Professor Michael Rosenthal
BA, PhD (London), MA (Cantab)
Michael Rosenthal studied at the Courtauld Institute, and was Leverhulme Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, before arriving at Warwick, where, to his surprise, he remained for 35 years. He held various fellowships in Australia and the US, and was lead curator of the Gainsborough exhibition at Tate Britain in 2002.
His research concentrated on the arts within British social and cultural histories, mainly of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and he has had an abiding concern with landscape. For some time now, he has been working on colonial art in Australia 1788-1840; about which he is writing a book, The Artless Landscape. Freed from the obligation to extol the virtues of civilised values in a country that isn't all that bothered with them, he is spending his retirement visiting Australia, attending race meetings, watching county cricket, and attempting to stave off the extinction of the country pub.
Michael Rosenthal was able, with grateful thanks to to the Leverhulme Trust, to spend November 2011-April 2012 in Sydney, getting on with the research towards a second book on colonial Australia; Governor Macquarie's Culture. He now finds himself retransported to The Land of Despair, and wondering what he did to deserve this.
