British Art, Incorporated

In recent decades, protests against corporate patronage have erupted in the galleries of Britain’s museums, making international headlines. Interventions by groups such as Art Not Oil, Liberate Tate, and Prescription Addiction Intervention Now have demanded that institutions confront the relationship between art and harmful corporate practices. These demonstrations are just the latest responses to British art’s long historical entanglement with private enterprise. As Philip Stern and others have demonstrated, modern Britain was shaped by the power of its corporations. This panel interrogates the place of the arts in that narrative, from the formation of early modern joint-stock companies like the Royal African Company and East India Company to the banking conglomerates of the present day. While histories of church and government patronage have long structured art historical discourse, we suggest that corporations in Britain and the British Empire were similarly influential, commissioning and funding major institutions, artists, and exhibitions.

We invite papers from a broad geographic and chronological scope that investigate how corporations shaped the visual arts in Britain and the British Empire. How have these businesses influenced what is depicted and what remains outside of the frame? What corporate histories can we discern in studies of artistic materials? How do companies use the arts to facilitate their capitalist, colonialist, extractive, and industrial objectives, and how do the arts collaborate with or challenge those missions? And how are the institutions of art history—including museums, publishing, and universities—implicated in these corporate projects?

Submit your Paper via this form. Please download, complete and send it directly to the Session Convenor(s) below by Sunday 2 November 2025:

Zoë Dostal, Amherst College, adostal@amherst.edu

Tobah Aukland-Peck, Postdoctoral Fellow at The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, tauklandpeck@gmail.com