Current Research Projects

Sarah recently completed a book provisionally entitled Art & the Sea in Britain, 1650-1850 (under review) in which she examines the aesthetic, sociocultural and political implications of the seascape image during the most significant period of its production.  Looking at the work of artists such as Willem van de Velde the Younger, Samuel Scott and Dominic Serres, this project charts the trajectory of the genre from its appropriation by Restoration court culture (and its critics) through to its radical sublimation by JMW Turner.  The central means by which Britain emerged as commercial and imperial power during this period, the sea played an important but complex role in the shaping of specifically modern British identities and this project considers the ways in which the visual imagery of the sea – as a site of victory, defeat, labour, capital and ambition – contributed to this process.  Aiming to offer more than a thematic history of the genre however, this project also considers the ways in which the pictorial possibilities of the seascape were elaborated by British artists, for whom the relationship between shoreline and open horizon represented a crucial starting point and for whom seawater’s capacity for buoyancy, wild surface and liquid depths would contribute to the rethinking of painting itself.

Her new book project, provisionally entitled Transported Subjects: British Art and the Effects of Empire, 1680-1830, aims to highlight key aspects of the broader relationship between British art and global commerce, experience and imperial ideology.  In particular, this project sets out to analyse the ways in which artworks produced in ‘the long eighteenth century’ engage with commodities, artefacts and people from the world beyond Europe, with the increasingly global character of trading, credit and cultural networks, and with the transformations that imperialism wrought upon the experiences and expectations of human subjects.  Looking at the work of artists such as Joseph Wright of Derby, Benjamin West, Thomas Banks and JMW Turner, this project considers how investment in slavery, exploration in the Pacific and power in India (amongst other imperial practices) shaped the forms of British art.

 
Sarah is also working on three collections of essays: Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768-1848, co-edited with Professors John Barrell and Mark Hallett (Ashgate, forthcoming); Anglo-American: Art between England and America, 1770-1970, co-edited with Professor David Peters Corbett (Blackwell, forthcoming; also to be published as a special issue of Art History in 2011), and a special issue of the journal Visual Culture in Britain entitled ‘The Visual Culture of British India’, 12:3 (November 2011).  These follow on from conferences which she (co-)organised in 2008-9, in line with her research interest in artistic practice and global experience during the long eighteenth century.