Dr Richard Stephens
Post-doctoral Researcher
Profile
Biography
Research Interests
Richard Stephens is a post-doctoral research assistant on the AHRC-funded project Court, Country, City: British Art 1660-1735, working on the London art market in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. He studied History of Art at Cambridge (BA, 1992) and was awarded a PhD on the Exeter-based landscape artist Francis Towne (1739-1816) at Birkbeck College, London, in 2006. In 2008-9 he was a curator of the exhibition Sir Joshua Reynolds: the Pursuit of Excellence at Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery, for which he researched Reynolds's early life and Westcountry links. Richard is interested in all aspects of painting in Britain during the long 18th century, but especially in landscape painting, in coach painting, and in provincial centres of art and the cultural impact of 'country ideology', which he studied in 2008 as a visiting scholar of the Yale Center for British Art.
Talks and Publications- 'Francis Towne's views of Rome: time- telling and ideology in provincial England', in British Art Journal (Winter 2010)
- Conference paper, 'Reynolds's visit to Paris in 1768', University of Plymouth conference Reynolds Re-appraised, 8-9 January 2010
- 'Francis Towne: 'rose in the wilderness' ', article for the 2010 catalogue of Lowell Libson Ltd (2009)
- Co-author of ed Sam Smiles, Sir Joshua Reynolds: the Pursuit of Excellence (2009)
- 'Four Letters by Sir Joshua Reynolds', in British Art Journal (Autumn 2009)
- Conference paper, 'John Baker RA and the 'melancholy degradation' of 18th century coach painting', Museum of London conference, Pomp and Power: Carriages as Status Symbols, 12-13 November 2009
- 'New Materials for Francis Towne's Biography', in The Burlington Magazine, CXXXVIII no.1121 (August 1996)
