In the spirit of enquiry and experimentation, we have created a new platform for British Art Studies. The key drivers for this change have centred on issues of accessibility, equity, and environmental impact.

In 1953, an exhibition of Kenneth Martin's abstract mobiles was staged in a children's hospital ward in North London.Having languished in the footnotes of the history of British constructionism, the exhibition is read in this article as a significant demonstration of the determination of artists connected with the movement to find a place and function for discrete and modestly sized artwork within post-war social space.A range of evidence is gathered towards piecing together a sense of the exhibition and realising its significance.Photographs made by Nigel Henderson and held in the Tate archive are among the material traces considered.His images are shown to articulate particular modes of spectatorship activated by the exhibition, and to locate the exhibition within post-war discourses of children and childhood.In addition, Kenneth Martin's own writing is drawn upon towards establishing a sense of the constructionist artwork as being something that protects a form of autonomy while being open to an immediate environment and the social forces at play in that environment.This article proposes a new way of understanding British constructionism within an expanded field of post-war British art.

The development of London’s West India Docks, opened in 1802, made manifest the contemporary connections between culture, capitalism, and colonialism. A liminal space, the docks existed as a secure conduit for the importation of goods from the West Indies, most of which were produced by enslaved Africans. As such, they functioned as a threshold between the brutal realities of the plantation-based slave economy, and the polite world of the London merchant whose wealth derived from that economy. This collaborative article, which we wrote as two curators at the Museum of London, explores the lasting effects of that liminality, focusing on the aesthetic and spatial implications of the West India Docks’s environment, and the ways in which these persist in influencing the site and its communities today.

In 1762, a delegation of Cherokee leaders arrived in London for negotiations with King George III following the Anglo-Cherokee War (1759-1761), itself part of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The British public reacted to the men's presence in London with fervent zeal; throngs of Londoners flocked to the men's private rooms and any public house, garden, or theatre they attended to see them in person before their very eyes. This article asks why the delegation became such a spectacle by studying three wax statues that were made in the image of the men and were exhibited at Mrs. Salmon's Royal Wax-Work in London from 1762 to approximately 1793, after which they were lost to history. In questioning how the life-likeness of the wax statues was achieved through materiality and visual elements, and analysing contemporary accounts of the London public's reception of the men, it emerges that the statues worked to retain their subjects as objects of spectacle long after they returned to North America. Due to the low aesthetic status and fragility of wax statuary, the medium has received little arthistorical attention despite the significance of the art form in eighteenthcentury London. This article seeks to address this oversight and bring new insight to the imperial visual culture of eighteenth-century Britain.

In 1788, the potter Josiah Wedgwood introduced a radical new sub-section under the banner of his popular Heads of Illustrious Moderns, from Chaucer to the Present Time focused on historical and contemporary women, rather than men, and entitled “Femmes Célèbres”. In its creation, Wedgwood celebrated the lives and achievements of twenty-eight elite, white women of immense privilege and beauty, but also objectified and commodified them for his financial gain. Within this group of aristocrats, mistresses, poets, queens, and educationalists were several female worthies, inspirational women, who possessed qualities he clearly admired—independence, intelligence, and industry. The outsider was the actress and first modern female celebrity, Sarah Siddons, whose struggles to gain acceptance by overcoming gendered obstacles paralleled those of elite, educated, literary women in their desire for recognition. Wedgwood’s gallery of female heads may have served as a visual conduct book or manual, presenting a modern vision of female agency, a new femininity that circumvented and navigated conventions of politeness and the status quo. When accompanied by enlightened conversations, even gossip, among women around the tea-table or while shopping with friends, the life choices of the sitters depicted in these portrait medallions served to educate and promote what it meant to be a woman in the late eighteenth century. This article redefines the reception of this group of ornamental portrait medallions in Wedgwood’s new stoneware bodies as decorative art objects inspired by fine art representations and made accessible through mass production.

This issue proposes a double move to readers. First, it foregrounds the fact that slavery, colonialism, and empire were integral historical components in the production, consumption, and reception of the British decorative arts. Second, it suggests that readers unhinge the “heritage” aspect that has long been associated with the British decorative arts, proposing instead a move of defamiliarization and making strange the routines of domesticity that seem self-evident and simply “the way things always have been”.

When visitors to the museum encounter carefully curated displays behind glass, the arrangements they see are the outcome of intense discussions, conversations, and dialogues, many of which span years. In an effort to open up the curatorial process to a broader audience, British Art Studies invited a group of curators and academics to participate in a round table discussion focusing on a case in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s British Galleries containing Chelsea porcelain, which each discussant had seen in person. The display, which served as a case study for pondering the challenges of curating and interpreting race and empire in a decorative arts gallery context, is unusual in that it combines useful porcelain wares such as plates alongside sculptural forms made as art works. Such an arrangement is not typical of decorative arts displays, which tend to separate wares for the table from ornamental sculpture. Even prior to the opening of the British Galleries in the spring of 2020, the case proved particularly challenging to configure, given its location in the central axis of the space devoted to the eighteenth century. An earlier iteration featuring Joseph Willems’s (1715–1766) terracotta sculpture of a Black man holding a mixing bowl in the center of the case prompted questions for the curatorial team of how race figured in the broader narratives of the British Galleries. Save for Josiah Wedgwood’s antislavery medallion, the sculpture marks the only Black presence in the entire suite of galleries. Although the decision was ultimately made to pivot the figure so that it faced north instead of being on axis, the impact of such a slight change in the arrangement prompted a larger discussion about what role the placement of works and museum displays play in propagating or challenging narratives from the past. The coordination or disjuncture between object and label, case height, as well as the visual and spatial relationships established between works within a display became crucial factors in recontextualizing and generating new perceptions in a three-dimensional format. Following the round table discussion, each participant contributed a response to the case, which provided a rich “object” for rethinking the British decorative arts.

This article describes the approach taken to interpreting, in a gallery setting, a set of silver with a troubling history: it had been made for use during negotiations of a major eighteenth-century contract for the transportation of enslaved Africans. Two further avenues for interpretation are presented, both of which relate to the Atlantic slave trade. The first follows the way that the “plain” surfaces of British silver of this period have been understood, while the second follows the physical transformation of the gilding. Both follow the “social life” of particular material properties of the silver, in an alternative approach to the well-established concept of the “social life of things”.