Pamela M. Fletcher

Affiliation: Art History

Professor of Art History

Pamela Fletcher specializes in the history of British art. Her work centers on Victorian and Edwardian painting, with a focus on questions of narrative, sentiment and play in the context of nineteenth-century exhibition culture. Her most recent book The Victorian Painting of Modern Life (Routledge 2025) tells the story of the emergence and flourishing of British modern-life paintings in the mid-nineteenth century, arguing that these paintings asked sharply contemporary questions about the effects of new technologies, financial and political systems, and rhythms of urban life on people’s private lives and intimate relationships, asking their viewers to reflect on and talk about the emotional contours of modern experience. She also studies the art market, with a particular focus on the development of the commercial art gallery in London and New York over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Her courses at Bowdoin cover the history of European art from the 18th century to the present, as well as contemporary art in the United States. She also teaches courses on the art market, digital literacy and the rise of new media, and histories of women in art. Her courses are cross listed with Digital and Computational Studies, Urban Studies, and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies.

Books

The Victorian Painting of Modern Life. London and New York: Routledge, 2025.

The Victorian Artist. 3 Volumes. Co-edited with Joanna Devereaux and Alison Syme. Routledge Historical Resources, forthcoming 2026.

The Picture Business: The Inside Story of the Knoedler Gallery and the Origins of New York’s Art Market. Co-authored with Anne Helmreich. Getty Publications, under contract.

Co-editor (with Anne Helmreich), The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850-1939. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, Fall 2011.

Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture, 1895-1914 (Ashgate, 2003).

Digital Project

London Gallery Project, co-authored with David N. Israel, 2007; Revised September 2012.
http://learn.bowdoin.edu/fletcher/london-gallery/

Articles and Chapters

“Relational Objects: Studio Props and Social Networks in Victorian Painting” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 31 (Spring 2022): 39-53.

“‘Unmistakably Visible’: Queen Victoria in Frith’s The Marriage of the Prince of Wales,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 33 (2022). (20pp)

“From Replica to Original: Abraham Solomon and the Market for Modern-Life Subjects,” inNineteenth-Century British Artists' Autograph Replicas: Auras, Aesthetics and Economics, ed. Julie Codell. (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 183-94.

“Digital Methods and the Study of the Art Market,” co-authored with Anne Helmreich, in The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, ed. Kathryn Brown, London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 167-77.

“Reframing the ‘International Art Market’,” co-authored with Anne Helmreich, in Art Crossing Borders: The International Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1760-1914, eds. Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna in the series Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), pp. 327-41.

“Networked: The International Art Market in the Nineteenth-Century,” co-authored with Anne Helmreich, in A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art, ed. Michelle Facos (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), pp. 83-101.

Five Chronicle Entries (“1854: Modern Life Subjects”; “1859: Sequel Paintings”; “1862: The Paragone”; “1903: The Prodigal Daughter and the Problem Picture”; and “1919: Virginia Woolf and Cocaine”) in The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769-2018. Edited by Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner and Jessica Feather. London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2018.https://chronicle250.com/

“Reader, Viewer, Spectator, Beholder: Response,” Victorian Studies Volume 59, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 457-462.

“Reflections on Digital Art History,” caa.reviews. June 18, 2015. http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2726 Translated into Croatian: “Razmišljanja o digitalnoj povijesti umjetnosti” Život umjetnosti 99 (2016): 20-27 (https://zivotumjetnosti.ipu.hr/) co-authored with Crystal Hall, “Digital Humanities and the Common Good.” Maine Policy Review 24.1 (2015): 124 -131.

“Human Character and Character-Reading at the Edwardian Royal Academy,” Visual Culture in Britain 14, no. 1 (2013): 21-35.

Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, with David N. Israel and Seth Erickson. “Local/Global: Mapping Nineteenth-Century London’s Art Market,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2012) [http://19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/autumn12/fletcher-helmreich-mapping-the-london-art-market (The first article published in NCAW’s Digital Humanities and Art History series, funded by the A. W. Mellon Foundation.) 2014 Association of Research Institutes in Art History Online Publishing Prize.

