Paul Mellon Centre Funding Secures Research Time for Kate Nichols

In 2024, Paul Mellon Centre funding covered Kate Nichols’ staff costs, allowing her to focus on her ongoing book project. Below, Kate reflects on how taking a term away from teaching impacted on her research.

My Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship ran from September to December 2024. The funding bought me out of a term of teaching and administrative responsibilities at the University of Birmingham, enabling me to concentrate fully on preparing a draft manuscript of my book project A Global History of Victorian Painting: Circulations and the Making of British Art.

The book explores the mobilities that made it possible to create and look at art in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire. It asks: How did migrations of raw materials, animals, people and ideas about artistic culture enable the making and viewing of art in this period? How did the acquisition and display of art works in museums and International Exhibitions foster notions of British cultural and racial identities both “at home” and in the empire? and How do these global connections transform our understandings of what we call “British” art?

I address these questions through a micro historical focus on two paintings made by Briton Rivière: A Roman Holiday (1881, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and Phoebus Apollo (1895, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). Rivière’s work does not explicitly engage with imperial themes or subject matter, which is one reason I selected him as my prime case study: I am interested in the ways in which empire permeates all Victorian painting, not just the work of artists who represented imperial warfare or colonised territories. Rivière was considered “the heir to Landseer” and to be the most important animal painter of his age. His terrifically popular paintings of human-animal interactions circulated widely as prints and originals. He also corresponded extensively with Charles Darwin and contributed illustrations to his 1872 The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Yet the significance of his work for the formation of late Victorian understandings and engagements with the natural world remains underexplored. Rivière’s work seems newly significant as scholarship increasingly notes the fundamental interconnection between ecology and empire, a key concern of my project.

The book is an enormous undertaking, and I have been working on it for over ten years now, through various career breaks. The fellowship gave me the time and space to think, uninterrupted, which I really needed to conceptualise and redraft the introductory chapter. I was also able to research and write the final remaining chapter of the book, which explores the networks of art dealers, patrons and exhibition histories crucial to the early circulation and reception of the paintings, spanning the RA, Henry Tate’s collection, Agnews’ dealership, the Whitechapel Easter Exhibitions, Oldham Spring Exhibition and the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. It pays particular attention to the role of colonial interests and the legacies of British slave-ownership in the buying, selling and display of these works.

I am currently tidying up footnotes, editing the final drafts and preparing the entire manuscript for submission.