Staff Research Projects 2009-2010

As an institution, the gallery continues to make great progress on the research project Making Art in Tudor Britain. Work on the Catalogue of Later Victorian Portraits also proceeds at a strong pace, and the gallery was pleased to announce the publication of John Ingamell’s Later Stuarts catalogue in February 2010.

On an individual level the gallery is also keen to foster wider research by encouraging members of staff to develop their own research and publication projects, and to participate in external study programmes, exhibitions and academic forums. These research initiatives are further promoted by the gallery through a regular series of staff research seminars open to all staff members as well as specialist guests invited by the speaker. Details of the range of research projects, both institutional and personal, being undertaken by members of the gallery staff are provided below:

Dr Ruth Brimacombe (Assistant Curator)

Ruth Brimacombe is currently preparing her doctoral thesis on the work of the artist-reporters who accompanied the Prince of Wales (Edward VII) on his royal tour of India in 1875-6 for publication. Her research focuses on the intersection between portraiture and the illustrated press in the nineteenth century, and the role of art and visual culture in the British Empire. Her most recent publication is an article entitled ‘One common hero: Gordon of Khartoum – the imperial icon in a colonial context’ due to be published in an edited collection of symposium papers by the University of Melbourne later this year.

Carol Blackett-Ord (Researcher, Late Victorian Catalogue)

Carol Blackett-Ord’s research explores the field of reproductive print-making, in particular the market for mezzotints in seventeenth-century London. At present, she is also writing an article titled ‘Donatello in the Nineteenth Century’ for Ravenna, vol. IV, Autumn 2010.

Dr Tarnya Cooper (16th Century Curator)

Tarnya Cooper has continued to lead the major research project Making Art in Tudor Britain and given several conference papers on the findings of this research. She has published two chapters (with Catharine MacLeod and Margaret Zoller) on paintings in the Lumley Inventory. She has been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to help her complete her book Citizen Portrait: Portrait Painting and the Urban Elites of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales. A full list of of her publications can be found here.

Dr Peter Funnell, (19th Century Curator and Head of Research Programmes)

Peter Funnell specialises in nineteenth-century portraiture across all media. He has also published and lectured on British art theory and the London art world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the representation of masculinity in British portraiture, and the history of museum display. Much of his focus this past year was on researching and writing an essay and catalogue entries for Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance (Yale University Press, 2010). He also contributed an essay to the publication accompanying the exhibition Portraits and Power at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina in Florence. He continues to be Consultant Editor for Likenesses to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and is on the advisory committees of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group and an AHRC funded network on Likeness and Facial Recognition. 

Clare Gittings (Learning Manager)

Clare Gittings has been awarded a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Bath where she teaches history and art history on the Masters course in Death and Society. She is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Mortality, to which she contributes regularly. She has a chapter entitled ‘The Art of Dying'  in The Study of Dying, Allan Kellehear (ed.), Cambridge University Press, which was published in October 2009. She has also co-written a chapter with Tony Walter called ‘What will the neighbours say? Reactions to field and garden burial’ in The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality, Jenny Hockey et al (ed.), published by Palgrave in September 2010. Her current research focuses on portraits of the dead within portraits of the living.

Catharine MacLeod (17th Century Curator)

Catharine MacLeod is preparing an exhibition on Henry, Prince of Wales to be held in 2012, and is carrying out research for a catalogue raisonné on the works of Sir Peter Lely in collaboration with Diana Dethloff of University College London. She has contributed a chapter entitled ‘The Age of Revolution’ to David Dimbleby’s book The Seven Ages of Britain: the story of our nation told through its greatest treasures, which was published in conjunction with the BBC television series of the same title in January 2010. Her two chapters on the portrait collection of John, Baron Lumley, written jointly with Tarnya Cooper and Margaret Zoller, were published in Art Collecting and Lineage in the Elizabethan Age: the Lumley Inventory and Pedigree, Mark Evans (ed.), 2010.

Dr Jan Marsh (Researcher, Late Victorian Catalogue)

Jan Marsh has continued her research into the world of Victorian culture, especially relating to the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the representation of people of African ancestry in Western art. Her selected publications include an essay on ‘Fact, Feeling and Femininity: Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement’, The Pre-Raphaelites, Mikael Ahlund (ed.), National Museum Stockholm, 2009, an article titled ‘Pictured at Work: Visual Evidence of black models’ employment in art 1800-1900’, Immigrants & Minorities, volume 28, no. 2, 2010, and a new edition of The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal for Quartet Books. She continues to be closely involved in Portraits for Posterity: Holocaust Survivors in Britain, an on-going exhibition and photographic project with the photographer Mark Writtle.

