Esther Chadwick is a specialist in eighteenth-century British art. She studied Art History at the University of Cambridge and completed her doctorate at Yale University in 2016. She has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre in London, the Huntington Library, California, the Lewis Walpole Library, Connecticut, and in 2013-2016 was Paul Mellon Fellow at the Center for Advanced 91制片厂 in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C. Before joining the 91制片厂, she was a curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
Esther is interested in eighteenth-century image-making in all its forms. Her research addresses the political agency of art in the age of revolutions, the materiality of printed images, the visual culture of transatlantic enslavement, and cross-cultural artistic encounters. She is interested in the global contexts of British art and is currently working on the cultural connections between Britain and Haiti in the years after the Haitian Revolution. In 2014, she co-curated Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain with Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. At the British Museum in 2018, she curated A revolutionary legacy: Haiti and Toussaint Louverture. Esther’s book, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, which examines the role of printmaking in forging new forms of artistic criticality, is under contract with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (Yale University Press). With Professor David Bindman, she has co-curated a major exhibition on (2024). Together with Professor Dorothy Price (91制片厂) and Dr Cora Gilroy-Ware (Oxford), she is also a co-curator of 听at Royal Academy of Arts (2024).
Teaching
- BA1: The Possibilities of Portraiture
- BA2: Artists, Radicals, Mystics: European Art c. 1800
- BA3: The Global Print
- BA3: Lessons in Critical Interpretation
- MA Special Option Circum-Atlantic visual culture, c. 1770-1830
- MA Curating the Art Museum, Spring term module, 鈥楲anguage and Interpretation鈥
Upcoming and recent publications
Monograph
鈥 The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024)
Articles
- With C茅cile Fromont, ‘Introduction: The Vast Early Modern Atlantic,’ Art History,听vol. 46, no. 5 (2023), special issue, ‘The Vast Early Modern Atlantic,’听 ed. Chadwick and C茅cile Fromont.
- ‘The Aesthetics of Postrevolutionary Haiti: Currency, Kingship and Circum-Atlantic Numismatics,’ Art History,听vol. 46, no. 5 (2023), special issue, ‘The Vast Early Modern Atlantic,’听 ed. Chadwick and C茅cile Fromont, pp. 1014-1045.
- ‘Portraiture in Indigenous London: Mohawks at the British Museum in 1776,’ Commentaries: Art Institutions and Race in the Atlantic World, 1750-1850,听American Art, Vol. 36, no. 2 (Summer 2022): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/720912
- 鈥楶atterned with Paper Pictures: The Print Room at Petworth House鈥, Art and the Country House, Paul Mellon Centre, 2020:听
- 鈥楴otes on A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti and Toussaint Louverture,鈥櫶Third Text, vol. 33, no. 4-5 (November 2019), pp. 501-520
- 鈥楤ewick鈥檚 鈥淟ittle Whimsies鈥: Printmaking, Paper Money and Currency Radicalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain,鈥櫶Art History, vol. 41, no. 1 (February 2018), pp. 42-71.
- 鈥1776鈥; 鈥1787鈥; 鈥1797鈥,听Royal Academy Chronicle: 1769-2018听Paul Mellon Centre online resource, ed. Mark Hallett and Sarah Victoria Turner (2018):听
Book chapters
- 鈥淭his deepe and perfect glosse of Blacknesse鈥: Colour, Colonialism, and The Paston Treasure鈥檚 Period Eye,鈥 in The Paston Treasure: Microcosm of the Known World, ed. Andrew Moore, Nathan Flis and Francesca Vanke (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018)
Book and exhibition reviews
- 鈥楽lavery Through Imperial Eyes,鈥 review of Sarah Thomas,听Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition听(Yale UP, 2019) in听Art History,听August 2020, pp. 873-878
- 鈥榃illiam Blake, Tate Britain, London,鈥 exhibition review,听Burlington Magazine, no. 161, November 2019, pp. 954-956
Exhibitions
- Co-curated with Dorothy Price, Cora Gilroy-Ware and Sarah Lea, Entangled Pasts, 1768-now: art, colonialism and change,听Royal Academy, 2024.
- William Blake’s Universe, Fitzwilliam Museum, 2024. For an interview with the curators, see听Blake Quarterly, .
- A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti and Toussaint Louverture,听British Museum, 2018
- Co-curated with Meredith Gamer and Cyra Levenson,听,听Yale Center for British Art, 2014
Writing for a wider public
PhD supervision
Current Students:
鈥ami毛t Schneeweisz, ‘A History of the Portrait Miniature in the Atlantic Ocean World, 1770-1830’ (CHASE funded)