Rachel Sloan was educated in the United States and England, earning a BA in English literature and history of art from Washington University in St Louis and an MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, on Symbolism and artistic exchange between France and Britain in the late nineteenth century.
She subsequently served as graduate intern in the Drawings Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2009-2010) and as curatorial research fellow at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2010-2011). Rachel joined The Courtauld as Assistant Curator of Works on Paper in 2012. Exhibitions she has curated include A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany (2014), Bruegel to Freud: Prints from the Courtauld Collection (2014), and Impressions of Modern Life: Prints from The Courtauld Gallery (2020, Royal Holloway, University of London).
Current/recent exhibitions and projects
- Impressions of Modern Life: Prints from The Courtauld Gallery (2020, Royal Holloway, University of London)
- A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany (2014, Courtauld Gallery, London and Morgan Library and Museum, New York)
- Bruegel to Freud: Prints from the Courtauld Collection (2014, Courtauld Gallery)
Recent publications
- ‘Head of a man: a new drawing by Alphonse Legros’, Master Drawings, vol. 59, no. 1, 2021, pp. 45-48.
- The Courtauld Collection: A Vision for Impressionism, London, 2019; essay on Stephen Courtauld’s collection of watercolours by J.M.W. Turner, pp. 339-41, and catalogue entries, pp. 114-19, 142-78, 188-98, 208, 234-52, 264, 274-82, 294-310, 314.
- Artists at work, exh. cat., The Courtauld Gallery, London, 2018 (ed.).
- ‘Unequalled by anything except perhaps Albert Dürer: Burne-Jones and Northern works on paper’, in Melissa Buron, ed., Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters, exh. cat., Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2018, pp. 42-45.
Public engagement
- Study tour of fin-de-siècle Brussels, Courtauld Public Programmes
- Summer school course on European Symbolism, Courtauld Public Programmes (ran 2014-2019)
