AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) Studentship - John Flaxman: Art, Design and the Intermedial Body

John Flaxman was one of only a handful of British artists of the early nineteenth century to achieve a wide international reputation. His prolific career as a sculptor and designer is distinguished by its material virtuosity, moving with apparent ease across different media and scales. He was among the first students to enrol at the Royal Academy Schools, and in 1810 was appointed the Academy’s first Professor of Sculpture.

Scholarly convention and curatorial practice tend to differentiate and divide Flaxman’s work according to media-specific categories. This project seeks to explore the material and visual richness of the artist’s work in two and three dimensions, in (or for) stone, metal, ceramics and on paper. The aim is not to produce an all-encompassing survey of Flaxman’s career, but to identify conceptual links and breaks across media and between places; to explore the imperial and international connections of the artist’s work; and examine ways in which that work contributed to a reframing of the body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The project has been devised to give the student room to shape the research according to their academic interests and professional goals, with the support and advice of the supervisory team, and prompted by a series of broad research questions: How does Flaxman’s conception of the body correlate from one medium to another? How did Flaxman’s practice shape, and how was it shaped by, the culture and institutional practices of the Royal Academy? In what ways do Flaxman’s bodies respond to, affirm, or challenge hegemonic constructions of race, class and gender? Research may focus on one or more of the following concepts: imperial bodies, infernal bodies and heavenly bodies, queer bodies, radical bodies, injured bodies and bodily resistance.

The successful candidate will be a promising art historian with a keen awareness of current developments in the discipline, and will be able to demonstrate a critical and creative approach to the subject. Their work will contribute to the development of Flaxman 200, a research and exhibition project proposed by York Art Gallery for 2026 (the bicentenary of the York-born artist’s death).

The project will be jointly supervised by Dr Beatrice Bertram (York Art Gallery) and Dr Richard Johns (University of York), with Prof. Jason Edwards (University of York) as chair of the candidate’s Thesis Advisory Panel.