Michael J. Rosenthal (born 1950) is emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of Warwick. He is a specialist both in British art and culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the arts of early colonial Australia. [1]
Michael Rosenthal attended Colchester Royal Grammar School, then under the aegis of headteacher, Jack Elam. [2] He received his BA from the University of London, his MA from the University of Cambridge and his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1978. [3]
Michael Rosenthal was Leverhulme Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge before taking up a post in the Department of History of Art at the University of Warwick. [1]
His scholarship examines British art, particularly landscape, within social and cultural contexts, and focusing on the 18th and early 19th centuries. His 1977 PhD thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art was entitled Constable and the valley of the Stour. [3] He has authored a number of books including British landscape painting (1982); Constable, the painter and his landscape (1983); The art of Thomas Gainsborough: "a little business for the eye" (1999); and Thomas Gainsborough: 1727-1788 to accompany Tate Britain's major exhibition on the artist in 2002. [4] He authored the Britannica entry on Constable. [5]
Many of his books are generously illustrated. Photographs contributed by Rosenthal to the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art are currently being digitised as part of the Courtauld Connects project. [6]
Rosenthal is interested not only in the aesthetics of landscape painting but also its social and ideological meaning and uses, for example in asserting a family's ownership over the land, structures and living things depicted. [7] His study of Thomas Gainsborough examines not only the paintings but also the artist's canny exploitation of the developing art market of the time. [8]
Rosenthal has spent considerable time in Australia over the years and is an authority on the art of early colonial Australia. He is working on a book about picture making in Australia from 1788 to 1840, provisionally entitled The Artless Landscape. [1] [9] [10]
He has held visiting Fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art, the University of Western Australia and the Australian National University, and in March–April 2007 was Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He retired from Warwick University in 2010, and was then made an Emeritus Professor in the Department of History of Art. [1] In July 2012, Walkabout: A symposium in honour of Professor Michael Rosenthal, was held at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London. [11]
Michael Rosenthal worked as a guest curator on several notable exhibitions over the course of his career. In 2002 he was lead curator of Tate Britain's exhibition, Gainsborough, which brought together from around the world the largest ever collection of paintings and drawings by the artist. [12] The exhibition subsequently travelled to the National Gallery of Art, Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. [9]
In 2013 he was the curator, with Anne Lyles, of the exhibition Turner and Constable: sketching from nature: Works from the Tate Collection, held first at Compton Verney, and subsequently at both the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate and the Laing in Newcastle. [13]
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
John Constable was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
Richard Wilson was an influential Welsh landscape painter, who worked in Britain and Italy. With George Lambert he is recognised as a pioneer in British art of landscape for its own sake and was described in the Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales as the "most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country". In December 1768 Wilson became one of the founder-members of the Royal Academy. A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work compiled by Paul Spencer-Longhurst is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the 18th century such as Reynolds or Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy. His series of paintings on the theme of a lion attacking a horse are early and significant examples of the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century. His painting, Whistlejacket hangs in the National Gallery, London.
The Art of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of visual art in or associated with the United Kingdom since the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 and encompasses English art, Scottish art, Welsh art and Irish art, and forms part of Western art history. During the 18th century, Britain began to reclaim the leading place England had previously played in European art during the Middle Ages, being especially strong in portraiture and landscape art.
The Courtauld Gallery is an art museum in Somerset House, on the Strand in central London. It houses the collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art, a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art.
The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in central New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward.
Sir Thomas Brock was an English sculptor and medallist, notable for the creation of several large public sculptures and monuments in Britain and abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most famous work is the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. Other commissions included the redesign of the effigy of Queen Victoria on British coinage, the massive bronze equestrian statue of Edward, the Black Prince, in City Square, Leeds and the completion of the statue of Prince Albert on the Albert Memorial.
Mr and Mrs Andrews is an oil on canvas portrait of about 1750 by Thomas Gainsborough, now in the National Gallery, London. Today it is one of his most famous works, but it remained in the family of the sitters until 1960 and was very little known before it appeared in an exhibition in Ipswich in 1927, after which it was regularly requested for other exhibitions in Britain and abroad, and praised by critics for its charm and freshness. By the post-war years its iconic status was established, and it was one of four paintings chosen to represent British art in an exhibition in Paris celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Soon the painting began to receive hostile scrutiny as a paradigm of the paternalist and capitalist society of 18th-century England, but it remains a firm popular favourite.
Richard Cork is a British art historian, editor, critic, broadcaster and exhibition curator. He has been an art critic for the Evening Standard, The Listener, The Times and the New Statesman. Cork was also editor for Studio International. He is a past Turner Prize judge.
Sir Oliver Nicholas Millar was a British art historian. He was an expert on 17th-century British painting, and a leading authority on Anthony van Dyck in particular. He served in the Royal Household for 41 years from 1947, becoming Surveyor of The Queen's Pictures in 1972. He was the first Director of the Royal Collection from 1987. He served in both offices until his retirement in 1988.
John Trevor Hayes was a British art historian and museum director. He was an authority on the paintings of Thomas Gainsborough.
Francis Towne was a British watercolour painter of landscapes that range from the English Lake District to Naples and Rome. After a long period of obscurity, his work has been increasingly recognised from the early 20th century onwards.
Martin Postle is a British art historian who is deputy director for collections and publications at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, and a leading expert on the art of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He is a former curator at the Tate Gallery.
William Vaughan is a British art historian and has been Emeritus Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London since 2003.
Mark Louis Hallett is an English art historian specialising in the history of British art. He is the Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He has recently been announced as the next Märit Rausing Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is due to take up this post in April 2023.
David Hersh Solkin, FBA is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, which he joined in 1986. In 2007, Solkin became the institute's first dean and deputy director. Solkin is an expert in the art of J. M. W. Turner.
Christiana Joan Elizabeth Ruth Payne is a British art historian at Oxford Brookes University who is a specialist in genre painting and the depiction of the natural environment in British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Arthur Graham Reynolds,, was an English art historian who was Keeper of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was a leading expert on portrait miniatures and the art of John Constable, for whose works he wrote the catalogue raisonné. Reynolds's approach exemplified traditional scholarship and connoisseurship and he was fiercely opposed to the New Art History of the 1970s.
Hugh Graham Belsey, MBE, is a British art historian who is an authority on the art of Thomas Gainsborough. For 23 years he was the curator of Gainsborough's House in Sudbury. His most recent contribution to Gainsborough scholarship is his catalogue raisonné of Gainsborough's portraits published in February 2019 by the Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
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