Mark Hallett (historian)

Professor Mark Hallett (born 11 March 1965)^[1] is an art historian specialising in the history of British art. He is currently Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.^[2]

Career

Professor Hallett moved to the Paul Mellon Centre in October 2012, after having spent eighteen years teaching at the University of York, where he was appointed a Professor in 2006. He was Head of the History of Art department at York between 2007 and 2012, and a member of the University’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.^[3] He took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University, graduating in 1986, and studied for a master's degree (1989) and a PhD (1996) at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Yale University in 1990–91.

Hallett is best known for his writings on 18th century graphic satire and on Georgian portraiture, and on the artists William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. He has also published essays on the new exhibition culture of Georgian London and about the visual imagery of London and York in the 18th century, and co-edited a catalogue on the work of the early-nineteenth-century painter William Etty. Hallett has also been involved in curating a number of major exhibitions, including James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (Tate Britain, 2001), Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (Tate Britain, 2005) Hogarth (Tate Britain, 2007) and William Etty: Art and Controversy (York Art Gallery, 2011). Working with colleagues from Tate Britain, he led the major AHRC research project Court, Country, City: British Art 1660–1735.

Publications

Books:

• Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1769-1848, ed. with Sarah Monks and John Barrell, Ashgate, 2013
• Faces in a Library: ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Streatham Worthies’ (The Watson Gordon Lecture 2011), National Galleries of Scotland, 2012
• William Etty: Art and Controversy, ed. with Sarah Burnage and Laura Turner, Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011
• Mark Hallett and Christine Riding, Hogarth, Tate Publishing, 2007
• 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

Articles and Essays:

• '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 University 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

References