Profile

Biography

BA (Cantab), MA, PhD (London)

Mark Hallett is Professor of History of Art, Head of Department, and a member of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.

Mark’s research deals with British art between 1650 and 1850. His work in this area includes the books The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth, published by Yale University Press in 1999, and Hogarth, published by Phaidon Press in 2000. He has also co-edited and contributed to a book of essays entitled Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society, published in 2003. Mark has written a series of scholarly articles on subjects that include the London paintings of Antonio Canaletto, the medley prints of early eighteenth century England, the portraiture of Joshua Reynolds, and the role of press criticism at the Georgian Royal Academy.

Mark has also worked on a number of exhibition projects with Tate Britain. He was involved in the organisation of the 2001 exhibition James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, and was the associate curator of the 2005 exhibition Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity. He co-curated the international exhibition of the work of William Hogarth, which opened at the Louvre in October 2006, travelled to Tate Britain in February 2007, and then moved to the Caixa Forum in Barcelona in May 2007. He and his co-curator, Christine Riding, wrote the scholarly catalogue that accompanied this exhibition (Hogarth, Tate Publishing, 2006).

More recently, Mark has been awarded a £477,000 AHRC grant for a collaborative project he has developed with art-historians at Tate Britain on the history of British art between the Restoration and the early eighteenth century. 

Departmental roles

• Head of Department
  
• Senior Management Team
  
• Departmental Research Committee
  
• Graduate Studies Committee
  

University roles

• University Council
  
• University International Steering Group
  

Research

Overview

• The visual culture of Restoration Britain
  
• Graphic Satire in Georgian England
  
• Portraiture in Britain 1660-1730
  
• British exhibition culture 1760-1851
  
• William Hogarth
  
• Joshua Reynolds 

Mark’s research focuses on British painting, sculpture and printmaking between the middle of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. He is also becoming increasingly interested in questions of art-historical method, and in the interpretative possibilities opened up by close readings of the art object.

Current projects

Mark is currently completing a book on the art and career of Sir Joshua Reynolds, for which he has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship (2003-2004) and a Mellon Senior Fellowship (2006-2007). Joshua Reynolds: Portraiture in Action, which is contracted to Yale University Press and is due to be published in 2012, will offer a detailed analysis of the artist’s remarkable body of work, focusing in particular on his experiments in portraiture and on his engagement with a new metropolitan exhibition culture.

He is also the principal investigator on the three-year AHRC-funded project 'Court, Country, City: British Art 1660-1735' which was launched in October 2009. This project, which has been developed with colleagues at Tate Britain, is designed to lead to an ambitious new scholarly interpretation of British art in this period. ‘Court, Country, City’ has already featured a major conference Revisiting British Art 1660-1735, held at York in May 2010, and generated a temporary display of works that is currently on show at Tate Britain The project will continue to communicate research in this area through an innovative mixture of exhibitions, conferences, scholarly publications, databases and online displays. The research that Mark himself is pursuing as part of this project focuses initially on the work and career of one of the leading portraitists of the period, Sir Godfrey Kneller.

Mark is also the co-curator of two forthcoming exhibitions. The first, William Etty: Art and Controversy, which will showcase the works of one of the leading British artists of the early nineteenth century, will open in York Art Gallery in June 2010. The second, which will focus on the paintings of Joshua Reynolds at the Wallace Collection, and mark the end of an important conversation project on the artist’s works in the gallery, is due to be held in 2014.

Research group(s)

• British Art
  
• Sculpture Studies
• Renaissance and Baroque Cluster
• Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies

Conferences Organised

Mark has convened or co-convened seven conferences, including a trio of day-conferences at the University of York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies:

• Revisiting British Art 1660-1735

  In May 2010 Mark convened and participated in this conference, held at the University of York's Humanities Research Centre. This conference was organised as part of the AHRC-supported York/Tate Britain research project, 'Court, Country, City: British Art 1660-1735'

• Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in Britain, 1768-1848

  In November 2008 Mark co-convened and participated in this conference, held at the University of York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. The conference was supported by a Mellon Grant.

• Empire and Landscape

  Over the Spring and Summer of 2007 Mark helped convene a successful series of four one-day AHRC research workshops on the theme of Empire and Landscape in the long nineteenth century.

