Professor Frances Spalding

Frances Spalding is an art historian and biographer.

She began publishing pieces for The Times Literary Supplement, The Burlington Magazine and other journals while still a postgraduate student. Her British Art Since 1900, in Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series, established her as a specialist in 20th-century British art. She then turned to biography, first writing a life of Vanessa Bell, widely used by American scholars of Virginia Woolf, and afterwards a life of the poet Stevie Smith. Biographies of John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat, and John and Myfanwy Piper followed.

In the mid-1990s, the Tate invited Professor Spalding to write a centenary history of this national institution. It required her to weave multiple ingredients into a complex narrative, a method taken further in her recent book, The Real and Romantic: English Art since Two World Wars, which moves firmly into the field of cultural history. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History, also writing a monograph on the artist Prunella Clough; an introduction to the Bloomsbury Group; and Virginia Woolf: Art, Life, Vision, which was accompanied by a National Portrait Gallery exhibition of the same title, guest-curated by Professor Spalding. She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine, 2015-16.

Frances first came to Clare Hall as the Ashby Lecturer in 1998. She stayed on as a Visiting Fellow before moving to Newcastle University. She later returned to Cambridge as a Visiting Research Fellow at Newnham and sat on the Clare Hall Art Committee. Made a Fellow of Clare Hall in 2015, she is now Emeritus Fellow and Chair of the Art Committee. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature.