British Art Studies (BAS)—the open-access online journal published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art and—is one year old this month. More than 24,000 readers around the world have accessed the journal to date.

Issue 4, released on November 28, 2016, offers a wide range of content that has been designed specifically for our interactive digital platform. In a new experiment for BAS, we collaborated with scholar Catherine Roach to create a virtual reconstruction of an exhibition held in 1823 at the British Institution. Roach’s article demonstrates the feedback loop between scholarly analysis and the development of new kinds of visualisations—each informs the other.

BAS also presents a data study, developed by Matthew Lincoln and Abram Fox, which features detailed visualization that shed new light to the landscape of auctions and exhibitions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Issue 4 has made use of the new “IIIF” frame for distribution of images, and now offers a zoom function and magnification for all images available in this format.

This issue’s cover collaboration features eight photographs by Martin Parr, spanning his forty year career, during which he has repeatedly turned his camera to the people and places of Britain. Photography features elsewhere in Issue 4—it is the focus of a Conversation Piece by John Tagg and an article by Sean Willcock. We also present recordings from an international conference on 'Photography and Britishness' held in New Haven in early November.


TOC

New Brutalist Image 1949–55: 'atlas to a new world' or, 'trying to look at things today' by Victoria Walsh and Claire Zimmerman

The Temporal Dimensions of the London Art Auction, 1780–1835 by Matthew Lincoln and Abram Fox

Rehanging Reynolds at the British Institution: Methods for Reconstructing Ephemeral Displays by Catherine Roach

Insurgent Citizenship: Dr John Nicholas Tresidder's Photographs of War and Peace in British India by Sean Willcock

“The Mirror-Like Sea”: A Bloomsbury Vision of Same-Sex Desire In Duncan Grant's Bathing, 1911 by Vajdon Sohaili

Super-size caricature: Thomas Rowlandson's Place de Victoires at the Society of Artists in 1783 by Kate Grandjouan

Exit Theory: Thinking Photography and Thinking History from One Crisis to Another, a Conversation Piece coordianted by John Tagg

Cover Collaboration with contributions from Martin Parr

Recordings of the Photography and Britishness conference held at the Yale Center for British Art