Professor Mark Ledbury

+61 2 9351 4826
Room N312, RC Mills Building A26

Mark Ledbury is also Director of the Power Institute, and was previously with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, where he was Associate Director of the Research and Academic Program. In that role he oversaw the expansion of the research program’s ambition and reach. He devised, planned and ran workshops, conferences and partnerships and worked to develop and oversee a lively residential scholars’ program.

Professor Ledbury took his degrees at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sussex, and his first academic post was as lecturer in Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth. He then moved to the University of Manchester where he was lecturer in Art History, until he joined the Clark in 2003.

Professor Ledbury’s research interests are in the history of French Art, particularly eighteenth-century Art, and specifically in the relationships between theatre and visual art and in genre theory in the Enlightenment. He has published widely on Boucher, Greuze, David, and on inter-arts networks and relationships.

Research areas

• eighteenth and nineteenth century European art, on the relationships between theatre and the visual arts and questions of genre in particular
• methods of art history
• eighteenth-century French artists, including Francois Boucher, Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Current projects

An Eccentric History of History Painting (forthcoming)

Selected Publications

Books

• Sedaine, Greuze and the Boundaries of Genre (Oxford, 2000)

Edited volumes

• Fictions of Art History (Yale University Press, 2012, forthcoming)
• David After David (Clark/Yale University Press, 2007)
• With Melissa Hyde, ed, Rethinking Boucher (Getty Publications: 2005)
• With David Charlton, Michel-Jean Sedaine 1719-1797: Theatre, Opera and Art (Ashgate, 2000)
• With Elizabeth Décultot, Aesthetic Debates in Enlightenment Europe: Questions of Theory and Practice (Paris: Champion, 2000)

Articles since 2005

• 'Embracing and Escaping the Material: Genre Painting, Objects and Private Life in Eighteenth-Century France' in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2010:11 (November 2010)
• 'Sets, Lives, and Videotape', (Review essay) Eighteenth-Century Life, Fall 2010; 34: 63 - 75
• 'Greuze in Limbo: Being Betwixt and Between’, in French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth-Century (Studies in the History of Art), 72 (2007), 179-199
• 'Vingt ans de recherches sur la peinture française (1775-1825)’, Perspective 3 (2006), 379-406
• ‘Stages of Creation: History, Epic and Theatre in David's Early History Painting Projects’, Studiolo 3 (2005), 169-190
• ‘But is it Art History?’ in Mary Vidal and Julia Douthwaite (eds.), The Tensions of Interdisciplinarity, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, 4 (2005), 124-139

Chapters in Books since 2005

• 'Patronage and the Visual Arts in the Ancien Régime' in William Doyle, ed. The Oxford Handbook to the Ancien Régime (Oxford, 2011, forthcoming)
• 'libertés et contraintes, la peinture comme modèle pour la tragédie' in Le Théâtre des Passions (Collange, ed.exh.cat, Nantes, Fage 2011), 68-84
• 'The Contested Image: Stage, Canvas and the Origins of the French Revolution’ in Peter Campbell, (ed.), The Origins of the French Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 191-218

Professional Associations

• executive committee of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
• advisory board of several journals and publications, including Art History, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and SVEC