Professor Kate Retford
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Overview
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 most 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. She has recently published a short piece summarising some of this research on the conversation piece on the DIGIT.EN.S website here.
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. She is now on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, working on her current book project on print rooms in eighteenth-century country houses.
Kate is Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project, 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collection'. The team has just launched the open access, online exhibition arising from the project: 'Making History: Shakespeare and the Royal Family'.
Highlights
Kate is now on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, in 2021-22, to work on a new book project: 'Cutting and Pasting: Making Print Rooms in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1840'. You can read more about this research on the Leverhulme's website here.
Kate is Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded project, 'Shakespeare in the Royal Collection'. The team has now launched the open access, online exhibition arising from the project: 'Making History: Shakespeare and the Royal Family'. You can read reviews from the Guardian, and the Telegraph, online.
My entry on the conversation piece has just been published on The Digital Encyclopaedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century website: https://www.digitens.org/en/notices/conversation-piece.html
'"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'
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Research
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 on a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on her new book project about print rooms in eighteenth-century country houses.
Kate is Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded research project, ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’, led by Principal Investigator Professor Gordon McMullan at King's College, London. The team launched their online exhibition in July 2021: 'Making History: Shakespeare and the Royal Family'.
Research Centres and Institutes
- Co-Organiser, Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group
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Supervision and teaching
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.
Current doctoral researchers
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JAMES STEWART
Doctoral alumni
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HANNAH LYONS
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ANNA JAMIESON
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JULIET LEARMOUTH
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EMMA DOWLEY
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KIRSTEN TAMBLING
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THOM BRAUN
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Publications
Publications
Article
- Retford, Kate (2020) ‘A family home and not … a museum’: living with the Country House Art Collection. Art and the Country House
- Retford, Kate (2016) Philippe Ariès’s ‘discovery of childhood’: imagery and historical evidence. Continuity and Change 31 (3), pp. 391-418. ISSN 0268-4160.
- Retford, Kate (2014) ‘The small Domestic & conversation style’: David Allan and Scottish portraiture in the Late Eighteenth Century. Visual Culture in Britain 15 (1), pp. 1-27. ISSN 1471-4787.
- Retford, Kate (2010) The evidence of the conversation piece: Thomas Bardwell's The Broke and Bowes Families (1740). Cultural and Social History 7 (4), pp. 493-510. ISSN 1478-0038.
- Retford, Kate (2010) A death in the family: posthumous portraiture in eighteenth-century England. Art History 33 (1), pp. 74-97. ISSN 0141-6790.
- Retford, Kate (2007) From the interior to interiority: the conversation piece in Georgian England. Journal of Design History 20 (4), pp. 291-307. ISSN 1741-7279.
- Retford, Kate (2004) Gender and the marital portrait in Eighteenth-Century England: ‘A Sort of Sex in Souls’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1), pp. 99-120. ISSN 17540194.
- Retford, Kate (2003) Sensibility and genealogy in the Eighteenth-Century family portrait: the collection at Kedleston Hall. The Historical Journal 46 (3), pp. 533-560. ISSN 0018-246X.
- Retford, Kate (2003) Reynolds's portrait of Mrs Theresa Parker: a case study in context. The British Art Journal 4 (3), pp. 80-86. ISSN 1467-2006.
- Retford, Kate Conversation piece. The Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century ISSN 2803-2845.
- Retford, Kate Philippe Ariès’s ‘Discovery of Childhood’: imagery and historical evidence. Continuity and Change 31 (3), pp. 391-418. ISSN 0268-4160.
Book
- Retford, Kate and Avery-Quash, S. (2019) The Georgian London town house: building, collecting and display. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781501337314.
- Retford, Kate (2017) The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in 18th-Century Britain. Yale Books. ISBN 9780300194807.
- Retford, Kate Retford, Kate, ed. (2013) Placing faces: the portrait and the English country house in the long Eighteenth Century. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719090394.
- Ackroyd, M. and Brockliss, L. and Moss, M. and Retford, Kate and Stevenson, J., eds. (2007) Advancing with the army: medicine, the professions and social mobility in the British Isles 1790-1850. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199267064.
- Retford, Kate (2006) The art of domestic life: family portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England. Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. ISBN 9780300110012.
Book Review
- Retford, Kate (2014) Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain.
- Retford, Kate (2013) "Johan Zoffany: 1733-1810" by Mary Webster.
Book Section
- Retford, Kate (2013) The topography of the conversation piece: a walk around Wanstead. In: Retford, Kate (ed.) Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 9780719090394.
- Retford, Kate (2013) "The Crown and Glory of a Woman": female chastity in Eighteenth‐Century British art. In: Arnold, D. and Peters Corbett, D. (eds.) A Companion to British Art: 1600 to the Present. Wiley. pp. 473-501. ISBN 9781405136297.
- Retford, Kate (2011) "Peculiarly happy at taking likenesses": Zoffany & British portraiture. In: Postle, M. (ed.) Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed. Yale, U.S.: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300176049.
- Retford, Kate (2007) Patrilineal portraiture? Gender and genealogy in the Eighteenth-Century country house. In: Styles, J. and Vickery, A. (eds.) Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830. New Haven, U.S.: Yale University Press for Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. pp. 323-352. ISBN 9780300116595.
Conference Item
- Retford, Kate “At least 18 or 20 persons. setting at Cards & Tea”: William Hogarth’s Wollaston Family and the British conversation piece. Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society Annual Lectures, Leicester, UK
- Retford, Kate Copies and connections: portrait practice in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Portraits, Authenticity, and Copies in the 17th and 18th Centuries, London, UK
- Retford, Kate Cutting and pasting in the Eighteenth Century: The Print Room at Woodhall Park, Hertfordshire. V&A Research Seminar,
- Retford, Kate 'Everlastingly joining frends together on the canvace": kinship and Eighteenth-Century portraiture. Long Eighteenth-Century Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, UK
- Retford, Kate In blood and in law: kinship networks in Eighteenth-Century British portraiture. Familienbilder II: Heilige und (andere) Menschen, Munich, Germany
- Retford, Kate Joseph Highmore, time and the marriage of Miss Whichcote. Basic Instincts: Women, Art and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century, London, UK
- Retford, Kate Light incidents: jokes in Eighteenth-Century British portraiture. Fairfax House Events, York, UK
- Retford, Kate Piranesi and the Print Room. New Approaches to Piranesi: A Virtual Roundtable, Online
- Retford, Kate Portraiture and the Enlightenment: Public and Private Images/ Les Lumières et l’art de portrait: images publiques et privées. ISECS International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh, UK
- Retford, Kate Real rooms, invented rooms: interpreting the Eighteenth-Century English conversation piece. Decoding the Domestic Interior in British Portraits, London, UK
- Retford, Kate 'Representing Natural Humour': Johan Zoffany and the Sharps. Meet the Sharp Family: Family Dynamics, Conversation Pieces and Humour in Johan Zoffany's portrait of the Sharp family, c1779, Birmingham, UK
- Retford, Kate Talking pictures: sociability in the Eighteenth-Century British conversation piece. Art et sociabilité en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle : la ‘conversation piece’, Paris, France
- Retford, Kate A fashion much in use: the vogue for print rooms in the late Eighteenth Century. London Art History Society Lecture, Online
Other
- Retford, Kate (2018) 1775: Nathaniel Hone's Spartan Boy "Concealing a Theft". London, UK: The Royal Academy.
- Retford, Kate (2018) 1798: An upturn in the career of William Beechey. London, UK: The Royal Academy.