoral in William Morris’s printed designs, arguing that his patterns are indirect representations of the landscape he most admired: the rural reaches of the Upper Thames.

ARTICLE“The River Seemed Almost Turned to Blood” by Nancy Rose Marshall

Summary Considers representations of a fire that broke out at Cotton’s Wharf in Tooley Street, London, in 1861 as a case study that reveals a debate about the status of Britain as a global power.

Summary Giving voice to women’s presence beneath the surface of James McNeill Whistler’s images, this article suggests how, as “involuntary neighbours”, they made sense of the watery, arterial world of the Thames.

ARTICLEWhistler and Battersea by Jon Newman

Summary Considers the significance of South London for James McNeill Whistler, particularly the line of Battersea factories that he viewed and depicted repeatedly from his home on Cheyne Walk from the 1860s.

ARTICLE“Over London at Night” Jennifer Tucker

Summary Explores how the Thames became a site where gas manufacture and ballooning came together to provide new forms of experience, spectacle, and economic opportunity as well as deadly risk and toxic effluent.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEUnhomelys by Iris Moon

Summary The spectres of history and the possibilities of the future haunt this special issue of British Art Studies, which challenges readers to rethink the British decorative arts.

ARTICLEEngland Am I? by Sarah Bochicchio

Summary Explores how the Renaissance may have posed a more malleable, self-assertive antidote to the pressures of twentieth-century fashion, and the systems it upheld.

Summary Looks at the dialogue between microscopical arranged slides that became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century and the design theories of Owen Jones.

ARTICLETarnished Silver by Max Bryant

Summary Describes the approach taken to interpreting, in a gallery setting, a set of silver with a troubling history.

Summary Examines the uses and meanings of white “Cherokee clay”, among Cherokee and British potters, and between their respective political and cultural worlds.

Summary This article reappraises a set of ceramic portrait medallions that served to educate and promote what it meant to be a woman in the late eighteenth century.

ARTICLEClassical Histories, Colonial Objects by Freya Gowrley

Summary Contextualises the production, purchase, and display of specimen tables in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

ARTICLEServing as Ornament by Hannah Lee

Summary Dissects the development of the “blackamoor” as a decorative category through case studies of objects at Ham House, Knole, and Dyrham Park.

ARTICLERuth Ellis’s Suit by Lynda Nead

Summary What can a suit tell us about gender, sex, and class in post-war Britain?

Summary Investigates the transformation of porcelain shards washed up on the beaches of St. Croix from island debris into artworks and decorative objects.

ARTICLEIn the Flesh at the Heart of Empire by Ianna Recco

Summary Discusses how the Cherokee visitors to London became such a spectacle by studying three wax statues that were made in their image.

ARTICLEWild Porcelain by Michelle Erickson

Summary Combines colonial era ceramic techniques and contemporary themes including gun violence, fossil fuel geopolitics, and the influence of big tech.

Summary Curators and academics discuss the challenges of displaying and interpreting race and empire in a decorative arts gallery.

ARTICLEUnpacking Wedgwood interview between Caitlin Meehye Beach
and Roberto Visani

Summary This article presents a discussion about the artist’s ongoing confrontation with the visual archive of slavery through the cardboard slave kits series.

ARTICLEWhat’s in a Label? convened by Iris Moon

Summary For this feature, curators were asked to revisit and revise an object label they had previously written.

ARTICLEAnother Crossing by Glenn Adamson

Summary Highlights the work of participants in the exhibition Another Crossing, with an introduction by its guest curator Glenn Adamson.

ARTICLEIn Sparkling Company by Christoper Maxwell

Summary A case study considers how gallery design and interpretation can enhance engagement with the colonial histories of glass objects.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEBritish Art after Brexit convened by *British Art Studies* Editorial Group

Summary Contributors respond to the provocation of correlating art and art history with idea of the “nation”. Responses from Jenny Gaschke, Sarah Gould, Gill Perry, Francesco Ventrella, Kimberly Lamm, Jackson Davidow, Isobel Harbison, Edwin Coomasaru, James Alexander Cameron, Imogen Hart, Corinne Fowler and Alexander Massouras.

ARTICLESlade, London, Asia by Liz Bruchet
and Ming Tiampo

Summary The first part of the Slade, London, Asia feature presents a narrative history that takes the Slade School of Fine Art as the starting point for a global microhistory.

