Thanks to generous financial support from Bob McCarthy, a wall painting project has recently been launched by Dr. Melena Hope, the Bob McCarthy Post-Doctoral Fellow for 2008-2010, in collaboration with the Conway Library. Part of the fellowship is devoted to a research and digitisation project aiming to catalogue over 4,000 photographs, drawings, as well as newspaper and journal cuttings depicting wall paintings and other monumental decoration. This eclectic, but rich repository of visual sources covers a wide chronological and geographical span - showcasing works especially from medieval Britain, but also other northern European countries, and including paintings dating up to the 18th century. It is hoped that the digitisation of this fascinating collection will help bring a relatively neglected segment of the Conway holdings to a wider audience, while the addition of vital data and enhanced cataloguing will make the imagery more useful to both scholars and the wider public. In addition to her work on the image collection at the Conway Library, Melena is also undertaking research projects on two sites containing fifteenth-century wall paintings in France: the Chapelle Dorée at the Cathédrale Saint-Lazare (Autun), and the oratory of Château de Busset (Allier).

The intention is to make images available by Summer 2010. Updates on the progress of the project, and links to online images, will be available from this website.

For further information contact: melena.hope@courtauld.ac.uk

Author’s Biography

Melena Hope completed her PhD, entitled "Painted Domestic Chapels and Oratories in the Households of Fifteenth-Century France", at The Courtauld Institute of Art in January 2009. Since 2008 she has been the Bob McCarthy Post-Doctoral Fellow, working on the aforementioned wall painting project in collaboration with the Conway Library at The Courtauld. While her specific interests centre around religious wall paintings in domestic and other 'private' settings, she is more broadly interested in the function and audience of devotional art, the relationship between artworks of different media (especially the interplay between works of art and their architectural settings), and artistic culture in Northern Europe in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She is a visiting lecturer at The Courtauld (since 2007) and the University of Kent, and has taught at Birkbeck College.