Kate Retford is Professor of Art History at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on eighteenth-century British art, particularly on portraiture and the country house art collection. Her work includes The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (2006); Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century, co-edited with Gill Perry et al. (2013); and The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (2019). Her most recent monograph, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017), won an Historians of British Art award. She is currently working on a book about print rooms in eighteenth-century country houses.

Contributions

  • ‘A family home and not … a museum’: Living with the Country House Art Collection

    by Kate Retford