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| Email: r.simon@ucl.ac.uk External phone: 020 7787 6944 |  |
Robin Simon is Honorary Professor of English at UCL; Editor of The British Art Journal; and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Education and Background
Robin Simon was born in Llandaff, studied English at the University of Exeter (BA) and History of Art at the Courtauld Institute (MA), and awarded DLitt (Exeter) in 2008.
He undertook research on fourteenth-century painting in northern Italy before being appointed lecturer in both the History of Art and English at the University of Nottingham and was Delmas Fellow in Venice, 1978.
After a period as Director of the Institute of European Studies in London he became Editor of Apollo magazine in 1990. He founded The British Art Journal in 1999.
Recent Appointments, Research and Other Interests
Robin Simon was Paul Mellon Lecturer in British Art 2013, at the National Gallery, London, and Yale University, with a series of public lectures ‘Painters and Players from Hogarth to Olivier’. He teaches for Yale University in London on the cultural interaction between Britain and France in the eighteenth century. His most recent book, Hogarth, France and British Art: The rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain, was published in 2007.
Robin Simon is currently working on a new history of the Royal Academy and its collections; is co-curator of the tercentenary exhibition of Richard Wilson at the Yale Center for British Art and National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 2014; and is a contributor to the catalogue of the exhibition ‘All’alba della modernità: pittura brittanica da Hogarth a Turner’, Fondazione Roma, 2014. He has continued to publish on early Italian painting, wrote The Art of Cricket with the late Alastair Smart in 1983 to accompany the exhibition of the same name, and still writes and lectures on the history of cricket.
Robin Simon has been art critic of the Daily Mail for the last twenty-six years and has written for many newspapers and journals including the Times Literary Supplement, Burlington Magazine, Apollo, Sunday Times, Spectator, New Statesman, Country Life, Opera Now and The Cricketer, and for five years wrote a monthly column in Tatler. His broadcasting experience includes eight years on the panel of ‘X Marks the Spot’ (BBC Radio 4); ‘Private Passions’ (with Michael Berkeley, BBC Radio 3); ‘Test Match Special’; ‘The World at One’; ‘Today’; and reviews for BBC2 TV, Sky TV, BBC World Service, Channel 4, CBS, NBC and ARD TV/Das Erste.
Robin Simon also devises and presents commissioned entertainments, including ‘Hogarth versus Handel’, Middle Temple, 2000 (with Emma Kirkby, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, the Academy of St Martin’s in the Fields and the Tallis Choir); and ‘Ruling Passions: Music and Monarchy’, for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, Villa Decius, Cracow, 2002 (with Alison Pearce, Paul Wynne-Griffiths and Anton Dowinga).
Books
Hogarth, France and British Art. The rise of the arts in eighteenth-century Britain (2007)
The Portrait in Britain and America, with a Biographical Dictionary of Portrait Painters 1680–1914 (1987)
The Art of Cricket (with Alastair Smart) (1983)
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Books edited
(with Martin Postle) Richard Wilson: The transformation of European landscape painting, exh. cat. (forthcoming, 2014)
The Royal Academy: its history and collections 1768 to the present day (2009–continuing)
Hogarth’s Children, exh. cat., Foundling Museum, London (2007)
(with Natasha McEnroe), exh. cat., The Tyranny of Treatment: Dr Johnson and Georgian Medicine (2003)
Public Art, Private Passions: The World of Edward Linley Sambourne (2001)
Somerset House: The Building and Collections (2001)
(Martin Postle) Angels and Urchins, exh. cat., University of Nottingham/English Heritage, Kenwood (1998)
(Susan Foister et al.) Young Gainsborough, exh. cat., National Gallery (1997)
(with Rhian Harris) Enlightened Self-Interest: The Foundling Hospital and Hogarth, exh. cat., Foundling Museum, London (1997)
(with Christopher Woodward) A Rake’s Progress: From Hogarth to Hockney, exh. cat., Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (1997)
Oxford: Art and Architecture (1997)
Lord Leighton and Leighton House: A Centenary Celebration (1996)
The National Trust Annual: Historic Houses and Collections (1996)
(Ann Dumas) Degas as a Collector, exh. cat., National Gallery (1996)
(David Jaffé et al.) The Earl and Countess of Arundel: Renaissance Collectors, exh. cat., Getty Museum, Malibu (1995)
(with Gervase Jackson-Stops) The National Trust 1895-1995:100 Great Treasures (1995)
The National Trust Annual: Historic Houses and Collections (1995)
The King’s Apartments, Hampton Court Palace (1994)
The National Trust Annual: Historic Houses and Collection (1994)
The National Trust Annual: Historic Houses and Collections (1993)
Buckingham Palace: A Complete Guide (1993)
Pissarro, National Gallery (1992)
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Recent articles and contributions to books
‘ “The monument I have had constructed”. Evidence for the first tomb monument of Enrico Scrovegni in the Arena Chapel, Padua’, chapter in M. Knapton and J. Law, eds., Festschrift for Benjamin G. Kohl (forthcoming, 2014)
“Pittura e teatro nel contesto culturale inglese”, chapter in V. Curzi and C. Brooke, eds., All’alba della modernità: pittura brittanica da Hogarth a Turner, exh. cat., Rome (forthcoming, 2014)
‘Zoffany at the Yale Center for British Art’, The British Art Journal, XII, 3 (Winter 2011–2)
‘Johan Hasenclever and Hogarth’, The British Art Journal, XII, 2 (Autumn 2011)
‘ “World Class. The Düsseldorf School of Painting 1819–1918”’ (review), The British Art Journal, XII, 2 (Autumn 2011)
‘ “Strong Impressions of their Art”: Zoffany and the Stage’ chapter, and catalogue entries on the theatre and Zoffany’s paintings in Italy, in Martin Postle, ed., Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed (2011)
‘Gesture, expression and identity in Hogarth’s images of The Beggar’s Opera’, chapter in Jeremy Barlow and Bertha Joncus eds., The Stage’s Glory: John Rich (1692–1761) (2011)
‘ “Treasures from Budapest”’, European Masters from Leonardo to Schiele”’ (review), The British Art Journal, XI, 2 (2010)
‘Apollo at 85’ (reminiscences of editorship 1990–97), Apollo (July-August 2010)
‘Les chants d’innocence et Les Chants d’expérience’, chapter in Michael Phillips, ed., William Blake (1757-1827): Le Génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais, exh. cat., Petit Palais, Paris (2009)
‘ “The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700”’ (review), The British Art Journal, X, 2 (Winter 2009)
‘The self-importance of being earnest’, review of D. Bindman, ed., The History of British Art, Tate/Yale UP, Apollo (July-August 2009)
‘Un rosbif à Paris: Hogarth’s visit to Paris in 1743’, The British Art Journal, VII, 2 (Autumn 2006)
Foreword, John Richards, Petrarch’s Influence on the Iconography of the Carrara Palace in Padua: The Conflict Between Ancestral and Antique Themes in the Fourteenth Century, 2008
‘Children by Hogarth and Rysbrack’, chapter in Robin Simon, ed. Hogarth’s Children (2007)
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