Lecture by Dr Elena Cooper

The nineteenth century is significant both to art history – as the ‘golden age’ of the living painter – and to copyright history – as the time of the emergence of modern copyright. In a new online exhibition, Painting and Copyright in the Nineteenth Century, which will be launched at this talk, Dr Elena Cooper brings these two scholarly perspectives into conversation by discussing paintings in the Picture Gallery at Royal Holloway.

How does closely engaging with painting help us better to understand copyright history? And how does copyright history help us better to understand painting? As Elena will explain at this talk, there is no better place to explore these questions as regards the nineteenth century than Royal Holloway: the Gallery holds what, at that time, was seen as one of the very best collections of modern art, and, when viewed through a legal lens, its paintings can bring copyright history to life.

Dr Elena Cooper is Senior Lecturer at CREATe, the Research Council funded centre for copyright law research at the University of Glasgow, where she is Research Lead for Legal History and Cultural Memory. She is the author of Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image (CUP 2018), the first in-depth and longitudinal history of copyright concerning the visual arts, which she launched with an event in the Picture Gallery at Royal Holloway in December 2018. Elena is also the author of two articles about the relationship between art history and copyright history published in The Burlington Magazine in 2021 and 2022. Elena is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and is also a member of the British Art Network, organised by The Tate to connect experts on British art.

Photograph of Dr Elena Cooper by Susanna Brunetti