Professor Kate Retford

Overview

Biography

Kate Retford joined the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck in 2003, having previously held a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and taught at the University of Warwick and Richmond, the American International University in London. She researches eighteenth-century British art, particularly the portraiture of the period, issues of gender, and the country house art collection. 

Kate's recent monograph, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain, was published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, by Yale University Press, in October 2017. The Conversation Piece explores the emergence of a new type of small group portrait in eighteenth-century Britain, in which diminutive sitters, engaged in activities such as taking tea or playing cards, are seen seated in genteel interiors or enjoying the air in their landscape gardens. The first monograph on this subject for decades, it examines the reasons for the development of this innovative art form, unpicks the resonances of that evocative word 'conversation', analyses the nature and function of those carefully described settings, and explores the full range of relationships encompassed in these groups.

Kate has been involved in a number of projects about British houses and art collections. In 2013, she co-edited a collection of essays exploring the relationship between eighteenth-century portraiture and the English country house, with Professor Gill Perry, Dr Jordan Vibert and Hannah Lyons, entitled Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century (Manchester University Press). In 2015, she co-organised a major conference entitled 'Animating the Eighteenth-Century Country House', a collaboration between Birkbeck, the National Gallery, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. This was followed by a related event the following year, co-organised by the same institutions: 'Animating the Georgian London Town House'. This formed the basis of a volume of essays, co-edited by Kate and Susanna Avery-Quash, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019: The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display. Most recently, Kate recorded a podcast on 'Marketing the British Country House as Home', and contributed an essay to the Paul Mellon Centre's online publication, Art & the British Country House.

Kate is co-organiser of the Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group, with Luisa Cale and Emily Senior from English and Humanities, and Ann Lewis from Cultures and Languages.

Highlights

• '"A Family Home and not a Museum": Living with the Country House Art Collection', Art and the Country House, Paul Mellon Centre online publication (2020).

  British Art Talks podcast, recorded for the Paul Mellon Centre in 2020: '"Things in their Natural Surroundings?": Marketing the British Country House as Home'

• Review of Amelia Rauser's The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s, in the London Review of Books, 3 December 2020

Administrative responsibilities

• MA History of Art Programme Director
• Chair of the MA sub-board, History of Art Department
• Chair of MA Mitigating Circumstances Committee

Research

Research interests

• eighteenth-century British portraiture
• the domestic sphere
• the British country house
• gender in the eighteenth century
• display of art collections
• the use of visual evidence in history and issues of interdisciplinarity

Research overview

Kate Retford has published widely on eighteenth-century British art, particularly on the portraiture of the period and the country house art collection. Her work includes The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 2006), Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century, co-edited with Gill Perry et al. (Manchester University Press, 2013) and The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

Her most recent monograph, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain, was published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2017, winning a Historians of British Art book award and shortlisted for the 2018 Apollo Book of the Year award. She is currently working on a book about print rooms in eighteenth-century country houses, and developing a project looking at the presentation of the country house as family home.

Kate is Co-Investigator on a new AHRC-funded research project, ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collections’, led by Principal Investigator Professor Gordon McMullan at King's College, London. The project seeks to establish a new understanding of the relationship of Shakespeare and the royal family from 1714 to the present by way of the first thorough investigation of the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collections. It explores the mutually sustaining and legitimating nature of the development of both Shakespeare and the royal family as hegemonic cultural phenomena, asking the twin questions: what has Shakespeare done for the royals, and what have the royals done for Shakespeare?

Research Centres and Institutes

• Co-Organiser, Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research on eighteenth-century portraiture, gender, or the British country house.

I currently supervise: 

- Hannah Lyons, ‘Making an impression: British women printmakers in the Long Eighteenth Century’, AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Student, co-supervised with Dr. Sarah Grant at the V&A

- Juliet Learmouth, ‘Women and the West End Town House: Agency and Self-fashioning in Eighteenth-Century London’

- Anna Jamieson, ‘Other bodies: The spectacle of female madness’, co-supervised with Dr. Suzannah Biernoff

Teaching

Teaching modules

• Art and Society in the Nineteenth Century (AHVM010S5)
• Dissertation MA History of Art (AHVM019D7)
• English Portraiture in the Long Eighteenth Century (AHVM063S7)
• Frameworks: Histories and Theories of Art, Architecture, Photography (ARVC247S7)
• The Country House Experience (ARVC252S7)

Publications