Ann Bermingham

Ann Bermingham
Professor Emeritus

Specialization

18th and 19th-century European art, particularly British art.

Education

B.A. Manhattanville College
M.A. University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Ph.D. Harvard University

Bio

Ann Bermingham is a specialist in British art of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Her current research explores emotion and irrationalism in late eighteenth-century art and the forms of early industrial architecture in Britain. She is the author of Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1760-1860, and Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art. Learning to Draw was awarded best book of 2000 by the Historians of British Art and named by Choice as "one of the most outstanding academic titles for 2000." She is the editor of Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s Cottage Door and, with John Brewer, The Consumption of Culture: Image, Object, Text, 1600-1800. Recent publications include “Daughters and Sisters: Gainsborough’s Portraits of Mary and Margaret,” Gainsborough’s Family Album, ed. David Solkin, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2019 and “Excursions of Imagination: British Drawing from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century,” Excursions of Imagination: 100 Great British Drawings from the Huntington’s Collection, Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA, 2022.

Publications

Ann Bermingham. “Excursions of Imagination: British Drawing from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century,” Excursions of Imagination: 100 Great British Drawings from the Huntington’s Collection Link opens an external site, Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA, 2022.

Ann Bermingham. “Daughters and Sisters: Gainsborough’s Portraits of Mary and Margaret,” Gainsborough’s Family Album Link opens an external site, ed. David Solkin, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2019.

Ann Bermingham. "Technologies of Illusion: De Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon in Eighteenth-Century London Link opens in a PDF reader."  Art History 39, no. 2 (Apr 2016): 376-399.