Biographies of contributors
Dr Susan Foister is Deputy Director and Director of Collections at the National Gallery. She has been Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery since 1990. She is a joint author of Giotto to Dürer (Yale University Press, 1991) and Dürer to Veronese (Yale University Press, 1999), Making and Meaning: Holbein’s Ambassadors 1997 (National Gallery Publications) and Renaissance Underdrawings 2002 (National Gallery Publications), and author of Holbein and England (Yale University Press, 2004), nominated for the Berger Prize for British Art History.
She has been responsible for a number of exhibitions at the National Gallery on early Northern and British paintings, and was curator of the exhibition Holbein in England held in 2006 at Tate Britain. She was the National Gallery’s curator for the exhibition Renaissance Portraits, presented at the Prado and in London in 2008, and London curator of the Jan Gossaert exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum New York in 2010 and at the National Gallery in 2011.
Susanna Avery-Quash is Research Curator in the History of Collecting at the National Gallery, London. She is Editor of The Travel Notebooks of Sir Charles Eastlake (Walpole
Society, 2011) and co-author of Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World (2011). She has also written a number of articles on the history of taste and the Victorian art world.
Jonathan Marsden took up the appointment of Director of The Royal Collection on 1May 2010, having worked since 1996 as Deputy Surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art, with responsibility for the decorative arts in the Royal Collection. He is engaged on a catalogue of the sculpture in the Collection and has published widely on sculpture and the history of collecting. He was the lead curator for Victoria & Albert: Art and Love and contributing editor of the catalogue.
Lucy Whitaker is Assistant Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, and previously was Curator of Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford and Research Assistant at the National Gallery. She has researched and published works on both Italian paintings and drawings. She was the co-author of The Art of Italy, the exhibition of Italian Renaissance and Baroque drawings held in the Queen’s Galleries in London and Edinburgh and the exhibition The Northern Reniassance: Durer to Holbein. Lucy wrote the catalogue entries on the early paintings collected by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria for the exhibition. The frames in the Royal Collection have always interested her. With Jonathan Marsden she published a brief survey of frames in Apollo September 2002 and plans further research in this area of the collection.
Julian Fellowes
Julian Fellowes is well-known in many capacities, and has been the recipient of numerous awards. As an author, he has written a number of books, including the best-selling Snobs, published in 2004. As an actor he has performed on the stage, screen and television, including a role as the incorrigible Lord Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen. As a producer he has written scripts for films such as Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Prince and the Pauper; and finally, as a screenplay writer he is well-known for his scripts for Gosford Park, and most importantly for our purposes, for Young Victoria, released in 2009.
William Vaughan
William Vaughan is Professor Emeritus in History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely on Romanticism and British and German Art. His books include Romanticism and Art (1995) and British Painting, the Golden Age (1999).
In 2005 he organized the Samuel Palmer Bicentenary exhibition at the British Museum, and he is currently completing a study of the artist’s work for Yale University Press. He is
also researching the history of the artistic profession in London in the nineteenth century.
Klaus Weschenfelder was born in 1952, studied art history, prehistory and pedagogic in Munich, receiving his M.A. in 1977, and his doctorate in 1980. He has worked as a museum educator in Munich, trainee in Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, curator of Museum im Ritterhaus Offenburg, and director of Mittelrhein-Museum Koblenz. Since 2002 he has been director of Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg.
He has published in the field of museum education and cultural action, contributions on art history from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. He is Chair of ICOM Germany, and the treasurer of the Prince Albert Society Coburg.
Dr John Morrison is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Aberdeen. He has published widely on Scottish art and cultural history including Painting the Nation: Identity and Nationalism in Scottish Painting 1800-1920 (Edinburgh University Press, 2003), A Shared Legacy. Essays on Irish and Scottish Art (Ashgate Press, Aldershot, 2005, with F.
Cullen) and 'For Covenant and King: Charles II and the Politics of Imagery’, Festivals of the Defeated (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuettel, Germany, 2007) He is currently working on Painting the People. Land, Labour and Landscape, a book on images of rural labour in the nineteenth century.
Philip Ward-Jackson was until 2005 Conway Librarian at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is now retired. While still employed at the Courtauld he wrote his first volume for the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association’s National Recording Project. This was on Public Sculpture in the City of London. His second volume for this series on Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. His doctoral thesis (1970) was on J.-K. Huysmans as Art Critic. He has taken a special interest in immigrant and visiting sculptors from continental Europe active in Britain during the 19th century, and has published many articles on such figures as Carlo Marochetti, Henry de Triqueti and Albert Carrier-Belleuse. He is currently preparing an online catalogue of the work of Carlo Marochetti.