ARTICLESlade, London, Asia by Ming Tiampo
and Liz Bruchet

Summary The second part of the Slade, London, Asia feature brings together materials from multiple institutional and personal archives in Asia and the United Kingdom.

Summary Explores the imaginative purchase of the historical and the antiquarian as Gustav Metzger learned to live, work, and practise as an artist outside the cosmopolitan centre.

ARTICLELady of Silences by Allison K. Young

Summary Considers Zarina Bhimji’s work in relation to surrealist and second-wave feminist artists through her interest in affect, memory, and the symbolic representation of enigmatic childhood and domestic objects.

Summary This feature brings together historians of art and historians of medicine to explore the production and reception of Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy.

ARTICLEAnatomy in Context filmed by Jonathan Law
with Ludmilla Jordanova
and William Schupbach

Summary Three films discuss the production, use, and circulation of anatomical images and texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Wellcome Collection.

ARTICLEBloodlines by Anthea Callen

Summary Tracks the networks of specialists with whom Maclise was associated, from Cork and the capitals of Scotland, England, and France, across the Atlantic to Philadelphia and Boston.

ARTICLEBlack Apollo by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

Summary An examination of Maclise’s rendering of the interior and exterior of the Black body considers the relationship between aesthetics and race in mid-nineteenth-century anatomical illustration.

Summary Argues that it is plausible and meaningful to take Maclise’s anatomical illustrations, and the figures depicted therein, as queer objects of queer desire.

Summary Contextualises the collaborative effort behind the publication of Maclise’s The Anatomy of the Arteries within the broader landscape of nineteenth-century anatomical publishing networks.

Summary Traces the US reception of Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy and outlines its impact on American medical publishing, pedagogy, and practice.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEMillais’s Metapicture by Mark A. Cheetham

Summary Presents a reading of Millais’s painting as a “metapicture” that looked ahead to the planting of the British flag at the North Pole and also to today’s treatment of the Arctic in contemporary art.

Summary Considers John McHale’s writing and art practice as an evolving response to Marshall McLuhan’s media ecology.

ARTICLESpratt’s Flaps by Rebecca Whiteley

Summary Obstetric Tables stood out among midwifery guides of the period for its coloured lithographic illustrations, mobilised by the construction of paper flaps.

ARTICLENecrography convened by Dan Hicks

Summary Contributors respond to the provocation that the concept of object “life-histories” in museums has masked the colonial violence inherent in their collections.

ARTICLERoyal Religion Series by Victor Ehikhamenor

Summary Victor Ehikhamenor’s Royal Religion series fuses Catholic rosaries, coral beads, and bronze statuettes to explore the hybrid history of garments worn by the Benin monarch.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEWomen in Fur by Sarah Parsons

Summary The Pitfour photographs illuminate the tension between the early progressive uses of photography, particularly by women, and the often-repressive contexts that shaped their production.

Summary Case studies of the 1961 IUA Congress and Victor Pasmore’s Peterlee project trace the decline of British constructionism amid changing cultural discourses.

Summary Examines the afterlife of Aubrey Beardsley in Russia, focusing on his admirers among the World of Art group, led by Sergei Diaghilev, and the circulation of Beardsley’s images through their journal Mir iskusstva.

ARTICLEMaking a Case by Steve Edwards

Summary Argues that daguerreotypes must be understood as image-thing amalgams, paying particular attention to the construction and marks on their cases and frames.

Summary Contributors consider whether the ecological crisis demands a fundamental transformation in the way art history is structured and taught.

ARTICLEClimate and Culture Beyond Borders by Worm: art + ecology

Summary Worm: art + ecology curates this feature, showcasing the work of four artists alongside their own practice to explore justice in environmental and climate issues.

ARTICLEMoss Rain Paradox by Angela Chan

Summary Moss Rain Paradox is a research project that examines the UK’s imminent water scarcity issues and responds to a spectrum of climate perspectives.

ARTICLEBeyond Interspecies Objectification by Sonia E. Barrett

Summary

ARTICLEWang Chau Village by Michael Leung

Summary Standing with the Wang Chau villagers resisting eviction by the Hong Kong government, these works capture their collective farming, jackfruit festival, activism, and daily co-learning through paintings, photos, and anecdotes.

ARTICLEDIÁSPORAS QUE LUCHAN by The Bonita Chola (aka Angela Camacho)

Summary Documents and archives the work of Indigenous and Afro-descendant organisers using vibrant, accessible images focused on anti-colonial, climate, and social justice issues.

