IMOGEN TEDBURY

Staff photo of the Curator of Southern European Art standing in front of a brick wall

Contact
Email: imogen.tedbury@ashmus.ox.ac.uk

University of Oxford webpages

Biography

Imogen Tedbury is Curator of Southern European Art in the Western Art department, with collections responsibility for Italian, Spanish and earlier French paintings, prints and drawings. She is a Governing Body Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.

Prior to her appointment at the Ashmolean, Imogen worked as a collections curator at the National Gallery. She was part of the curatorial team leading on the redisplay of the collections for the Gallery’s bicentenary (The Wonder of Art), and a co-curator for exhibitions Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 (The National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024-25) and Zurbarán (The National Gallery, Musée du Louvre and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2025-26).

She has also worked as a curator at the National Maritime Museum, where she co-curated the exhibition The Van de Veldes: Greenwich, Art and the Sea (the Queen’s House, 2023-24).

In addition to her curatorial responsibilities, Imogen is cataloguing the earlier Italian paintings of the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, with Sir Nicholas Penny. She is a regular contributor to Apollo.

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Research

Imogen is interested in the intersections between histories of taste and the long lives of objects, from the time of their making to the present. She is an art historian of the Trecento, with a focus on early Italian panel painting.

Other aspects of her work present a ‘material turn’ in the history of collecting, investigating subjects such as the connection between historic restoration practices and the art market, or the material traces that might illuminate the storage and circulation of drawings by artists and collectors.

Her current major research project is her work for the Norton Simon Museum’s Italian paintings catalogue. She is responsible for cataloguing some major works, such as Giovanni di Paolo’s Branchini Madonna, as well as works that came to the collection when Norton Simon purchased the remaining stock of the Duveen Galleries in New York. The project engages with issues of patronage and workshop production processes, but also with the later histories of these works, exploring conservation treatments, framing and sales tactics employed by Duveen in its final decades.

Imogen values technical art history and the insights that arise through collaboration between curators, conservators and conservation scientists. At the National Gallery, she was involved in a five-year collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Museo Nazionale, Arezzo, investigating the techniques of Margarito d’Arezzo and his 13th-century contemporaries. Her research has been funded by the Biblioteca Hertziana, the Warburg Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.