CATHERINE WHISTLER

Contact
Email: catherine.whistler@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0002-6671-9590

University of Oxford webpages

Biography

After completing her PhD thesis on Giambattista Tiepolo in Spain (National University of Ireland 1984) and having gained a variety of experience through teaching at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and working at the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice, Catherine became a curator and joined the University of Oxford.

The experience of working at the Christ Church Picture Gallery from June 1985 until September 1988, looking after a superb art collection, organising exhibitions and engaging with students and the public, equipped her for her University role as a curator (Assistant Keeper) at the Ashmolean Museum from October 1988. This position, with responsibility for collections including Italian, French and Spanish paintings, drawings and prints, involved teaching, research and public engagement.

Her University role also led to a Supernumerary Fellowship at St John's College, where she contributed to the promotion of the visual arts in a variety of ways. With the Ashmolean's leading position internationally, she has had different involvements with European and American museums and initiatives, from partnership exhibitions to collaborative workshops and conferences, or serving on the advisory boards of academic journals. In the UK, she has served on the Councils of the British Association of Art Historians, and the Society for Renaissance Studies, and have given expert advice to the DCMS /ACE Acceptance in Lieu panel and the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art. She has enjoyed research appointments at the Harvard University Art Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Getty Research Institute.

In 2013 she became Acting Keeper or Head of the Western Art Department (and Keeper from 2017). In 2017 the University of Oxford awarded her the title of Professor of the History of European Art as a recognition of distinction.

In January 2023 she became a Research Keeper in a part-time role (related to flexible retirement) to focus on my current ambitious Italian Drawings project. In January 2025, having fully retired, she became an Honorary Curator. At St John’s College, she holds an Emeritus Research Fellowship.

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Research

While Catherine's research has been mainly focused on Italian art, she has ranged across European art, publishing a detailed scholarly catalogue of the Italian, French and Spanish paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries at the Ashmolean in 2016.

Her doctoral research on the Tiepolo family of artists led to explorations of the arts in 18th-century Spain. She has published extensively on 16th-18th century Venetian art. She is interested in life of objects and the history of collecting and display, though she often works on wider-ranging projects with interdisciplinary aspects.

Exhibitions she has organised include ‘Opulence and Devotion: Brazilian Baroque Art’, and, in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, ‘The English Prize. The Capture of the Westmorland, an Episode of the Grand Tour’. As part of the exhibition 'Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice' that she curated in 2015–16, in collaboration with the Uffizi, Florence, leading British artist Jenny Saville displayed her responses to the gestural and material qualities of Venetian drawing. The exhibition’s themes of the significance of drawing in Venetian artistic and collecting practices were explored in her book, Venice and Drawing: Theory, Practice and Collecting 1500–1800 (2016), which won a British Academy Medal.

Her research project from 2016-2018 with co-investigator, Dr Ben Thomas (University of Kent), funded by the Leverhulme Trust, aimed to transform our understanding of Raphael, with eloquence in drawing as a research theme. They held interdisciplinary workshops exploring ideas on rhetoric, materiality, and the cognitive and expressive dimensions of drawing, and we shared our research findings in academic papers at conferences and seminars. As part of this project, the award-winning exhibition, 'Raphael: The Drawings' held at the Ashmolean from 1st June–3rd September 2017, in collaboration with the Albertina, Vienna, emphasised the visual and material eloquence of Raphael’s drawings. It won a Vice Chancellor’s PER award in 2019.

A major research project with a focus on the Ashmolean’s Italian drawings collection was funded by the Getty Foundation as part of The Paper Project, an initiative focused on prints and drawings curatorship in the 21st century. Beginning in early 2019, this has supported curatorial training in drawings scholarship and object-based research by funding two successive 18-month research fellowships for early career art historians. The project involved research travel and consultation with senior specialists nationally and internationally, in preparation for a scholarly collection catalogue of the Italian drawings, with an online resource to be produced in late 2025 as a direct result of the research.

Building on the technical and connoisseurial investigations that characterise the Italian Drawings project, a short research project in 2021, The Anonymous Drawing: Values and Identities, was generously funded by St Johns College, Oxford. She is pursuing this theme in her current research with a view to publishing a book on this topic.