Brett Dolman

Brett Dolman is a curator and historian, specialising in the creation, purpose and reception of western European art in the 16^th – early 18th centuries. He is currently Curator (Collections) for Historic Royal Palaces (HRP), based at Hampton Court, responsible for the management, research, display and interpretation of fine art, including paintings and tapestries. He works alongside colleagues at HRP and at Royal Collection Trust, and has a research interest in the display of Royal Collection paintings at Hampton Court from the 16^th century to the present.
Brett is a graduate of Queens’ College, Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute, where he specialised in Renaissance and Classical art. He was a Manuscript Curator at the British Library for 7 years, responsible for topographical and antiquarian collections. At HRP since 2003, he has curated exhibitions and displays on court portraiture and the Royal Collection; at Hampton Court, he is the curator of the Cumberland Art Gallery. He has published articles on portraiture, Tudor history painting, Baroque murals, the Royal Collection and the Raphael Cartoons; he is the author of Beauty, Sex and Power, an exploration of the meaning and use of portraiture at the late Stuart court. Until 2020, he was co-lead of the BAN research group, the British Murals Network.