• Hogarth: New Perspectives (2007)

• Making Faces: New Approaches to Georgian Portraiture (2006)

  In conjunction with Dr Lucy Peltz of the National Portrait Gallery. Mark convened this two-day conference held at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and at Beningbrough Hall, Yorkshire on 17-18 November 2006. The conference was supported by a Mellon Grant.

• The Englishness of English Art: Painting, Aesthetics and Nationhood 1760-1824 (2002) 
• Exhibition: Art, Display and the Eighteenth Century (2001) 
• Representing Masculinities (1998)

Grants

• 2009-2012: ‘Court, Country, City: British art 1660-1735’, AHRC Major Research Grant (standard scheme), (including two PhD studentships). 
  
• 2006-7: ‘Empire and Landscape in the Long Eighteenth Century’, AHRC Landscape and Environment Project, Research Workshop Series.
  
• 2006-7" ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds: Portraiture and Display in Eighteenth Century England’, Mellon Senior Fellowship.
  
• 2003- 2004: ‘The Art of Sir Joshua Reynolds’, The Leverhulme Trust.
  
• 2002: ‘Funding for illustrations to Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society’, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Collaborators

• Professor Nigel Llewellyn (Tate Britain) 
• Dr Martin Myrone (Tate Britain) 
• Dr Sarah Monks (UEA) 
• Dr Christoph Vogtherr (Wallace Collection) 
• Dr Sarah Burnage (York Art Gallery) 
• Laura Turner (York Art Gallery)
  

Supervision

• Joy Bailey, 'Thomas Gainsborough and the Imagery of Passage' (MA by Research)
• Beatrice Bertram, ‘William Etty and the Royal Academy’ (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award). Co-supervised with Laura Turner, York Art Gallery
• Caitlin Blackwell, 'John Collet (ca. 1725-1780) and Pictorial Satire in England, 1760-1780'
• Caroline Good, 'The Making of a National Art History: British writers on art and the narratives of nation 1660-1735' (part of the AHRC research project: 'Court, Country, City: British Art 1660-1735.') Co-supervised with Dr Martin Myrone, Tate Britain
• Samantha Hancock, 'A new theatre of prospects: Eighteenth-century British Painters and Artistic Mobility'
• Rosanna Harrison, 'George Wilson and the Engraved Fan Leaf Design, 1790-1800' (MA by Research)
• Lucinda Lax, ''Telling the Eye a Moral Story': Edward Penny, Genre Painting and the Royal Academy'
• Arlene Leis, 'Sarah Sophia Banks: femininity, sociability and the practice of collecting in late eighteenth-century England'
• Peter Moore, 'Graphic Art and Empire: British Visual Culture in the Atlantic World, 1660-1735' (part of the AHRC research project: 'Court, Country, City: British Art 1660-1735.') Co-supervised with Professor Nigel Llewellyn, Tate Britain
• Jaqueline Riding, 'Joseph Highmore (1692-1780)’
• Cicely Robinson, 'The National Gallery of Naval Art at Greenwich' (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award). Co-supervised with Dr Richard Johns, National Maritime Museum

• Anne-Marie Akhurst, 'Architecture and Philanthropy: Building Hospitals in Eighteenth-Century York' (part-time, co-supervised), PhD thesis, awarded 2009.
  
• Sarah Burnage, 'The Works of John Bacon RA (1769-1799)', PhD thesis, awarded 2007.
  
• Richard Johns, 'Sir James Thornhill and Decorative History Painting in England', PhD thesis, awarded 2004.
  
• Helen Pierce, 'Unseemly Pictures: Political Graphic Satire in England, c.1600-c.1650' (co-supervised), PhD thesis, awarded 2004.
  
• Ruth Stewart, 'Gavin Hamilton and the Classical Ideal, 1756-1798: Painting and Antiquity in Late Eighteenth-Century Rome' (co-supervised), PhD thesis, awarded 2004.
  
• Rosie Dias, 'John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and the Promotion of a National Aesthetic', PhD thesis, awarded 2003.
  