ARTICLEThe Ecological Imperative by INTERPRT

Summary Investigations that utilise geospatial analysis and architectural methodologies to reconstruct cases of environmental violations.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEEditorial British Art Studies Editorial Group

Summary

ARTICLELuxury and Crisis convened by Iris Moon

Summary Contributors consider the role that decorative objects, which have long been deemed as “superfluous”, played in shaping and negotiating our political, social, and economic needs, wants, and desires, both past and present.

ARTICLE“The Bold Adventure of All” by Helen Pierce

Summary Considers a series of encounters with printed, painted, and sculpted portraits by a range of viewers with different political and religious inclinations during the 1650s.

ARTICLEThe Social Economics of Artistic Labour by Anna Cooper
and Martin Myrone

Summary Considers a series of encounters with printed, painted, and sculpted portraits by a range of viewers with different political and religious inclinations during the 1650s.

ARTICLEBill Brandt by Martina Droth
and Paul Messier
Robert Hixon
with photography by Richard Caspole

Summary This feature explores the photography of Bill Brandt from the perspective of the physical print, drawing attention to its material qualities and practical functions.

Summary

ARTICLEVirtual St Stephen’s by Tim Ayers

Summary

ARTICLEMapping the Unknown by Anthony Masinton
and James Jago

Summary

ARTICLEThe Wall Paintings at St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster Palace by Helen Howard
and Lloyd de Beer
David Saunders
Catherine Higgitt

Summary

Issue Overview
ARTICLEA Visionary Sense of London by Laura Grace Ford

Summary This feature presents an illustrated lecture delivered by artist Laura Grace Ford in conjunction with a conference and exhibition on William Blake at Tate Britain.

ARTICLEBert Hardy by Lynda Nead
and John Wyver

Summary Two short films and an essay explore the aesthetic and historical qualities of Bert Hardy’s wartime and post-war photography for Picture Post.

Summary This essay traces how Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and his wife Ethel Mairet’s photographs and studies of craft in India and Ceylon in the 1900s relate to Charles and Ray Eames’s 1958 India Report.

ARTICLEReason Dazzled by Matthew Beaumont

Summary Proposes a reinterpretation of Turner’s painting as an attempt to stage a certain crisis in the Enlightenment, at the level both of form and content—the blinding effect of too much light.

ARTICLESigns of a Struggle by Aviva Burnstock
and Sarah MacDougall

Summary Describes a collaborative technical and art-historical study of paintings by Mark Gertler sparked by the discovery through X-radiography of a painted sketch for his masterwork Merry-Go-Round (1916).

ARTICLESkin and Bone by David Hansen

Summary A visual essay explores the interplay between portraiture, politics, class, and race across Britain, Europe, America, and Australia, linking diverse visual and scientific practices.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEon the side of the disease and not the cure with films by James Richards
introduced by Sarah Perks

Summary This feature showcases new work by James Richards that continues the artist’s investigation into the body and technology, as well as a short essay by curator Sarah Perks.

ARTICLE“The Assemblage of Specimens” by Samuel Bibby

Summary Explores how three 1976 publications functioned as alternative catalogues for a Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, highlighting the magazine’s role as a key site for art-historical experimentation.

Summary Investigates the history of the joint exhibition of Jack B. Yeats and William Nicholson at the National Gallery in 1942.

ARTICLEThe Texture of Capitalism by Kirsty Sinclair Dootson

Summary Considers how the industrial production of oil paint became a flashpoint for debates about the effect of capitalist modernity on painting in particular and society more broadly.

ARTICLEThe Ecosystem of Exhibitions by Catherine Roach

Summary Explores how three 1976 publications functioned as alternative catalogues for a Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, highlighting the magazine’s role as a key site for art-historical experimentation.

ARTICLE“The Sense of Nearness” by Katherine Fein

Summary Re-examines Harriet Hosmer’s Clasped Hands, challenging assumptions about the indexicality of life casts and instead proposing a dynamic relationship defined by nearness between cast and subject.

Issue Overview
ARTICLELondon, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories by Hammad Nasar
and Sarah Victoria Turner

Summary Introduces this special issue of British Art Studies, the first publication to emerge from the Paul Mellon Centre’s London, Asia research project.

ARTICLEExhibitions, Histories by Sonal Khullar

Summary An introduction to the symposium Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900 to Now.

ARTICLEWhy Exhibition Histories? convened by Saloni Mathur

Summary Contributors respond to the idea that exhibitions provide an important lens through which to explore the entangled art histories of Asia and Britain.

