The Barber at The Courtauld: New research on the Barber collection

With contributions from:

Professor Aviva Burnstock, speaking on The Crucifixion, attributed to Salerno di Coppo, 1280.

Professor Aviva Burnstock is a Professor of Conservation at The Courtauld, where she took a PhD (1991) and a Diploma in the Conservation of Easel Paintings (1984). Aviva’s research includes an investigation of the materials and techniques used for painting; characterisation of visual and material changes; the application of new methods for technical study; evaluating methods for conservation practice; and a focus on the deterioration and conservation issues for modern oil paint and paintings.

Robert Wenley FSA, speaking on A Pastoral Landscape, Claude Lorrain, 1645.

Robert Wenley is Deputy Director: Collections and Research at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. He has previously held curatorial positions at Norwich Castle Museum, the British Golf Museum, St Andrews, The Wallace Collection, London and Glasgow Museums, before joining the Barber Institute  in 2010. He has particular interests in French Louis XIV-period bronzes, Dutch and Flemish 17th-century painting, and the history of collecting in Britain and France, c.1600-1950. He has curated several exhibitions and published numerous articles on sculpture, collecting and Dutch and Flemish paintings. He was Reviews Editor for the Sculpture Journal from 2000 to 2010, has been Chair of the PSSA’s Specialist Advisory Board since 2022, and Chair of the Public Picture Gallery Fund, Birmingham, since 2019.

Dr Esther Chadwick, speaking on The Harvest Wagon, Thomas Gainsborough, 1767.

Dr Esther Chadwick is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Courtauld. She is interested in eighteenth-century image-making in all its forms. Her research addresses the political agency of art in the age of revolutions, the materiality of printed images, the visual culture of transatlantic enslavement, and cross-cultural artistic encounters. She is interested in the global contexts of British art and is currently working on the cultural connections between Britain and Haiti in the years after the Haitian Revolution.

Professor Steve Edwards, speaking on The Harvest Wagon, Thomas Gainsborough, 1767.

Steve Edwards joined the Courtauld in April 2025 as Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the newly established Manton Centre for British Art, which hosts conferences, workshops and research lectures. He began teaching at the University of Derby and subsequently held professorships at the Open University, where he was also head of the art history department, and Birkbeck, University of London.

Matthew French, speaking on A Woman Seated in a Garden, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, around 1890.

Matthew French is a final year doctoral student at the University of Birmingham. He is preparing a thesis on the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec titled Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, caricature and the marketing of modern art which considers the ways in which caricature proliferated at the fin-de-siècle notably in the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. He is also preparing a major exhibition on the artist to take place in 2029 at a major London and European gallery. Matthew is a co-founder of the ECR French Art Network, a research network for early career scholars.

Dr Camilla Smith, speaking on Still Life in Grey, Max Pechstein, 1913.

Dr Camilla Smith is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Birmingham, UK.  She’s published widely on German modernism – particularly on art and visual culture of the Weimar Republic. Her recent book, Jeanne Mammen: Art Between Resistance and Conformity in Modern Germany, 1916–1950 (Bloomsbury, 2023), explores gender and artistic dissent under National Socialism. A co-edited volume of essays with Ty Vanover, Erotic Art in Modern Germany: Visual Cultures of Sex, 1871-1945, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2026. She is co-editor of the book series ‘German Visual Culture’ with the publisher Peter Lang. Camilla is the curator of two upcoming exhibitions, the first at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, on the artists, Lotte Laserstein and Renée Sintenis, and a second at the Museum of Sex in New York, on Weimar erotic visual culture.

Professor Jennifer Powell is Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, and Barber Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham. Prior to this, she was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge. She is a respected scholar in the field of modern and contemporary art, especially sculpture and exhibition cultures since 1945, an area in which she has published widely. Jennifer began her curatorial career with the V&A before taking up the post of Assistant Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain in 2010. She was appointed Head of Collections, Programme and Research at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, in 2013, and played a key role in the gallery’s major capital extension project.

Professor Mark Hallett is the Märit Rausing Director of The Courtauld. Prior to this, he spent more than a decade as the Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC), a London-based research centre that is part of Yale University. As an art historian, Hallett is best known for his many publications on British art, and for his curatorial involvement in a series of major exhibitions at venues including Tate Britain, the Royal Academy, the Wallace Collection and the Yale Center for British Art. His work ranges from major monographs and exhibitions devoted to the eighteenth-century artists William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, to publications on the contemporary artists George Shaw and Frank Auerbach.