Dr Rose Pickering

Rose Pickering is an Art Historian who focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century French visual culture with a specialist interest in word and image relations.

Her PhD project, ‘Édouard Vuillard’s Representations of Women, 1890-1940: Modernity, Femininity and Proust’, explored a word-image connection between Édouard Vuillard’s artwork and Marcel Proust’s novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927). The research was supervised by Professor David Peters Corbett and advised by Dr Caroline Levitt.

The project is the first dedicated survey of Vuillard’s most important female subjects, considering depictions of these women as important examples through which to reassess Vuillard’s broader relationship to modernism. The study is also the first to consider Vuillard’s representation of femininity through the framework of Proust’s novel. Using Proust as a theorist in the interpretation of Vuillard’s art, the study goes beyond any previous investigation of Proust and Vuillard, becoming a significant contribution to this subfield of the Vuillard scholarship. The thesis reveals how a connection with Proust can clarify Vuillard’s place as a modern painter and, in turn, how the artist’s work constitutes an unusual method in the context of male representations of women in modern French visual culture.

Rose has lectured and given conference papers on her research; in 2024, she organised a conference on word and image relations with King’s College London and The Courtauld. She has taught modules on British, American and European art and is currently a Teaching Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art History at The Courtauld.