London Faculty

Dr Nicholas Tromans

Programme Director, MA Art History and Art World Practice

Biography Research Interests Publications and Exhibitions
Biography

Biography

Dr Nicholas Tromans studied Philosophy and History of Art at Cambridge University and wrote a PhD on the Scottish painter David Wilkie at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham. He has worked in a range of academic and curatorial roles, most recently at the Watts Gallery in Surrey where he was Curator from 2013-18. A specialist in nineteenth-century British art, Nicholas has published books on Wilkie, Orientalist painting, Richard Dadd and G. F. Watts, in addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters. His most recent publication is a collection of essays about the poet Christina Rossetti and her relationship to art (edited with Susan Owens, Yale University Press, November 2018).
Research Interests

Research Interests

Nineteenth-century European art
Publications and Exhibitions

Publications and Exhibitions

Books  (single-authored or edited)

David Wilkie: Painter of Everyday Life exhibition catalogue with essays by two other contributors: Dulwich Picture Gallery 2002, 160pp.

David Wilkie. The People’s Painter Edinburgh University Press 2007, 301pp. (shortlisted for 2008 Berger Prize for British Art History)

The Lure of the East. British Orientalist Painting  editor and principal author: Tate Publishing, London and Yale University Press, New Haven 2008, 224pp. Turkish translation published by the Pera Museum, Istanbul

Richard Dadd. The Artist and the Asylum Tate Publishing, London 2011, 208pp.        

Hope: The Life and Times of a Victorian Icon Watts Gallery, Compton 2011, 80pp.  

The Art of G. F. Watts  Paul Holberton, London 2017, 136pp.

Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art  co-edited with Susan Owens, Yale University Press, 2018, 192pp.

Journal articles and book chapters

 Only material presenting substantial original research is listed here; book and exhibition reviews, occasional pieces, roundtable contributions, etc. are excluded

The Iconography of Velázquez’s ‘Aesop’  Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 59 (1996): 332-7

Leighton’s Early Years  Apollo (February 1996): 30-34

J.F. Lewis’s Carlist War Subjects  Burlington Magazine (November 1997): 760-5

Le Baron Taylor à Londres en 1837  Revue du Louvre (June 1998): 66-69

Museum or Market? The British Institution  in Colin Trodd and Paul Barlow (eds.), Governing Cultures: Institutions of Art in Victorian London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000): 44-55

Un Museo en Sevilla en 1822  Goya no.282 (May-June 2001): 156-60

‘Like Splendid Dreams Realised’: David Wilkie’s Image of Spain  British Art Journal 3: 3 (September 2002): 36-42

Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings  in Pre-Raphaelite and other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd-Webber Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2003): 295-308

Between the Museum and the Mausoleum: Showing Spain to Britain  in R. Panzanelli and M. Preti-Hamard, eds, La Circulation des Oeuvres d’Art 1789-1848 (Los Angeles: Getty Institute & Rennes: Presses Universitaires, 2006): 323-30

Palestine: Picture of Prophecy  in Carol Jacobi and K. Lochnan, eds, William Holman Hunt (Yale University Press & Art Gallery of Ontario, 2008): 135-60

The Future of Orientalism  Kiosk no.2 (Kingston-upon-Thames, 2008): 6-11

The Age of Goya in David Howarth, ed., Imagining Spain. British Artists and Collectors. Goya to Picasso (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2009): 29-45

The Psychiatric Sublime Tate Papers 13 (2010) https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/13/the-psychiatric-sublime

Nineteenth-century Orientalist Painting  Groniek: Historisch Tijdschrift, 187 (Groningen, 2010): 157-70 https://rjh.ub.rug.nl/groniek/article/download/17636/15109

Bringing it Home? Orientalist Painting and the Art Market  in Z. Inanker, Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts, eds, The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Seattle: Washington University Press & Istanbul: Kıraç Foundation, 2011): 64-74

Away with the Fairies. Richard Dadd at Broadmoor  Tate etc. no.23 (Autumn 2011): 102-5 https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/away-fairies

Richard Dadd’s Master-Stroke  Public Domain Review, online journal (March 2012) https://publicdomainreview.org/2012/03/14/richard-dadds-master-stroke/

A Portrait of the Artist in London: The Critical Reception of Raeburn’s Royal Academy Exhibits, 1792-1823  in Viccy Coltman and Stephen Lloyd, eds, Henry Raeburn: Context, Reception and Reputation (Edinburgh University Press 2012): 179-207

‘The defeat of narrative by vision’: Said and the Image  in Ziad Elmarsafy et al., eds, Debating Orientalism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 175-91

Drawing Teeth: Reflections on Ford Madox Brown’s Mouths  Visual Culture in Britain 15: 3 (2014): 299-312

'The Elements’: A Fresco Cycle by George Frederic Watts  in Mark Stocker and Phillip Lindley, eds, Tributes to Jean Michel Massing: Towards a Global Art History (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2016): 307-22

‘Girlish Dreams’: Burne-Jones in the Twentieth Century  in Alison Smith, ed., Edward Burne-Jones (Tate Britain, 2018): 35-41

‘Consuming Observation’: The Case of Richard Dadd  in Marije Vellekoop, Louis van Tilborgh, Teio Meedendorp and Arko Oderwald, eds, On The Verge of Insanity: Van Gogh and other Artists in Crises (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming 2019)

Dadd’s Replicants in Julie Codell, ed., Nineteenth-Century British Artists’ Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics and Economics (Routledge, forthcoming 2020)

Tuke and the Inheritance of Victorian Psychiatry in Cicely Robinson, ed., Henry Scott Tuke (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2020)