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Yale Center for British Art
British Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints, and Rare Books from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

Yale Center for British Art

The Yale Center for British Art is both a public museum and a research institute. It houses the most comprehensive collection of British paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and rare books outside Great Britain. Given to the University by the late Paul Mellon (Yale Class of 1929), the collection contains masterpieces by the leading artists who worked in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present, including Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Stubbs, Constable, Turner, and Bonington. The Center also boasts rich holdings of British sporting art, marine painting, and paintings by nineteenth-century artists. Modern and contemporary British art have been growing strengths, and works by painters of the Camden Town School and the Bloomsbury Group are especially well represented. The prints and drawings collection offers a comprehensive view of the development of British graphic art, with an emphasis on the flowering of the British watercolor school. Other areas of interest include architectural drawings, topographical prints, caricatures, and mezzotint portraits. The collection of rare books and archives contains material relating to the visual arts and cultural life in the United Kingdom and former British Empire from the seventeenth through the end of the nineteenth century, with particular strengths in illustrated “color-plate” books, sporting books and manuscripts, early maps and atlases, and archival material relating to British artists of all periods. The Center’s reference library includes materials in a variety of formats supporting the study of British art and related fields including architecture, history, literature, and the performing arts. The photo archive, located within the reference library, consists of over 200,000 black-and-white photographs of British art worldwide. The Center offers a limited number of short-term resident residential fellowships to doctoral students and scholars at postdoctoral or equivalent level whose projects relate directly to the Center’s collections. Applications are also welcomed from museum professionals whose responsibilities and research interests involve British art. The deadline is early January. Please visit http://britishart.yale.edu/research/visiting-scholars for details.

Yale Center for British Art
Department of Research
1080 Chapel Street
PO Box 208280
New Haven, CT 06520-8280
Tel: (203) 432-2824
Fax: (203) 432-4538
E-mail: ycba.research@yale.edu

britishart.yale.edu