ARTICLEExhibitions in Print interview between Sharmini Pereira
and Sneha Ragavan

Summary Presents an interview with the founder and director of the non-profit organisation Raking Leaves, which publishes artist books with an emphasis on the geopolitical and cultural contexts of South Asia.

ARTICLECurating the Cosmopolis interview between Iwona Blazwick
and Rattanamol Singh Johal

Summary The curator of Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis in 2001 at Tate Modern looks back at this ambitious exhibition, discussing its development, challenges, and legacy.

ARTICLEUnlearning the Modern interview between David Elliott
and Hilary Floe

Summary n interview with David Elliott discusses his time as director the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, in particular his influential series of exhibitions under the title India: Myth and Reality.

ARTICLEInstant Malaysia by Kelvin Chuah

Summary A personal article reflects on the history, impact, and legacy of the 1973 Instant Malaysia exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, London.

ARTICLE“A Bridge between the Two Worlds” by Sarena Abdullah

Summary Discusses the links between London and Kuala Lumpur during the 1960s and 1970s, through several exhibitions of Malaysian art organised at, or by, the Commonwealth Institute, London.

ARTICLEMapping Decolonisation by Claire Wintle

Summary A close reading of London’s Commonwealth Institute and its intriguing gallery floor plan of 1969, considering the interaction between display, exhibition graphics, and imperial change.

ARTICLEJourneying through Modernism by Lotte Hoek
and Sanjukta Sunderason

Summary Explores the journeys of two key twentieth-century artists from East Pakistan—Zainul Abedin and S.M. Sultan—to and through post-imperial London in the early 1950s.

Summary Focuses on the largely understudied Art of India exhibition held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in London in 1931, which was hailed at the time as the first event of its kind in the West.

Summary Methods and findings from the ongoing research project Articulating British Asian Art Histories focuses on four exhibitions of South Asian women artists during the 1980s and early 1990s.

ARTICLETaking Space for Asian Diaspora Narratives by Annie Jael Kwan

Summary This curatorial essay discusses an experimental performance programme, Being Present, which included three works by three artists from the Asia-Art-Activism Research Network.

ARTICLE26 x 2 = 0 by Bettina Fung | 馮允珊

Summary An artistic intervention originally performed as part of the exhibition Speech Acts at the Manchester Art Gallery in March 2019.

Summary An artistic intervention originally performed as part of the exhibition Speech Acts at the Manchester Art Gallery in March 2019.

ARTICLEYellow Peril by Nicholas Tee

Summary An artistic intervention originally performed as part of the exhibition Speech Acts at the Manchester Art Gallery in March 2019.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEThe Kitchen Sink Too by Abi Shapiro

Summary This feature reflects on the invisibility of women’s perspectives of domesticity in early post-war art, and the process of working with community groups to develop curatorial research.

ARTICLE1964 by Stephen Bann

Summary This feature assembles archival material, text and images in a non-linear fashion to examine the experience of a single year of exhibitions in 1964.

ARTICLETransatlantic Transactions and the Domestic Market by Barbara Pezzini
and Alan Crookham

Summary A case study of art dealer Agnew’s presents a methodological discussion of how digital tools can be used to investigate circulation and transnational exchange in the historical art market.

ARTICLELetters from the Home Front by Sophie Hatchwell

Summary Explores how Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun’s experience of life on the home front as non-combatants and erstwhile pacifists in Britain informed their work during the Second World War.

ARTICLECumbrian Cosmopolitanisms by Hammad Nasar

Summary Case studies of three works related to the LYC Museum & Art Gallery in Cumbria explore how friendships inform shared practices, generate work, and socialise narratives.

Summary An account of Delia Derbyshire’s work in the 1970s after she left the BBC also includes an unreleased recording from an unfinished project in 1980.

ARTICLEDelia Derbyshire by Caroline Catz

Summary A short film explores the life and creative output of Delia Derbyshire, accompanied by an interview with the filmmaker.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEIntroduction by Mark Hallett

Summary Introduces this special issue of British Art Studies, which focuses on landscape imagery as an area of study attracting new kinds of art-historical attention.

ARTICLELandscape Then and Now by Tim Barringer

Summary Explores how landscape art has historically reflected ideological concerns and examines its evolving significance in contemporary global and postcolonial contexts.

ARTICLEFire-Stick Picturesque by Julia Lum

Summary Drawing from scholarship in fire ecology and ethnohistory, this article suggests new approaches to art historical analysis of colonial landscape art.