Paul Moorhouse (20th Century Curator)

Paul Moorhouse specialises in international twentieth-century and contemporary art. He is currently curating The Queen: art and Image, a National Portrait Gallery exhibition that will tour to Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff and London in 2011-12. His monograph, Anthony Caro: Presence was published by Lund Humphries in March 2010 and he curated Warhol/Icon: The Creation of Image at the Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens in October 2009.  He has also contributed numerous essays and articles to international exhibitions and publications, including the essay on Richard Long for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection (2009) and another titled ‘A Human Universe: Auerbach's Building Site Paintings and existentialism' for the Courtauld Institute's exhibition Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-1962, October 2009-January 2010.  His monograph Cindy Sherman will be published by Phaidon later this year.

Sarah Moulden (Assistant 18th Century Curator)

Sarah Moulden, in her dual role as Assistant Curator of Dulwich Picture Gallery, has published The Furniture at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2009). A survey of the furniture in the gallery's collection, the book is both a guide and catalogue, and provides new research on the tastes, purchasing and collecting habits of the founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery, Sir Francis Bourgeois and Noel and Margaret Desenfans.  Her other research interests focus on the portraiture of the Florentine artist Andrea Soldi, particularly his portraits from the 1730s of Levant Company merchants.

Sandy Nairne (Director)

Sandy Nairne has given various lectures and has written occasional articles relating to the Gallery’s collection and programmes. He is in the final stages of completing his book, titled Art Theft and the Tate’s Stolen Turners, which will be published by Reaktion Press in 2011.

Dr Lucy Peltz (18th Century Curator)

Lucy Peltz is the co-editor of Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance (Yale University Press, 2010). She is also currently researching the cultural and economic history of portrait print production and collecting in the eighteenth century. During the past year, she has continued her part-time research sabbatical, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to work on her monograph on extra-illustration, a significant fashion in portrait print collecting from the 1760s to the 1840s.

Terence Pepper (Photographs Curator)

Terence Pepper recently made a research trip to Pasadena, California to carry out preparatory research on E.O. Hoppe for the upcoming exhibition in 2011 of Hoppe Portraits, Studio, Society and Street. He also visited The Getty Center to review works for another exhibition on Man Ray scheduled for 2013. Along with his colleagues in the photographs department, he has overseen research into Hoppe’s lesser well-known subjects, and the preparation of an electronic database on Hoppe’s 15,000 portraits sittings, to be made available through the gallery’s archive. His latest publication, written with Jon Savage, was the catalogue for Beatles to Bowie: the 60s exposed (NPG publications, 2009) to which he contributed a biographical dictionary of over sixty prominent photographers of the 1960s. He maintains an ongoing interest in researching the early history of photo-journalism, as seen in periodicals such as Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, Weekly Illustrated and The Graphic, as well as the lives and photographs of fashion models of the 1960s.

Jacob Simon (Chief Curator)

Jacob Simon’s current research interests include the development of 17th-century auricular picture frames as exemplified at Ham House, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait practice, and British 19th and 20th-century bronze funders and plaster figure makers (see British bronze founders and plaster figure makers). His ongoing projects include the biennial updating of three online directories: British artists' suppliers, 1650-1950; British picture framemakers, 1630-1950 and British picture restorers, 1630-1950 .

Dr Heather Tilley (Curatorial Assistant)

Heather Tilley’s research encompasses Romantic and Victorian literature and visual/material culture, life writing and disability studies. She recently completed a PhD in nineteenth-century studies at Birkbeck, University of London, entitled ‘Blindness and Writing, 1800-72’, and is currently revising the thesis for book publication. She has published “Frances Browne, the ‘blind poetess’: towards a poetics of blind writing” in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, special issue ‘Blindness and Literature’, guest edited by Georgina Kleege, 3:2 (2009), and “Wordsworth’s Glasses: The Materiality of Blindness in the Romantic Imagination” in The Verbal and Visual in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Luisa Cale and Patrizia Di Bello (eds.), Palgrave, 2010.