Vanessa Remington, Curator of Paintings at the Royal Collection, is a specialist in portrait miniatures and in 1996-7 co-curated an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, the Huntington Library, San Marino and The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace entitled Masterpieces in Little: Portrait Miniatures from the Collection of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Her catalogue raisonné of the Victorian Miniatures in the Royal Collection was published in November 2010.
Dr Geoffrey Tyack is a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford University (and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society). He is the author of Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London (Cambridge, 1992) and of several publications on the history of the English country house and on the architectural history of Oxford. He is the co-author of the revised Berkshire volume in the Pevsner Buildings of England series, just published by Yale University Press, and is the editor of the Georgian Group Journal.
Sophie Gordon
Sophie Gordon has been curator of the Royal Photograph Collection since 2005. Prior to this she was Associate Curator with the Alkazi Foundation, a private South Asian art and photography collection, for ten years. Sophie has a particular interest in 19th century photography from India, and has published widely in this area, focusing particularly on photography and Indian architecture. Sophie's most recent publications include The Heart of the Great Alone, on Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic photography; and a touring exhibition of photographs by Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron.
Oliver Davies
Oliver Davies studied at the Royal College of Music and afterwards with Ilona Kabos and Esther Fisher. He was formerly Piano Professor and Keeper of Portraits at the Royal College of Music. A particular interest in placing music in a historical context has led to a long series of surveys of the musical histories of great British houses and to reconstructions of concerts and period balls for, among others, Aldeburgh Festival, the BBC, the National Gallery and the V&A. He devised and performed a programme of music for the exhibition Prince Albert His Life and Work at the Royal College of Art in 1983.
Kathryn Jones is an Assistant Curator of decorative arts in the Royal Collection, working mainly with silver. For this exhibition she researched and wrote catalogue entries on the silver, porcelain, and jewellery, as well as compiling the two appendices in the catalogue on the Great Exhibition and the gifts exchanged between Victoria and Albert. Previous publications include pieces on silver and jewellery in the Royal Collection, and a book on Royal dining.
Charlotte Gere has written on Victorian jewellery, women as collectors, nineteenth-century design and interior decoration: Her most recent publication, co-authored with Judy Rudoe of the British Museum, is Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria, Mirror to the Age, The British Museum Press, 2010
Richard Foulkes has recently retired after 35 years in the employ of the University of Leicester, culminating in 4 years as head of English. His main research interest is the Victorian theatre including books on Church and stage in Victorian England, Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire and Lewis Carroll and the Victorian Stage Theatricals in a Quiet Life.
He was an Associate Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to which he contributed several entries. He completed the volume on Macready in the Pickering and Chatto Lives of Shakespearian Actors series published earlier this year. He is chairman of the Society for Theatre Research.
Dr Starcky started his career at the Cabinet des Dessins, at the Louvre. He was curator of the Northern Schools, for which he produced a catalogue in 1988 and several exhibitions, including Rembrandt (1988), Dürer (1991), and l’Art du paysage. He was appointed Director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Dijon in 1991, where he has overseen the creation of new exhibition galleries, and the development of a conservation and restoration program, and purchased many important works. The museum’s exhibition policy was greatly developed, with shows such as Matisse (1991). In 2003 Dr Starcky was appointed Deputy Director to the Directeur des musées de France (Deputy Director), with the special responsibility of organising an exhibition celebrating the entrance of Hungary, Poland and Romania into the European Community. He became in 2005 Director of the Musée National et du Domaine du Château de Compiègne where I initiated renovation works on the Palais, a conservation programme on paintings and works of art. He also set up a seasonal music festival and expanded the museum’s acquisition policy and exhibition programme.
During his study of History of Art at Basel university, Dr Wittwer got trained in ceramic and glass restoration. After university he was appointed as assistant curator at the Historic Museum Basel, mainly working for the Pauls Eisenbeiss Foundation, which is one of the worldwide leading collection of 18th century German porcelain. He wrote his dissertation about the large Meißen porcelain animal sculpture ordered by Augustus the Strong in the 1730s for the Japanese Palace in Dresden, published in 2004.
In 1999 Samuel Wittwer became curator of the ceramic collections at the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg, in charge with the historic archives of the Berlin porcelain manufactory and the State of Berlin porcelain collection, too. In 2008 he became Director of the Palaces and Collections with responsibility for the scientific department, overlooking 32 former Royal palaces in and around Berlin and Potsdam. His main interest is the culture of collecting in the past, as well as the history of porcelain display and he has published widely in this field.
