Matthew Craske | Oxford Brookes University

Reader in History of Art

Personal Profile

Matthew joined the staff at Oxford Brookes in January 2005 from Leicester University. He was awarded his PhD in 1992 by University College, London for his thesis: The London trade in monumental sculpture and the imagery of the family in monumental art, 1720-1760. He held a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge from 1995 – 1998. In 1998 he was the Henry Moore Centre Fellow at Leed and from 1998 – 200a Henry Moore Foundation Fellow. In 2001-2002 he was the Leverhulme Fellow of the national Portrait Gallery.

He has been the host ‘expert’ both for galleries, auction houses and television programmes. He played a major role in the setting up of the Below Stairs exhibition at the national Portrait Gallery in 2003 and wrote a major section of the catalogue on ‘The Image of the Outdoor Servant in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century England’. He designed the exhibition Hounds in Leash: the Dog in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Sculpture, the Henry Moore Institute Summer Exhibition for 2000. He contributed an essay to the catalogue entitled ‘Representing the Domestic Animal in England, 1760-1830’.

Matthew has been involved in various think tanks for the presentation of Art and national Identity at the new Tate Britain.

Undergraduate Teaching

U68002: Art in Context 2: Modern Art and its Institutions
U68021 Themes in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century European Art
U68023: Field Work in Art History
U68024/5: Advanced Seminars in History of Art
U68080: History of Art Synoptic

Research

immediate research projects

The Image of the English Huntsman, Gamekeeper and Stockman in the period 1700 – 1850 (which was alluded to in the Below Stairs catalogue).

forthcoming projects

Various articles on Joseph Wright of Derby.

Books and other publications

Art in Europe: A History of the Visual Arts in an Era of Unprecedented Urban Growth (OUP, 1997).

Hogarth, Liberty and its Consequences (London: Tate Publishing and Harvard: Princeton University Press, 2000)

The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England. 1720-70. (Yale University Press, forthcoming)

Edited volumes

Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea Matthew Craske and Richard Quigley eds., Ashgate, 2004

Patiotism and Pathos: Art and War in Britain 1700 - 1840 – with John Bonehill, (Lund Humphreys, forthcoming ).

Chapters

‘Richard Jago’s Edge-hill Revisited: An Eighteenth-Century Traveller’s Prospect of Health and Disease in a Succession of English Landscapes’, in Pathologies of Travel, Richard Wrigley and George Revell eds., (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999).

‘Henry Cheere and the Rise of a New Commercial World of London Sculpture’, The lustrous trade : material culture and the history of sculpture in England and Italy, c.1700-c.1860, Cinzia Sicca and Alison Yarrington eds., (London: Continuum International Publishing Group – Pinter, 2000)

‘Landseer’s Flood in the Highlands’ in Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Wealth of Depictions, Mark Bills, ed. (London: Lund Humphreys, 2001)

‘The Upholder Concept: New Types of Business in the Eighteenth Century English Furniture Trades’. Matthew Craske and Maxine Berg, in Art and Economy in Europe (Prato, 2001)

‘From Burlington Gate to Billingsgate; James Ralph’s attempt to impose Burlingtoninan Classicism as a Canon of Public Taste’, in Barbara Arciszewska and Elizabeth McKellar eds., Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Architecture (London: Ashgate, 2004)

Journal Articles

Entombed like and Egyptian: an Eighteenth-Century Surgeon’s Extravagant Measures to Protect his Corpse’, in Church Monuments, December 2000.

‘The True Successors of Phidias: the invention of the British School of Sculpture in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries’, Art History (forthcoming 2005)