• Corita Myerscough, 'The Fishers of York: A Provincial Sculpture Workshop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries', DPhil thesis, awarded 1998.
  

Publications

Selected publications

Books

• William Etty: Art and Controversy, ed. with Sarah Burnage and Laura Turner, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011
• Mark Hallett and Christine Riding, Hogarth, Tate Publishing, 2006
• Eighteenth Century York: Culture, Space and Society, ed. with Jane Rendall, Borthwick Institute, 2003
• Hogarth, Phaidon Press, 2000
• The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth, Yale University Press, 1999 

• 'A monument to intimacy: Joshua Reynolds's The Marlborough Family', in Art History, Vol.31, no. 5, 2008
• 'Reynolds, Celebrity and the Exhibition Space', and numerous catalogue entries, in Martin Postle (ed) Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, Tate Publishing, 2005
• 'Reading the Walls: Pictorial Dialogue at the British Royal Academy', in Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 4 (2004)
• 'From Out of the Shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Captain Robert Orme', in Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2004
• 'Manly Satire: William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress' in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal (eds.), The Other Hogarth: The Aesthetics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 2001.
• 'James Gillray and the Language of Graphic Satire', in Richard Godfrey (ed.) Gillray and the Art of Caricature, Tate Gallery Publications, 2001.
• 'The Business of Criticism: the Press and the Royal Academy Exhibition in Eighteenth-Century London' in David Solkin (ed.) Art on the line: the Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836, Yale University Press, 2001.
• 'The view across the City: William Hogarth and the visual culture of eighteenth-century London' in David Bindman, Frederic Ogee and Peter Wagner (eds.), Hogarth: Representing Nature's Machines, Manchester University Press, 2001.
• 'Painting: Exhibitions, Audiences, Critics, 1780-1830', in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, edited by Iain McCalman, Oxford Unversity Press, 1999
• 'Framing the Modern City: Canaletto's Images of London', in Michael Liversidge and Jane Farrington (eds.), Canaletto and England, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1993
• 'The Medley Print in Early Eighteenth-Century London', in Art History, Vol 20, no. 2, June 1997

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Painting in Britain 1730-1840
• Art and the City: Representing Georgian London and York
• Making Faces: Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England
• Victorian Art
• British Art since the Second World War
  

Postgraduate

• Sir Joshua Reynolds: Portraiture in Action
  
• William Hogarth and the London Art World
  

External activities

Memberships

• Mark will be a Visiting Professor at Yale University  in 2011. 
• Visual Culture in Britain
  Member of the Advisory Board
  
• Immediations
  Editorial Advisory Board
• Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
  Member of the Advisory Council, 2008- 
• Courtauld Institute of Art’s Research Forum
  Member of the International Advisory Panel, 2008-

• William Etty: Art and Controversy
  To be held at the York Art Gallery, 2011-12. Co-curator. 
  
• Hogarth
  Musée du Louvre, Tate Britain and Caixa Forum, Barcelona 2006-7. Co-curator. This exhibition, which was five years in the planning, and  showcased nearly two hundred of the artist’s works, was extraordinarily successful: it was one of the Louvre’s most popular autumn exhibitions, attracting more than 200,000 visitors, and made an enormous impact when shown in London, attracting more than 185,000 visitors over a relatively short run, and garnering almost universal praise in the daily and scholarly press: ‘tremendous’ (The Guardian), ‘completely engaging’ (The Times); ‘vivid, energetic, and enormously enjoyable’ (The Financial Times); ‘a triumph’ (The Daily Telegraph). It has also been highly praised by scholarly reviewers. In the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Dr Kate Retford wrote that ‘this was a great exhibition... Professor Mark Hallett and Christine Riding put together a truly impressive show that was both visually appealing and packed with a wealth of information and insight.’ 
• Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity
  Ferrara Arte and Tate Britain, 2005. Associate curator. The exhibition was the biggest and most important display of Reynolds’s work for nearly twenty years, and promoted an original interpretation of his works to both a scholarly audience and to a much wider, European, public. 
• James Gillray: The Art of Caricature
  Tate Britain, 2001. Assistant co-curator,  The exhibition was widely praised by academic and journalistic critics, and was voted an ‘Exhibition of the Year’ by the Guardian.
  