“The Grand Tour on Bond Street: Cosmopolitanism and the Commercial Art Gallery in Victorian London,” Visual Culture in Britain, Summer 2011.

“Happiness Lost: William Powell Frith and the Painting of Modern Life,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33, no. 2 (June 2011).

Victorian Studies Book Cover Image
“Narrative Painting and Visual Gossip at the Early-Twentieth-Century Royal Academy,” Oxford Art Journal, 2009 32(2):243-262

“‘To wipe a manly tear;’ The Aesthetics of Emotion in Victorian Narrative Painting,” Victorian Studies Volume 51, Number 3, Spring 2009

co-authored with Anne Helmreich, “The Periodical and the Art Market: Investigating the ‘Dealer-Critic System’ in Victorian England,” Victorian Periodicals Review 41, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 323-51.

"Virtue, Vice, Sex, and Gossip: Narratives of Gender in Late Victorian and Edwardian Painting," Remapping British Art and Architecture Editors Dana Arnold, and David Peters Corbett. Commissioned for Blackwell; forthcoming.

"Creating the French Gallery: Ernest Gambart and the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Mid-Victorian London," Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Volume 6, no. 1 (Spring 2007).

English Art Book Cover Image
"Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce and Value in Late Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism." Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 6 Issue 2, Winter 2005, pp 157-170.
Abstract »

"Masculinity, Money, and Modern Art: The Sentence of Death by John Collier." English Art, 1860-1914: Modern Artists and Identity. Eds. David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Exhibitions, Encyclopedia Entries and Reviews

Review of Patricia Smyth, Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle (Liverpool University Press, 2022), Victorian Studies 66/4 (Summer 2024): 716-718.

Review of Diana Davis, The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785-1865 (Getty Research Institute, 2020), Victorian Studies (2022)

Review of Diana Greenwald, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art (Princeton University Press, 2021), caa.reviews December 2021.

“Portrait of Maud by Julia Margaret Cameron,” catalogue entry, Art Purposes: Object Lessons for the Liberal Arts (Delmonico Books – Prestel and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2019), 90.

“Preservation,” catalogue entry on John Ruskin: The Porta Della Carta, in Why Draw? Prestel and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2017, 66-7.

“John Ruskin: The Porta Della Carta,” catalogue entry, Why Draw? Prestel and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 2017.

Review of The Camden Town Group in Context, eds. Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt and Jennifer Mundy (Tate Research Publication, 2012, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group). Art Bulletin, June 2017.

Review of John Paul M. Kanwit, Victorian Art Criticism and the Woman Writer (The Ohio State University Press, 2013). Victorian Studies 57/4 (Summer 2015): 706-708.

Review of Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room, Eds. Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke (Ashgate, 2012). The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 22 (Fall 2013): 107-110.

Review of Elizabeth A. Pergam, The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 (Ashgate, 2011). Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35, no. 1 (February 2013): 96-8.

Review of Amy Woodson-Boulton, Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain (Stanford University Press, 2012). The Journal of British Studies 52, no.2 (April 2013): 567-9.

“Victorians and Moderns” and four catalogue entries, Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Yale Center for British Art, 2013. 99-107, 346-7, 355-6, 358.

“On the Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in London,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. www. branchcollective.org. Posted February 27, 2012. [http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=pamela-fletcher-on-the-rise-of-the-commercial-art-gallery-in-london]

“William Maw Egley” and “Marcus Stone,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Review of Katharine Lochnan and Carol Jacobi (eds.), Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Victorian Studies, 52, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 476-8.

Review of Peter Trippi and Elizabeth Prettejohn (eds.), J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite (Royal Academy Publishing, 2009), caa.reviews.

Review of Kimberly Rhodes, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Ashgate, 2008), Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Fall 2009.

Review of Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 2007), Historians of British Art Newsletter, 2008.

African American Lives Book Cover image
Review of Alexander Sturgis, Rupert Christiansen, Lois Oliver, and Michael Wilson, Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century (London: National Gallery, Distributed by Yale University Press, 2006), Victorian Studies 50, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 318-9.

“Claude Phillips” and “D.S. MacColl,” Entries in The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Ghent and London: Academia Press and the British Library), 2008.

