Dr Richard Johns
Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

BA (York), MA (Courtauld Institute of Art), PhD (York)

Richard Johns is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art.  He has co-curated exhibitions and published widely on various aspects of British art from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on the long eighteenth century. He joined the department in 2013, having previously worked as a curator of art at the National Maritime Museum, London.

Richard leads the British Art research cluster in the department. He is a member of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.

Departmental roles

Director, York Art History Collaborations (YAHCs)

Research

Overview

• British art c.1650-1850
• Modern British art
• Ceramics

One focus of Richard’s research has been the often-overlooked field of grand-scale decorative history painting, a form of site-specific elite visual culture that flourished in England for half a century or more following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. His work in this area combines a close reading of specific painted interiors with a fresh look at the interpretive and methodological challenges that such schemes pose for modern scholars. He is currently completing a book-length study of the work of the English artist James Thornhill (1675-1734).

Current and divergent research interests include the history of Wedgwood ceramics, from the mid-1700s to the present (as an example of the very long eighteenth century); and the global connections and affiliations of modern British art, including the work of Bridget Riley.

As a curator at the National Maritime Museum from 2008 to 2013, Richard researched many aspects of marine painting from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, and co-curated the major touring exhibition Turner and the Sea (2013-14). The principal published outcome of this research was a full-length catalogue, co-edited with Christine Riding. Themes introduced by the exhibition are explored further in a separate essay ‘From the Nore: Turner at the Mouth of the Thames’ (2016).

Other recent research includes an essay on the interventionist role of Netherlandish artists within the milieu of the Painter-Stainers’ Company in London during the closing decades of the seventeenth century (2009); an exhibition and book on caricature and the Royal Navy around 1800, written with the naval historian James Davey (2012); and the exhibition Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud, co-curated with Suzanne Fagence Cooper (York Art Gallery and Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 2019). In 2015 he co-ordinated a series of short responses to the proposition ‘There’s no such thing as British art’ for the journal British Art Studies.

Research group(s)

Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies

British Art

Available PhD research projects

Richard welcomes enquiries from potential PhD candidates wishing to undertake advanced research in the field of British art c.1650-1850.

Supervision

Completed research degrees include:

Peter Wells, ‘Greenville Collins and Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot, 1693’ (MA by Research awarded December 2019)

Madeleine Pelling, ‘The Collection of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland’ (PhD awarded December 2018)

Cicely Robinson, ‘The National Gallery of Naval Art’, AHRC CDA co-supervised with Prof. Mark Hallett, University of York (PhD awarded December 2013)

Sophie Carney, ‘The Queen’s House in Greenwich, 1603–69’, AHRC CDA co-supervised with Prof. Clare McManus, Roehampton University (PhD awarded December 2012)

Publications

Selected publications

• ‘Riley in Cairo: British Art and Egypt in the 1980s’, Art History special issue on British Art and the Global, ed. I. Hart and D. Price (forthcoming 2022).
• ‘Re-covering the early eighteenth-century chapel: James Thornhill's Resurrectio vestita’ in The Reredos of All Souls College Oxford, ed. P. Horden (London, Paul Holberton, 2019), 218-35.
• Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud, co-edited with Suzanne Fagence Cooper (London, Paul Holberton, 2019), pp. 120.
• ‘1799: Unfinished Monkey Business’, ‘1802: Head Shots’, ‘1809: Turner's Failure’ in The Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition: a Chronicle, 1769-2018, ed. M. Hallett, S.V. Turner and J. Feather (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018).
• ‘From the Nore: Turner at the Mouth of the Thames’ in Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, ed. S. Padiyar, P. Shaw and P. Simpson (London: Routledge, 2016), 87-101.
• ‘Antonio Verrio and the Triumph of Painting at the Restoration Court’ in Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660-1735, ed. M. Hallett, N. Llewellyn and M. Myrone (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2016), 153-76.
• ‘After Van de Velde’ in Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting, ed. E. Hughes (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2016), 17-39.
• Turner and the Sea, co-authored and edited with Christine Riding (London: Thames and Hudson, 2013); translated by Katrin Boskamp-Priever as Turner und das Meer (Leipzig: E.A. Seeman, 2013), pp. 288.
• ‘“Those wilder sorts of Painting”: The Painted Interior in the Age of Antonio Verrio’ in A Companion to British Art 1600 to the Present, ed. D. Arnold and D. Peters Corbett (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 79-104.
• Broadsides: Caricature and the Navy 1756-1815, co-authored with James Davey (Basingstoke: Seaforth for the National Maritime Museum, 2012), pp. 64.
• ‘Framing Robert Aggas: the Painter-Stainers’ Company and the “English School of Painters”’, Art History 31:3 (June 2008), 322-41.

See the York Research Database for a longer list.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Painting in Eighteenth-century Britain

Cut / Bite / Stamp: the power of print in the eighteenth-century

Object in Focus: Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle

Postgraduate

JMW Turner (MA)

Landscape Painting in Britain c.1750-1850 (MA)

Eighteenth Century Studies MA Core Course (contributor)

External activities

Editorial duties

Advisory duties

2011-19: Painted Hall Conservation Advisory Panel, Greenwich Foundation

2010-17: Editorial Advisory Board, Art History

2010-11: External Review Board, Immediations (the postgraduate journal of the Courtauld Institute)

External Examining

BA in History of Art (Part I), University of Cambridge, 2019-22

MA in History of Art, UCL, 2019-22

MA in History of Art, University of Sussex, 2016-19

BA in History of Art, Oxford Brookes University, 2015-18

Exhibitions

Ruskin Turner and the Storm Cloud (co-curated with Suzanne Fagence Cooper)
York Art Gallery, 29 March-23 June 2019
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendall, 11 July-5 October 2019

Turner and the Sea (co-curated with Christine Riding)
National Maritime Museum, London: 21 November 2013-21 April 2014
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA: 4 June-1 September 2014

Broadsides: caricature and the navy 1756-1815 (co-curated with James Davey)
National Maritime Museum, London: 25 October 2012-16 April 2013

Invited talks and conferences

‘Riley in Cairo: British Art and Egypt since the 1980s’, British Art and the Global, University of California, Berkeley, CA, conference, 17-18 September 2018

‘James Thornhill at All Souls’, All Souls Reredos Symposium, All Souls College, Oxford, 13 September 2018

‘Fish and Ships: JMW Turner at the Edge of England’, Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, public lecture, 11 July 2018

‘On a Model Whale Boat’, Turner and the Whale, Hull Maritime Museum, symposium, 28 October 2017

‘“It consumes a man as a moth does a garment”: Henry Fuseli’s Lady Macbeth seizing the daggers’, Bloody, Bold and Resolute: Macbeth Day (part of the York International Shakespeare Festival 2017), University of York, 20 May 2017

‘The Thin (Red) Line between Architecture and Painting’, Revisiting Murals in Britain 1600-1750, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, symposium co-organised with Brett Dolman and Lydia Hamlett, 16 September 2016

‘The Trials of Josiah Wedgwood’, Making Britain Modern, conference, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2 July 2016

Remapping the Government Art Collection, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, symposium organised in collaboration with the GAC, 17 June 2016

‘James Thornhill in France and the Netherlands’, Cultural Transfers: British Art and the Continent, Friedrich-Alexander Universität, Erlangan, symposium, 30-31 October 2015

‘Dead British Artists’, Mourning and Morbidity: Death in British Art, University of York, symposium, 10 March 2015

‘Mind the Step: The Art of the Country House Staircase’, Animating the Eighteenth-Century Country House, National Gallery, London, conference, 5-6 March 2015