Ruth Brimacombe

Associate Curator (Research Coordinator) & Assistant Curator

Job description

My work as Assistant Curator involves researching the nineteenth-century collection and creating new exhibits for the Gallery’s changing schedule of room displays.  Some of the displays I have curated include Beautiful Souls on the set of aristocrats known as ‘the Souls’ and their Pre-Raphaelite affiliations;  Queens in Waiting: Charlotte & Victoria on the imagery associated with a young female heir to the throne and Charles Dickens: Life & Legacy, marking the bicentennial anniversary of the famous author’s birth. Most recently I have worked on Viceroys of India and Victorian Masquerade, which explores the vogue for fancy dress during Queen Victoria’s reign. As Research Coordinator, I am also responsible for helping to develop the Gallery’s research programmes and for organizing the staff research seminars.

Biography

I joined the National Portrait Gallery as an Assistant Curator in 2010 and was appointed the Research Coordinator in 2011. I studied a BA (Hons) English Degree at King’s College London, before completing an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College London, as well as a Master of Art Curatorship and a PhD in Art History at the University of Melbourne in Australia.  I was formerly a Junior and Post-doctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art; and a Leverhulme Fellow in the History of British Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in 2008.

Research interests

My doctoral thesis was entitled Imperial Avatars: Art, India and the Prince of Wales 1875-6. It explored the artists and photographers who accompanied the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) on his royal tour of India in the late nineteenth-century. My research interests continue to focus on the art and visual culture associated with the British Empire in the nineteenth century (particularly in Australia, India and Canada); royal portraiture; artist-reporters working for the illustrated press; the relationship between mass media and portraiture, and the transnational exchange of the British portrait.

Recent Publications

'One Common Hero: Gordon of Khartoum – the imperial icon in a colonial context' to be published along with other conference papers from the British Empire and Visual Culture Symposium by the University of Melbourne Custom Book Centre on-line (Forthcoming 2012).