Review of Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). caa.reviews, April 2007.

Encyclopedia of Women Book Cover Image
"Edward Mitchell Bannister," in African American Lives. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. (Oxford University Press, 2004).

"Painting, Genres of," in The Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era. Editor James Eli Adams. (Grolier Academic Press, 2004).

"Painting," and "The Politics of Representation," in The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women. Editors Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender. (Routledge, 2000.)

Post Pre Rahaelite Book Cover Image
"Illustration" and 15 catalogue entries in The Post-Pre-Raphaelite Print: Etching, Illustration, Reproductive Engraving, and Photography in England in and around the 1860s. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 1995.

"The Victorians," exhibition review, Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art Newsletter, 4/1 (April 1997).

Exhibitions Curated at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

‘We Never See Anything Clearly’: John Ruskin and Landscape Painting 1840s-1870s, October-December 2012, Becker Gallery. Co-curated with Ursula Moreno-VanderLaan ‘13 and Benjamin Livingston ‘13, students in Art History 352: The Pre-Raphaelites.

Visual Conversations: A Study Gallery for Art History 100, Fall 2009, Shaw Ruddock Gallery. Co-curated with Professors Susan Wegner and De-nin Lee.

Becoming a (Woman) Artist, Fall 2007
Modernism and the Nude, Fall 2001.

“The Visual Language of the “Now” in the Illustrated Press,” INCS Annual Conference, Genoa, Italy, June 2025.

“Salisbury, Portsmouth, Dublin: The Circulation of Art and Definition of a “British Public,” NAVSA Event 24 Virtual Panel “The Invention of British Art,” October 2024.

“Framed in Ink: Print Culture at the Royal Academy,” College Art Association Annual Conference, New York, February 2023.

“Marketing Opportunity: Gambart and Women Artists,” The Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States, Virtual Panel on “Promises of the Victorian International Art Market,” February 2023.

“The Formation of the New York City Art Market, 1850s-1920s,” (with Anne Helmreich).Digital Approaches to Nineteenth-Century American Art, The Courtauld Centre for American Art, London, May 2022. Online.

“Mapping British Art Worlds; Mapping Digital Art History,” Keynote address for Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism. Virtual Residency Program, British Art Studies and the Terra Foundation, November 2021. Online.

“Circulation,” Keynote Address, Art on the Move: A Conference on Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century," University of Birmingham, UK, January 2018.

“Viewing Bodies: Looking at Art with William Powell Frith and Lawrence Alma-Tadema,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March 2017.

“Mapping the Commercial Art Gallery in Nineteenth-Century London,” Cologne University, Cologne, Germany, December 2016.

“The Social Spaces of Victorian Realist Painting,” North American Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, November 2016.

Panelist, Art History in Digital Dimensions symposium, University of Maryland, October 2016. (Invitation only symposium, sponsored by the Kress Foundation and the Getty Foundation.)

“The Sequel: Memory, Time, and Attachment in Victorian Narrative Painting (1859), A Year’s Art: The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 1769-2016, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, England, September 2016.

“Mapping the Commercial Art Gallery in Nineteenth-Century London,” Digital Mapping and the Humanities Lecture Series, Emory University, March 2016.

“Digital Art History: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Apps, Maps and Models: Digital Pedagogy and Research Symposium, Duke University, February 2016.

Discussant, “Digital Art History: New Projects, New Questions,” CAA, February 2016

“Mapping the Commercial Gallery System in Nineteenth-Century London; or, The Promise and Perils of Digital Art History,” Public lecture in the Elizabeth Allen Visiting Scholar in Art History series, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, March 2015.

“Exhibition, Circulation, Memory: An Aesthetic Geography of Victorian London,” Sonic Spaces: Music and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century London, Yale University, March 2015. (Invitation only symposium.)

Respondent, “Doing Digital Art History: Reflection on the Field,” College Art Association Annual Conference, New York, February 2015.

“Mapping the Commercial Gallery System in Nineteenth-Century London,” guest lecture at Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History, Sponsored by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Middlebury, August 2014.

“The London Gallery Project: Process and Outcomes,” THATCamp Session, College Art Association, Chicago, February 2014.

