DEPTDIRECTORY
Faculty » Malcolm Baker
"Place des Victoires"
Thomas Rowlandson
1789, Yale Center for British Art
(The image comes from the YBCA)
Distinguished Professor
Office: 325 Arts Building
Phone: (951) 827-4634
E-mail: mcbaker@ucr.edu
Ph.D., University of Edinburgh
Areas of specialization: History of sculpture, especially in 18th century Britain, France and Germany; portraiture; 18th century British art, history of collecting and display.
Professor Baker comes to UCR from the University of Southern California where
he was Chair of Art History and Director of the USC-Getty Program in the
History of Collecting. His earlier career in Britain was divided between teaching
the Universities of York and Sussex and working as a curator at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, one of London's major museums. He has written widely on
sculpture, the decorative arts and collecting and has attempted to redress the
bias of historians of eighteenth-century art towards painting by drawing attention
to the centrality of sculpture during this period. Among his books are Roubiliac
and the Eighteenth-Century Monument (co-authored with David Bindman and
awarded the 1996 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art) and Figured in Marble:
the Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-Century Sculpture. During 2007-08
will be a Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library where he will be writing "The
Marble Index: Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain" — a study of
how the portrait bust became modern.