Lucy West
- Email: fhlw@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: A Great Commerce in Curious Paintings: the role and practices of art dealers and agents in the reception and re-evaluation of pre-1500 European painting in Britain, 1800-65.
- Supervisor: Professor Mark Westgarth, Dr Susanna Avery-Quash, Dr Howard Coutts
Profile
Research project
I am an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD researcher working in collaboration with the University of Leeds, the National Gallery and the Bowes Museum to interrogate the roles and practices of art dealers and agents in the reception and re-evaluation of pre-1500 European painting in nineteenth-century Britain. Shifting focus away from the emphasis frequently placed upon the mid-century as a marker in the British art market’s professionalization, I predominantly examine the art dealer as a cultural agent within the opening decades of the nineteenth century.
Conferences and lectures
- ‘The Art Dealer and the Art Museum, 1780–1850’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, July 2022.
- ‘Picture Trade Networks at Government Select Committees concerning the National Gallery, 1835/6 – 1853’ (poster presentation), Museum Networks and Museum History, the Museum and Gallery History Group Biennial Conference, virtual, July 2021.
- ‘The artistic unity of the hall will be lost (…) it will take a museum character’: placing cases at Wallington Hall, Northumberland’, Making a Case for Cases: The Furniture of Display, The Bowes Museum, January 2020.
- ‘Priceless: Oettingen-Wallerstein and the unsaleable collection, 1847-1863’, Art as Commodities / Commodities as Art: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University of York, June 2019.
- Panel chair for ‘Rome: Negotiating the Past and Future’, Same Old Things? Re-thinking the Italian Renaissance, Courtauld Institute of Art, May 2019.
Publications
- Lucy West, ‘“She enclosed & decorated this hall on the advice of John Ruskin”: Pauline, Lady Trevelyan and the creation of Wallington Hall’s Central Hall’, Journal of Art Historiography, 22.1, (Jun 2020).
- Lucy West, ‘Samuel Woodburn and the Lillebonne Apollo’, Antique Dealers Research Project Newsletter, 1.1, (Spring 2020), pp.10–11.
Teaching and mentoring
- Mentor for the Bowes Museum’s ‘Young Curators’, Spring/Summer 2021.
- 2019: Undergraduate Seminar Tutor for ‘A Story of Art? 1’ (Year 1)
Research interests
- history of collecting, history of taste;
- Italian painting and sculpture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries;
- the art market and the dealer;
- the history of the art museum, the formation of collections in the nineteenth century, and how these legacies might be addressed in today's museums;
- the development of Art History as a discipline in the nineteenth century.
Qualifications
- MA in History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art [The Arts of Florence and Central Italy 1400-1500]
- BA in History of Art, University of Warwick.
Research groups and institutes
- Centre for the Study of the Art and Antiques Market