Discussant, “Spatial (Digital) Art History” session, College Art Association, Chicago, February 2014.

“Performing Absorption: Looking at Art with Lawrence Alma-Tadema and William Powell Frith,” at “The Global and the Local,” a supernumerary conference sponsored by the North American Victorian Studies Conference, the British Association of Victorian Studies and the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, Venice, Italy, June 2013.

"Maps, Networks, and Art Markets: Doing Digital Art History", Wesleyan Digital and Computational Knowledge Initiative, March, 2015.

Invited Seminar Leader (with Morna O’Neill), “Storytelling and Play in Victorian Art and Visual Culture,” North American Victorian Studies Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, November 2011.

Keynote Address, “Moralities in the Visual Arts,” 36th Annual Graduate Student Symposium, Department of Art History, University of California Santa Barbara, April 2011.

“Edwardian Obituaries for Victorian Art,” British Association of Modernist Studies and Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, University of Glasgow, December 2010.

“Happiness Lost: The Space of Victorian Modern-Life Genre Painting,” North AmericanVictorian Studies Association Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada, November 2010.

“Human Character at the Edwardian Royal Academy, c. 1910,” Midwest Conference on British Studies Annual Conference, Cleveland, Ohio, October 2010.

“The Problem of Painting Modern Life, c. 1850,” New England Conference on British Studies, Burlington, Vermont, September 2010.

“Victorian Old Masters,” Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference, Venice,Italy, April 2010.

“Gossiping at the Royal Academy,” Symposium in honor of Natalie Boymel Kampen, Barnard College and Columbia University, New York, October 2009.

“Shopping for Art: The Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery,” Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States joint conference with the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, October 2009.

Co-chair, “Galleries, Dealers and Critics: London’s Art Market in the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States joint conference with the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, October 2009.

“Happiness Lost: William Powell Frith and the Painting of Modern Life,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, Saratoga Springs, New York, April 2009.

“ ‘To wipe a manly tear:’ The Aesthetics of Emotion in Victorian Narrative Painting,” North American Victorian Studies Association, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, November 2008.

“The Grand Tour on Bond Street: Cosmopolitanism and the Commercial Art Gallery,” Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, Tate Britain, Tate Modern and Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, April 2008.

“Modern Masters and ‘Cheap French Chic:’ Cosmopolitanism in the Victorian Art Market” Northeast Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 2007.

Chair, "A Nation of Shopkeepers: Innovation and the Art Market in Great Britain," College Art Association, New York, February 2007.

"Shopping for Art: Commercial Art Galleries and Their Publics 1870-1914," The Rise of the London Art Market. Tate Britain, London, February 2007.

"Apologia Pro Arte Mea: A Critic's Perspective on the Art Market and the Press," Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, New York, 2006.

"Artistic Circulation: The Social Lives of Victorian Paintings", North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Conference, September 2006.

"Cosmopolitan Connoisseurs: The Commercial Art Gallery and Its Publics," Internationalism and the Arts: Cultural Exchange between Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siecle, Magdalene College, Cambridge University, July 2006.

"Cocaine Addicts and Bolsheviks: Gossip and Topicality in British Narrative Painting," College Art Association, Boston, February 2006.

"The Social Practice of Victorian Art," commentator for the panel "New Market/New Economies: Art and Design Discourses c. 1840-1890," North American Conference on British Studies, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 2004

"Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce, and Value in Late Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism." Visual Culture and Taste in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, Centre for Visual Culture in Britain, University of Northumbria, July 2004

" 'Let me be your banker': The Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery in Mid-Victorian London," North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Bloomington, Indiana, October 2003.

"Art, Commerce, and the Nation: Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery." College Art Association, New York, February 2003.

"Queen Victoria's Indian Subjects: Rudolph Swoboda's Indian Portraits at Osborne House." Women Art Patrons and Collectors, New York Public Library, New York, March 1999.

"The Fallen Woman and the New Woman: The Prodigal Daughter by John Collier." College Art Association, Los Angeles, February 1999.

Education

PhD, Columbia University, 1998
MA, Feminist Theory, Columbia University, 1994
AB, Bowdoin College, 1989

Art History