Editorial duties

Editorial and Refereeing Duties

• In 2009, Mark was invited by the Dean of the Humanities at Bristol, Professor Charles Martindale, to carry out an extensive ‘critical friend’ review of their History of Art department.

External Examining

• Mark has acted as an external examiner for PhDs at the Courtauld Institute of Art, UCL and Oxford, and at the European University Institute in Florence.
  

Invited talks and conferences

• Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance
  In November 2010, Mark acted as an end-of-conference respondent at this conference, held at the National Portrait Gallery and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British art.
• ‘Attracting the Public Eye: Sir Joshua Reynolds and the origins of British exhibition culture’
  Inaugural Lecture, University of York, November 2009; Mark gave an expanded version of this lecture at the conference Reynolds Reappraised, held at the University of Plymouth in January 2010.
• ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds and the group portrait: The Marlborough Family, 1777-9’
  Lecture given at the University of Edinburgh, 2007. Mark also gave this lecture at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, (January 2008), and as a Frank Davis Lecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, November 2008
• 'Hogarth and Hogarth Scholarship'
  Tate Britain, 2007, talk given as part of Hogarth: New Approaches conference.‘Hogarth and the Theatre of Art’, Tate Britain, 2007
• 'Curating Hogarth in London'
  University of Paris, 2006, lecture given as part of William Hogarth and Europe conference.‘Hogarth: the Exhibition’, Musee du Louvre, 2006
• 'Reynolds, Celebrity and Solitude'
  Lecture given to the Restoration to Reform Seminar, University of Cambridge, 2006 (also given at the University of Essex, 2007)
• 'Reynolds and the Allegorical Portrait'
  Lecture given to the Romantic Realignments seminar, University of Oxford, 2006
• 'Reynolds, Celebrity and Solitude'
  Lecture given at Tate Britain as part of a one-day conference accompanying the exhibition Joshua Reynolds: the Creation of Celebrity, 2005
• 'Reynolds’ Heroic Portraiture'
  Lecture given at Tate Britain to accompany the exhibition Joshua Reynolds: the Creation of Celebrity, 2005
• 'Hogarth, Art and Music'
  Ferens Fine Art lecture, University of Hull, 2005
• 'Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Beauties of the Present Age'
  Delivered at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians, Bristol, 2005
• 'Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Marquis of Granby'
  Ringling Museum of the Fine Arts, U.S.A, 2004
• 'Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Captain Robert Orme'
  Northwestern University, U.S.A, 2004
• 'Reynolds’s portraits of aristocratic women’
  Plenary lecture at the three-day Women and the Country House Conference, University of York, 2004
• 'Sir Joshua Reynolds, War and the Portrayal of the British Soldier in mid-eighteenth-century England'
  Paper delivered at the 1753 symposium held at the British Museum, 2003
• 'Painting and Display at the Eighteenth Century Royal Academy Exhibitions'
  Paper delivered at Academies of Art in England and France, c.1780-1830 symposium, University of Oxford, 2002.
• 'James Gillray and the Aesthetics of Satire'
  Paper delivered at a one-day conference at the European University Institute, Florence, 2001.
• 'James Gillray and the Satiric Tradition'
  Lecture given at Tate Britain to accompany the exhibition James Gillray: the Art of Caricature, 2001
• 'Spectacle: Concept and Practice'
  Paper delivered as part of a two-day conference ‘The Culture of Spectacle’ held at the European University Institute, Florence, 1999
• 'Pamela on Display'
  Paper delivered at a two-day conference The Print in 18th Century Britain, the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 1998
• 'Manly Satire: William Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress'
  Paper delivered at Hogarth and his Times: An International Symposium, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California, 1998
• ‘William Hogarth and Graphic satire in Eighteenth-Century London'
  Lecture delivered at the Tate Gallery, London, 1997
• 'Hogarth and the Visual Culture of Eighteenth-Century London'
  Paper delivered at the Hogarth Tercentenary Conference, William Hogarth and his Times, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 1997
• ‘Satire, Spectatorship and Space'
  Paper delivered at the Hogarth Tercentenary Symposium, U.C.L.A., Los Angeles, California, 1997