ARTICLELandscape Now convened by Alexandra Harris

Summary Contributors respond in a wide-ranging discussion on the evolving role of landscape art in contemporary culture, exploring how it intersects with literature, history, and environmental concerns.

ARTICLEGardening the Archive by Hammad Nasar
and David Alesworth

Summary This feature with David Alesworth showcases five details from his recent projects that suggest the range of different questions we may pose to landscapes now.

ARTICLEPaul Nash’s Geological Enigma by Anna Reid

Summary Explores the attunement of Paul Nash’s work to pioneering early to mid-twentieth century geophysical research in England—connections that have not yet been fully recognised.

Summary Traces the life of a representationally elusive and stubborn landscape, the Hoo Peninsula in Kent, through various forms of visual culture.

ARTICLEOn Place and Displacement by Julia A. Sienkewicz

Summary Studying watercolours from the Virginian residence of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, this feature analyses the concept of “displacement” as a contribution to landscape studies.

ARTICLELiquid Landscape by Stephen Daniels

Summary Considers the presence of the pond in the work of two artists: one contemporary and the other a historical English landscape artist, both of whom are attentive to a range of hydrologies.

ARTICLEThe Anthroposcenic by David Matless

Summary Through the “Anthroposcenic”, this article explores how landscape becomes emblematic of processes deemed to mark an Anthropocene epoch.

ARTICLELandscaping Islands by Gill Perry

Summary Drawing on examples of installation, film, photography, and performance, this article explores the significance of the island theme in contemporary British art.

ARTICLEOutside In by Mark A. Cheetham

Summary Examines how eco art, land art, and landscape interact within the Anthropocene, focusing on artists bringing natural landscapes into galleries and institutional frameworks.

ARTICLELines in the Landscape by Corinne Silva
and Val Williams

Summary Presents a new research project by the artist Corinne Silva and the curator and writer Val Williams retracing the footsteps of W.G. Hoskins and F.L. Attenborough for their 1948 guidebook Touring Leicestershire.

ARTICLEThe “Connoisseur’s Panorama” by Greg Smith

Summary This feature with David Alesworth showcases five details from his recent projects that suggest the range of different questions we may pose to landscapes now.

ARTICLE1973 and the Future of Landscape by Nicholas Alfrey

Summary An exhibition history of Landscape in Britain c.1750–1850 at the Tate Gallery in 1973, looks at how the curators set out to question received ideas about the rise of landscape painting in Britain.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEIntroduction by Elizabeth Prettejohn
and Peter Trippi

Summary Introduces a group of articles and features on artists’ houses by considering the Alma-Tademas’ studio-houses, their influence on art, design, and early cinema.

ARTICLELaboratories of Creativity convened by Elizabeth Prettejohn
and Peter Trippi

Summary Contributors explore artists’ studio-houses as creative spaces that shaped personal identities, artistic collaboration, and cultural influence, extending beyond mere domestic settings.

ARTICLEWhat Do We Want from Artists’ Houses? by Christopher Reed

Summary Contributors explore artists’ studio-houses as creative spaces that shaped personal identities, artistic collaboration, and cultural influence, extending beyond mere domestic settings.

Summary Addresses how Frederic Leighton’s Arab Hall embodies a complex synthesis of Islamic art and British Aestheticism, revealing tensions between historical authenticity and artistic restoration.

ARTICLEThe Atmospherics of Leighton House by Jonathan Law
and Mary Roberts

Summary Five short films made by Jonathan Law with texts selected by Mary Roberts highlight the atmospheric materiality of the studio-home of Frederic Leighton.

ARTICLE“A Door of Hell” by Gregory Salter

Summary This article considers the art of Gilbert and George in relation to the concept of the threshold, placing their work in the context of a pervading sense of crisis in 1970s Britain.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEEditorial by British Art Studies Editorial Group

Summary The editorial to this issue describes work by the journal’s editors on another project, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018.

ARTICLE“As if Every Particle Was Alive” by Damian Taylor

Summary Argues that Constable’s Hadleigh Castle can be understood as fundamentally engaged with scientific ideas arising in contemporary geology and meteorology.

ARTICLEAubrey Williams by Kobena Mercer

Summary Suggests Williams’s Amerindian focus is best understood in terms of a “hauntological” mode of abstraction critically responsive to the moment of decolonisation.

ARTICLEThe Art Game by Michael Clegg

Summary Examines the coverage of the visual arts by the BBC’s Monitor, exploring its place in the evolution of approaches to art on British television and assesses its impact on the post-war art support system.

