Felicity Myrone

Position: Lead Curator, Western Prints and Drawings
Specialism: Prints and drawings
Department: Collections

Felicity Myrone is an art historian and curator with a particular interest in 17th-19th-century works on paper, their collecting histories, and the historical relationships between the image collections at the British Library and British Museum.

She worked as a Curatorial Assistant at the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings before joining the British Library as Curator of Topography in 2006. In 2015 she became Lead Curator, Western Prints and Drawings, with sole responsibility for prints and drawings in the printed books, maps and manuscripts collections.

She led an externally funded team cataloguing and digitising George III’s maps and views, the King’s Topographical Collection, and managed a related research project, Transforming Topography. One outcome of the latter is the British Library webspace, Picturing Places. Other projects include ongoing cataloguing of prints and drawings, and incorporation of Mark McDonald’s catalogue of Cassiano dal Pozzo’s print collection and the BL satires described by Stephens and George.

She has hosted PhD placements on Charles I's Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, William Blake, the King's Maritime Collection and the King's Topographical Collection.

Felicity's current projects involve writing the first handbook to the prints and drawings collections with the support of a 2021 Getty Paper Project publication grant and leading a research project on prints held by both the British Library and British Museum. Both build on her 2019-20 Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellowship, Art in the Library, which investigated how the fused and intertwined institutional histories of the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library have shaped attitudes to prints and drawings.

Her research on the history and scope of the collections has previously involved hosting invited workshops in 2013 and 2015, and an international conference in 2016. In autumn 2021 she co-hosted an international online conference with Mark Hallett of the Paul Mellon Centre. She was awarded the Ian Willison Fellowship to the Rare Book School, University of Virginia in 2009 and a Georgian Papers Fellowship in 2016.

She is a Member of the AHRC Peer Review College, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Trustee of the Walpole Society.

Publications

Articles

'No Mercenary Views'? Constable’s English Landscape’, Tate Papers, no.33, (2020)
'Response to Alexandra Harris', Landscape Now, British Art Studies, Issue 10, Autumn (2018)
‘British topography: ‘Our real national art form?’, Picturing Places, British Library (2017)
‘Looking at topographical images’, Picturing Places, British Library (2017)
‘Prints and drawings at the British Museum and British Library’, Picturing Places, British Library (2017)
‘Putting topography in its place’, Picturing Places, British Library (2017)
‘What is K.Top?’, Picturing Places, British Library (2017)
‘Peter van Lerberghe: Artist, printmaker and ‘capital’ collector’, British Art Journal, 15 (Spring 2015)
‘J. M.W. Turner and his World: John Platt (1842-1902), a Late Victorian Extra-illustrator, and his Collection’, Electronic British Library Journal, Article 8 (2009)
‘The Monarch of the Plain': Paul Sandby and Topography’, in Paul Sandby (1731-1809): Picturing Britain, ed. by John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels(London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009), pp. 56-64
‘A Print by Francis Hayman Rediscovered’, Print Quarterly, 24 (December 2007), 426-428
‘Introductions to Constable's English Landscape’, Print Quarterly, 24 (September 2007), 273-77