Richard Green
Honorary Visiting Fellow

Profile

Biography

DipAD, MA (London, Courtauld Institute), FSA, FRSA

Following a brief spell lecturing in aesthetics in the Department of Photography at what is now the University of Westminster, Richard Green worked for thirty-two years as an art gallery curator.

As Keeper of Fine Art at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, from 1971 to 1977, he organised pioneering exhibitions devoted to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Frederick Lewis and Albert Moore. He was instrumental in the purchase of Edward Burne-Jones’s masterpiece Laus Veneris and an important group of paintings by John Martin.

At York Art Gallery, of which he was Curator from 1977 to 2003, Richard presented a sustained series of exhibitions of art-historical interest ranging from Turner in Yorkshire and The Etruscans through Angelica Kauffman and Masterpieces from Yorkshire Houses to Venice through Canaletto’s Eyes and The Artist’s Model from Etty to Spencer. He made many important acquisitions across a broad spectrum, enhancing different aspects of the collection. These ranged from two predella panels of c.1500 by the Sienese Bernardino Fungai and a painted portrait of Nicolas Poussin by Gianlorenzo Bernini, through eighteenth-century portraits by William Hogarth, Andrea Soldi, Pompeo Batoni, Allan Ramsay and Francis Cotes, to Victorian pictures by William Powell Frith, Emily Osborn and Albert Moore, and twentieth-century paintings by Ben Nicholson, Spencer Gore, and David Hockney. Outstanding among many works on paper were two watercolours by J.M.W. Turner and important examples by Barbara Hepworth and Edward Burra.  Additions to the Gallery’s studio ceramics collection included major pieces by Elizabeth Fritsch, Alison Britton, and Kate Malone. The Gallery’s more significant acquisitions during the years 1991–2003 were the subject of a special supplement to the Burlington Magazine, December 2003.

Since 2003 Richard Green has worked as an independent art historian, consultant and critic.

He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an elected member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

Research

Overview

Richard’s primary area of research is British art (paintings, watercolours and drawings) from c.1750 to c.1850 – and beyond. He is also interested in British architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the history of collecting and museums. He is completing work on the paintings at Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire (mostly British pictures from 1800 to 1850) and has embarked on research for a proposed exhibition devoted to the Victorian oil sketch.

Publications

Selected publications

‘Etty and the Masters’ in S. Burnage, M. Hallett and L. Turner, eds, William Etty: Art and Controversy, (catalogue of an exhibition at York Art Gallery), London 2011

‘Paul Sandby’s young Pupil identified’, Burlington Magazine, vol.144,2012

Editing (with the addition of original material) of J. Ingamells, Hans Hess (1908–1975), York 2014

Richard Green regularly contributes reviews of exhibitions and books to the Burlington Magazine (around fifty such articles from 2004 to 2015), and has also written reviews for the British Art Journal and the Art Quarterly of the Art Fund.

External activities

Memberships

From 2007 to 2015 Richard Green was Chairman of the York Georgian Society. He is on the committee of the Sheldon Memorial Trust and a member of the Trust’s lectures sub-committee. He is also a member of the York and East Yorkshire committee of the Art Fund.

He is Group Leader, Yorkshire and the Humber, for Art Detective, an online discussion forum linked to the Public Catalogue Foundation.