ARTICLESnapshots from No Man’s Land by Pippa Oldfield

Summary Pippa Oldfield reflects on curating an exhibition of war photography by women and the research involved in recovering the work and experiences of women photographers.

Issue Overview

Summary A short film exploring Paul Nash’s diverse works across media, emphasising interconnected themes of pattern, design, and nature, advocating for a unified interpretation.

ARTICLE“The Snob’s Chaldron” by Katherine Gazzard

Summary Examines Alexander Davison’s patronage of history painting, exploring his ambitions for social advancement and the genre’s public–private role in early nineteenth-century Britain.

ARTICLEA Photobook of the Shimmer Natasha Eaton

Summary Looks at Lionel Wendt’s photography, highlighting the interplay between colonialism, pearl fisheries, coerced labour, and the aesthetic allure of pearlescence and shimmer.

ARTICLEElegant Engravings of the Pacific by Jocelyn Anderson

Summary Describes how illustrations from James Cook’s Pacific expeditions were widely circulated through eighteenth-century British magazines and shaped public perceptions of the Pacific.

ARTICLEArt by the Many by Thomas Crow

Summary Contributors respond to the influence of 1960s London style cults on art, focusing on their innovative blending of fashion, music, and self-expression within broader cultural and social contexts.

ARTICLESeeing Red by Glenn Adamson
with photography by Richard Caspole

Summary This feature explores Clare Twomey’s Made in China installation at the Yale Center for British Art.

ARTICLEThe Famous Women Dinner Service by Hana Leaper

Summary Biographical entries for the women portrayed in Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s set of fifty plates of “famous women” accompany an article that examines the place of this playful work in the artists’ oeuvres.

ARTICLEThe Famous Women Dinner Service conversation between Judy Chicago

Hana Leaper
and Carmen Hermo
filmed by Jonathan Law

Summary Judy Chicago and the Feminist Art Collective discuss their work in a filmed conversation, reflecting on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Famous Women dinner service.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEEditorial by Sandy Heslop
and Jessica Berenbeim

Summary The editorial to this special issue on medieval art and architecture examines the evolving concepts of invention, visual difference, and historical perceptions of novelty in medieval works.

ARTICLEMedieval Invention and its Potencies by Paul Binski

Summary Medieval invention blended rationality and mystery, with art sometimes perceived as possessing persuasive or supernatural forces, though most often rooted in social conventions, rules, and playful creative processes.

Summary Explores how innovation in English Gothic architecture was shaped by risks, constraints, structural failures, and the relationship between masons and their patrons.

ARTICLEImagining Invention by James Hillson

Summary Scholars have long conflated Gothic architects into a generalised figure – this article critiques that framework and suggests alternatives for understanding medieval designers.

ARTICLECreativity in Three Dimensions by Alexandrina Buchanan
and Nicholas Webb

Summary Analyses the design and construction of Wells Cathedral’s lierne vaults using digital scanning to reveal varied processes and experimentation during construction stages.

Summary A study of the relationship between medieval church porches and the porches of King Solomon, highlighting the inventive ways medieval designers interpreted prototypes from written sources

ARTICLEImagining Place and Moralizing Space by Laura Slater

Summary Examines the significance of medieval “recreated Jerusalem” sites, and specifically the Jerusalem Chamber in the abbot’s house at Westminster Abbey, where Henry IV died in 1413.

ARTICLEThe Englishness of English Sedilia by James Alexander Cameron

Summary Explores why sedilia – the ceremonial seats of the priest, deacon, and subdeacon placed to the south of the altar – became so popular in England, through a consideration of trends in English architecture.

Summary Considers whether the earliest surviving example of side-by-side effigies of a married couple in the British Isles was intended to assert the legitimacy of a claim to the earldom of Menteith.

ARTICLEIn the Vineyard of the Lord by Veronika Decker

Summary Considers the significance of the image of the Tree of Jesse that appears in stained glass in the chapels of New College, Oxford and Winchester College, both founded by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester.

Summary Argues that the Chichester seal matrix was intentionally designed to reference legal and biblical authority, positioning the cathedral as a “temple of justice”.

ARTICLEResonance and Reuse by Kirsten Collins

Summary Explores the fifteenth-century reinvention of Getty Ms. 101, a late Romanesque picture book that was reconfigured as a devotional manual.

