Paul Mellon Centre | Georgian Provocations Series II, Panel Discussion

Georgian Provocations Series II, Panel Discussion

An associated conversation on 8 December, chaired by Mark Hallett, will be streamed live via Zoom Webinar at 6pm (GMT), providing a Q&A session with the series presenters, who will talk about the artworks upon which they focused in their lectures and their respective approaches to discussing the works in question.

No prior art historical knowledge is necessary.

Georgian Provocations Series II is convened by Martin Postle, Senior Research Fellow, the Paul Mellon Centre.

Registration via Eventbrite is required and opens on 16 September. This series will take place in person at the Paul Mellon Centre and will also be streamed live via Zoom Webinar.

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Mark Hallett is Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is currently carrying out research for a forthcoming exhibition devoted to Constable and Turner, and leads the Centre’s Generation Landscape research project, of which this programme of webinars is a part.

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 the Department of History of Art at University College London, where he teaches the history of art and visual culture in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. He is currently working on a book, The Late Weather, about the aesthetic, scientific and cultural history of climate in nineteenth-century Britain.

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.

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Image credits:

Top row: Richard Evans, Henri Christophe, Portrait as King of Haiti, 1816, oil on canvas, 86.9 x 64.7 cm. National Pantheon Museum, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo: © Granger / Bridgeman Images;

Eliza Trotter, Lady Caroline Lamb (Portrait of a Young Lady), ca. 1811, oil on canvas, 114.9 x 140.3 cm, NPG 3312; Joseph Wright of Derby Self-portrait, ? 1772-3, Derby Museum and Art Gallery;

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, oil on canvas, 101.7 x 127.1 cm. © Detroit Institute of Arts / Founders Society Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleischmanf / Bridgeman Images

Bottom row: George Romney (1734–1802), Howard Visiting a Prison, n.d. Black ink, watercolour and graphite on paper, 36.2 x 53.3 cm. Yale Center for British Art;

John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778, National Gallery of Art, Washington