Professor Frances Fowle

Job title:

Emeritus Professor of Nineteenth-Century Art, History of Art

Frances.Fowle@ed.ac.uk
+44 (0) 131 650 2308

Office:

Room O.64, Higgitt Gallery, Hunter Building

Research Output:

Edinburgh Research Explorer link

Biography

Frances is Emeritus Professor of Nineteenth-Century Art. For over twenty years she was Senior Curator at the National Galleries of Scotland. She has curated numerous international exhibitions and her main area of specialism is French and Scottish nineteenth-century art, with an emphasis on collecting, the art market, national identity, cultural revival and artistic networks. She has been interviewed frequently for radio and TV, including Front Row, Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time and BBC One's Fake or Fortune, and has appeared in films such as The Danish Collector (2021) and John Singer Sargent: Fashion and Swagger (2024)

Frances began her career working for Sotheby's auctioneers and, briefly, as an arts journalist. She gained her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1994 and taught at the universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and at Edinburgh College of Art. She worked in the curatorial department at Tate Britain before joining the National Galleries of Scotland 2001-24.

Frances is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (elected 2022), Senior Trustee of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, Chair of the Hospitalfield Trust and Patron of Paisley Museum Reimagined. She is a Board Director of ICRA (the International Catalogue Raisonné Association) and is on the Scholarly Advisory Board of the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History). She is also on the International Scholarly Advisory Board of the Van Gogh Worldwide project, and the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History. She was Chair of the Association for Art History from 2019-2023 and is a co-founder and former Board member of the International Art Market Studies Association (TIAMSA), 2017-2022. She was the 2022 Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow.

Frances's most recent publication is The Art Market and the Museum (Bloomsbury 2025). The Art Market and the Museum: Institutional Collecting, Display and Patronage since the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Contextualizing Art Markets Frances Fowle Bloomsbury Visual Arts

In 2023 her two-volume book French Painting 1500-1900 was shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year Award (Scotland’s National Book Awards).

In 2020 she published Yale University Press’s first ‘born digital’ book, Globalizing Impressionism: reception, translation and transnationalism, co-edited with Alexis Clark. This was listed in April 2024 in Art in America as 'One of the Five most essential books about Impressionism'.

She was also co-author of Celts: Art and Identity which was shortlisted for the Archaeology Now Book of the Year 2016.

Research interests

Nineteenth-Century Art
Women Collectors
Art Market Studies
Artists' Colonies
Impressionism and Symbolism

Research

Current and future projects

Frances is co-editor (with MaryKate Cleary) of The Art Market and the Museum: Institutional Collecting, Display and Patronage since the mid-nineteenth century, published by Bloomsbury in their Contextualizing Art Markets series.
Frances is lead editor of a four-volume anthology of primary sources on Scottish Art in the Industrial Age, c.1800-1914, to be published in 2025 by Routledge Historical Resources.
Frances is co-author with Dr Hannah Halliwell of The Historical Dictionary of Impressionism, to be published by Bloomsbury.

Recent exhibitions and publications

Frances is co-author (with Karen Serres and Jennifer Thompson) of Monet and London: Views of the Thames, Courtauld Institute, 2024.
Frances was guest curator of Discovering Degas: Collecting in the Time of William Burrell at the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, 24 May - 30 September 2024.
She also co-curated Lavery on Location, a partnership with the National Gallery of Art, Dublin, National Museums NI and National Galleries of Scotland, 2023-2024
Frances is co-author (with Michael Clarke) of a major critical catalogue, French Paintings 1500-1900 in the National Galleries of Scotland, published in April 2023 and shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year.
In 2022 Frances curated the National Galleries of Scotland's main summer exhibition, A Taste for Impressionism: Modern French Art from Millet to Matisse at the Royal Scottish Academy. The accompanying book, The Impressionist Era: The Story of Scotland's French Masterpieces was published in October 2021.
In 2020 Frances published Yale University Press's first 'born digital' book, co-edited with Alexis Clark. Globalizing Impressionism: reception, translation and transnationalism, an anthology of 14 essays by international scholars of impressionism, is available on Yale's new A&A ePortal.

Other key publications and exhibitions

Frances is the author of Van Gogh's Twin: the Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid (1854-1928) (2010), Impressionism and Scotland (2008) and Monet and French Landscape: Vétheuil and Normandy (2006). More recently she produced two edited publications: The Idea of North: Myth-Making and Identities (with Marja Lahelma), 2019, and Nordic Artists' Colonies 1870-1920, a special edition of Art in Translation (Taylor & Francis), 2 vols, June and December 2017.
The Idea of North: Myth-Making and Identities
View Volume 1 of Nordic Artists Colonies 1870-1920
View Volume 2 of Nordic Artists Colonies 1870-1920

Exhibitions

Frances has curated numerous major international exhibitions, most recently Pin-Ups: Toulouse-Lautrec and the Art of Celebrity (National Galleries of Scotland, 2018-19). Others include Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape (Taft Museum, Cincinnati, the National Galleries of Scotland and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2016-17); Celts: Art and Identity (British Museum and National Museums of Scotland, 2015-16 - catalogue shortlisted for the Current Archaeology Book of the Year 2017); American Impressionism: A New Vision 1880-1900 (Giverny, Edinburgh, Madrid 2014-2015), which received $600,000 in sponsorship from the Terra Foundation for American Art; Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 (Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Helsinki 2012-13); Impressionism and Scotland (2008); Van Gogh and Britain: Pioneer Collectors (2006); Gauguin's Vision (2005); Patrick Geddes: the French Connection (2004).

French, British nineteenth-century art; Collecting and Art Market; Networks and Artists' Colonies; Celtic Revival and northern identity; American Gilded Age.