ARTICLEWording the Wound Man by Jack Hartnell

Summary An investigation into the only known English example of a Wound Man image, positioning the picture as a site not just of surgical knowledge but of a broader medico-artistic entanglement.

ARTICLEDisciplining the Digital coordinated by Amy Jeffs

Summary

ARTICLEHandling Digital Objects by Lloyd de Beer
and Naomi Speakman

Summary

ARTICLEAn Ivory Staff Terminal from Alcester by Sandy Heslop

Summary

ARTICLEPilgrim Souvenir by Amy Jeffs

Summary

ARTICLEPilgrim Souvenir by Amy Jeffs

Summary

Issue Overview
ARTICLEBetween a Rock and a Blue Chair by Martin Hammer

Summary Close analysis discloses Hockney’s repertoire of artistic and literary allusions in Rocky Mountains (1965), and the meanings and associations these may have encapsulated.

Summary Explores how free access to the British Museum’s sculpture galleries shaped art education and reinforced middle-class dominance in early nineteenth-century Britain.

ARTICLEA “Modern Rendezvous” in London by Bernard Vere

Summary Resituates A Short Flight within the context of aviation in London before the First World War, when 120,000 people attended the meeting at Hendon Aerodrome over the Easter weekend of 1914.

ARTICLELowry and the Local by Anne M. Wagner

Summary What does it mean to draw a slum? Lowry, one of the few artists to take up this question, adopted a notably uninflected manner, descriptive, but not dramatic.

Summary Introducing a feature on the Hereford Screen, one of the most complex and intricate choir screens of the Victorian era.

ARTICLETheology and Threshold by Ayla Lepine

Summary Explores the Victorian revival of choir and rood screens, their theological significance, and artistic evolution, accompanied by three films illustrating their impact on sacred spaces and Christian worship.

ARTICLEThe Hereford Screen: A Prehistory by Matthew Reeve

Summary Examines Skidmore and Scott’s Hereford Cathedral screen, its historical context, and connections to their work at Lichfield and Salisbury, addressing eighteenth-century “improvements”.

ARTICLEThe Medieval Choir Screen in Sacred Space by Jacqueline E. Jung

Summary Reveals the dynamic, mutually reinforcing relations among choir screens, the spaces they inhabited, and the liturgical objects that animated those zones.

ARTICLESound and Vision in the Hereford Screen by Justin Underhill

Summary Describes how digital documentation of Hereford Cathedral and the Hereford Screen has revealed standpoints within the cathedral that would have dramatically impacted the appearance of the screen.

Summary In focusing on the musical culture connected with Hereford Cathedral, this article enriches the interpretation of the restored Hereford Screen in its secular setting at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

ARTICLECollaborations Between Scott and Skidmore by Alicia Robinson

Summary Examines the collaboration between architect George Gilbert Scott and metalworker Francis Skidmore, comparing their metalwork screens at the cathedrals of Hereford, Lichfield, and Salisbury.

Summary Provides a broad narrative of how the screens designed Gilbert Scott and Skidmore for the cathedrals of Hereford, Lichfield, and Salisbury, have been regarded since they were produced.

Summary In this film, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Head of Metals Conservation, Diana Heath, describes her involvement in the intricate conservation and restoration of the Hereford Screen.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEEditorial by British Art Studies Editorial Group

Summary This editorial recaps the journal’s first year of publication, highlighting newly introduced features and looking ahead to upcoming work.

ARTICLENew Brutalist Image 1949–55 by Claire Zimmerman
and Victoria Walsh

Summary Three reels of photographs taken by Nigel Henderson reveal a visual lexicon of New Brutalism that links the 1953 Parallel of Life and Art exhibition and the Hunstanton School project completed in 1954.

ARTICLEThe Temporal Dimensions of the London Art Auction, 1780–1835 by Matthew Lincoln
and Abram Fox

Summary Draws on quantitative methods to explore the gradual emergence of a tightly scheduled auction season in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, focusing on the sale of paintings.

Summary This article and the accompanying reconstruction explore methods for representing lost displays, with an emphasis on visualising uncertainty and the mediated nature of period images.

ARTICLEInsurgent Citizenship by Sean Robert Willcock

Summary Looking at the palliative, diplomatic role played by photographic portraiture following the Indian Rebellion (1857–59), this article assesses how photography engaged with warfare’s social upheavals.

ARTICLE“The Mirror-Like Sea” by Vajdon Sohaili

Summary Analyses Duncan Grant’s mural for the Borough Polytechnic, and the painting’s linkage of naked homosociality to a subtle figuration of desire that echoes E.M. Forster’s “only connect” dictum.

