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Courtauld Institute of Art
Somerset House
Strand
London WC2R 0RN
+44 (0)20 7848 2806
One of the world’s leading authorities on the history of British
art, David Solkin studied at Harvard College (AB magna cum laude
1972), the Courtauld (MA with distinction 1974) and Yale University
(PhD 1978). He taught for eight years at the University of British
Columbia before joining the Institute in 1986, where he was promoted
from Lecturer to Reader in 1993, and to Professor of the Social History
of Art in 2002. In the autumn of 2007 Solkin became the Institute’s
first Dean and Deputy Director, a position that he anticipates occupying
for a term of three years. In addition to numerous articles, he has
published three important books: Richard Wilson: The Landscape
of Reaction (London, Tate Gallery 1982); Painting for Money:
The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New
Haven & London, Yale University Press 1993); and most recently, Painting
out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life
in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven & London,
Yale University Press 2008). David Solkin was the guest curator of
the exhibition Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions
at Somerset House 1780-1836, which took place at the Courtauld
Institute Gallery in 2001-2002.. He also edited and co-authored the
collection of essays that accompanied the exhibition, for which he
was awarded the inaugural William M.B. Berger Prize for British art
historyCurrently Professor Solkin is preparing a major exhibition
on Turner and the Masters, which is scheduled to open at Tate Britain
in the autumn of 2009, before travelling on to the Grand Palais,
Paris and the Museo del Prado, Madrid during the spring and summer
of the following year.
Current research/interests:
- British genre painting c1790-1830
- The art of JMW Turner
- British art c.1660-1840
Recent/forthcoming publications:
Published in 2001
Ed. and co-author, Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2001, 278 pp.
'This Great Mart of Genius’, introduction to Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2001, pp.1-8.
'Crowds and Connoisseurs: Looking at Genre Painting at Somerset
House’, in Art on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions
at Somerset House 1780-1836, Yale University Press, New Haven
and London 2001, pp.157-71.
Jointly with John Sunderland, 'Staging the Spectacle’, in Art
on The Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836,
Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, pp.23-37.
'The Excessive Jew in the Harlot's Progress’, in David Bindman, Frédéric Ogée and Hans-Peter Wagner, eds., Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, Manchester University Press, Manchester 2001, pp.219-35.
Published in 2003
‘Joseph Wright of Derby and the Sublime Art of Labour’, Representations 83 (Summer 2003), pp.167-194.
Published in 2004
‘The Other Half of the Landscape: Thomas Heaphy’s Watercolour Nasties’, in David Simpson, Nigel Leask, and Peter de Bolla eds.,Land, Nation and Culture: Thinking the Republic of Taste 1740-1840, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2004, pp.63-96
Published in 2006
‘John Hamilton Mortimer’s Banditti and the Anxieties
of Empire’, in Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley & Douglas
Fordham, eds., Art and the British Empire, Manchester University
Press (2006), pp.120-138.
Published in 2008
Painting out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of
Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, Yale University
Press, New Haven and London 2008, 270pp.
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The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London,
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