Between God, Art and Mammon: Religious Painting as Public Spectacle in Britain, c.1800-1850

The project will aim to explore an important but little studied dimension of the history of British art: the dramatic proliferation of religious paintings in the public exhibition-spaces of London and other urban centres during the first half of the nineteenth century. The importance of this phenomenon has long been recognised by scholars, but - for reasons having largely to do with the secular bias of both the historical and art-historical discourses of British Romanticism - it has never been closely examined, nor have its implications been seriously explored. This neglect offers the opportunity for The Courtauld Institute and Tate jointly to oversee a research project that will not only shed welcome new light on a highly significant area of Tate's collection by enriching our knowledge of some of the era's most ambitious paintings, but also complicate our understanding of a host of key players - artists, art institutions, audiences, patrons, and art entrepreneurs - in an increasingly commercially-driven art world. The student will work toward the fulfillment of these larger ambitions by constructing a succession of six focused case studies, mainly of pictures that belong to Tate. These may include major religious paintings by JMW Turner, Benjamin West, Benjamin Robert Haydon, Joseph Severn, Francis Danby and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood - works which in every case were created for public display, either at the Royal Academy or in a variety of private commercial galleries.
The supervisory team are well qualified to direct the research. David Solkin is one of the world's leading scholars on British art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and has pioneered the study of London exhibition culture in this period with 'Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836', a major exhibition (and accompanying book) that he organised at The Courtauld Gallery in 2001; more recently he has published an important monograph on early nineteenth-century British genre painting, and curated 'Turner and the Masters', a major exhibition that opened at Tate Britain in 2009 before moving on to Paris and Madrid. Martin Myrone was involved in both these exhibition projects, and has published extensively on history painting, the Sublime, and other aspects of British Romantic art that are particularly pertinent to this project. The student would be able to take advantage of two complementary research cultures at Tate and The Courtauld. With its teaching staff of over twenty research-active art historians specialising in western art, and its international-renowned Research Forum, The Courtauld offers an exceptionally rich intellectual environment for its doctoral students, who are given the opportunity to participate in the largest and most diverse community of art history PhD's in the UK; for this student, the London Research Seminar in Early Modern Visual Culture (co-organised by The Courtauld and University College London) will be of particular relevance, but issues relating to religious art and to 19th-century exhibition culture arise in numerous other contexts as well. At Tate Britain, the student will have access to another active research community involved in a range of projects from collection catalogues to exhibitions and displays, and the chance to become involved in the programmes of the new Research Centre for British Romantic Art. Practical training will be provided by Tate in order to allow the student to access and work closely with the primary materials (paintings especially) held in the gallery and its Southwark store.
We foresee several important outcomes from this project. Primarily the PhD would enter the public domain through partial or complete publication. The case-studies will form the basis of new 'In-Focus' texts which will provide an in-depth documentation and analy

The research project is conceived as being embedded within Tate's curatorial culture, and the documentation, analysis and interpretation of a core of Tate works which lies at the heart of this research will contribute directly to their future presentation in the context of the national collection of British art. Through online publication and through exhibitions and displays the research will, then, reach a potentially extremely wide audience.

Early nineteenth-century British art is always displayed in depth at Tate, through displays and small-scale exhibitions which are free to visitors, and through larger-scale ticketed exhibitions. While this has in the past led to a particular focus on the works of Blake, Constable and, above all, Turner, there is a commitment to expanding the range of artists and historical themes represented in the displays and to engaging more dynamically with current thinking. Recent exhibition and display projects, including 'Turner and the Masters' (guest-curated by Prof. Solkin) have demonstrated the popular appetite for British art of the period, and the potential for renewing and reshaping public understanding of this vital period in art history. By reviewing art-historical attitudes to religious painting in the period, and providing new insights into individual works in the collection, the research will contribute strategically to this ongoing effort to rethink the art of the early nineteenth century in a way which is accessible to a wide audience. The documentation and analysis of those works will help shape the written interpretation of these and other related paintings in the future, and while the programme for the period that this award would cover remains in development, we would expect that the researcher would find opportunities to contribute more directly to individual display projects. In that regard, we can note that Dr Myrone is leading on the planning of a programme of 'in focus' displays, which are intended to showcase new research and ideas. With well over 1.5 million visitors to Tate Britain annually, any display or exhibition project is guaranteed to reach an exceptionally large audience. Tate's website (which includes the online collections catalogue, Tate Papers and an area dedicated to Research) attracts between 1.4 and 1.8 million unique visitors per month, expanding the potential audience for this research still further. By this variety of means, we can expect that the researcher's work would reach an extended audience, both directly and indirectly, and leave a legacy in the texts and documentation attached to a number of major works in the national collection.

Finally, a broader point about the timeliness of this project. At the deepest level, its formulation has been prompted by recent events in Britain and around the world that have reminded us - often in highly disturbing ways - of the motivating power of religious beliefs, and of how they have shaped a wide spectrum of current cultural practices. Thus a study of the role which Christianity played in high visual culture at a time when Britain assumed its character as a modern (and imperial) nation-state could hardly be more topical.