ARTICLESuper-size caricature Kate Grandjouan

Summary This article re-examines Rowlandson’s ambitious caricature of the French in the context of his training at the Académie Royale in Paris, as well as the rise of public exhibitions and market for comic prints.

ARTICLEExit Theory convened by John Tagg

Summary Contributors discuss whether the current interest in the 1970s will prove anything more than another passing curatorial revival and generate its own inventive forms of practice and theory?

ARTICLEMartin Parr by Martin Parr

Summary A selection of photographs by Martin Parr that have come to define particular notions of what Britishness looks like.

ARTICLEConference Proceedings convened by Sarah Victoria Turner
and Martina Droth

Summary Video-recordings made at the conference Photography and Britishness, held at the Yale Center for British Art in November 2016.

Issue Overview
ARTICLEBritish Sculpture Abroad: An Introduction by Martina Droth
and Penelope Curtis

Summary

ARTICLEHenry Moore’s Exhibition in Yugoslavia, 1955 by Želimir Koščević

Summary

ARTICLEBarbara Hepworth in Brazil by Ana Gonçalves Magalhães

Summary

ARTICLE1984 and Beyond (2005–07) by Gerard Byrne

Summary

ARTICLEBritish Constructivist Art by Sam Gathercole

Summary

ARTICLE“Induced Tension” by Arie Hartog

Summary

ARTICLEHybrid Sculpture of the 1960s by John J. Curley

Summary

ARTICLESight Unseen by Sarah Stanners

Summary

ARTICLE1970s: Out of Sculpture by Elena Crippa

Summary

ARTICLEThe British Avant Garde by Jo Melvin

Summary

ARTICLEUn Certain Art Anglais, 1979 by Lucy Reynolds

Summary

Summary

ARTICLEThe British Show in Australia, 1985 by Anthony Bond

Summary

ARTICLEA Quiet Revolution by Mary Jane Jacob

Summary

ARTICLEExpanding the Field by Nick Baker

Summary

Summary

ARTICLESensational Cities by John J. Curley

Summary

ARTICLEReal/Life by Kajiya Kenji

Summary

ARTICLEWith the Void, Full Powers by Rakhee Balaram

Summary

ARTICLEDisorienting the Art World by Jo Applin

Summary

Issue Overview
ARTICLEEditorial by British Art Studies Editorial Group

Summary This editorial highlights the journal’s international reach, open-access digital platform, and commitment to expanding British art studies through innovative methodologies.

ARTICLEChanging Subjects by Anne Nellis Richter

Summary Explores how William Cantrill’s 1812 etchings dedicated to the Marchioness of Stafford used genre painting to mediate tensions from the Highland Clearances.

ARTICLEStill Invisible? convened by Patricia de Montfort
and Robyne Erica Calvert

Summary Contributors respond to the provocation that women artists are “still invisible”, examining their underrepresentation in British art and efforts to improve their visibility.

ARTICLECanaletto’s Colour by Roxane Sperber
and Jens Stenger

Summary Examining six paintings from Canaletto’s English period from a technical perspective, this article details changes to the artist’s grounds, painting technique, and palette when working in England.

ARTICLEHigh Art and High Stakes by John Chu

Summary Exploring the 3rd Duke of Dorset’s investment in Reynolds’s experimental paintings, this article views his risky patronage as a high-stakes gamble for social advancement.

ARTICLELooking for “the Longitude” convened by Katy Barrett

Summary An interactive feature explores the “Longitude Problem” through Hogarth’s art, using images and illuminates its role in Georgian visual culture.

ARTICLECarnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and the process of painting by Rebecca Hellen
and Elaine Kilmurray

Summary Technical analysis and archival research uncover new insights into John Singer Sargents’s process in creating Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

ARTICLEConversations and Chimneypieces by Matthew Craske

Summary This study of conversation piece portraits, argues that they replicated the experience of meetings hosts, replicating the experience of a private greeting tied to the rituals of hospitality.

ARTICLEJohn Singleton Copley and the World of Prints conversation between Jules Prown
and Mark Hallett

Summary An audio-visual conversation addresses Copley’s involvement with prints throughout his career, from his early years in Boston to the sale of his estate after his death in 1815.

ARTICLEYale Center for British Art by David Lewis

Summary This feature presents animated images inspired by the renovation and temporary closure of Louis I. Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.