Christiana Payne is Professor Emerita of History of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She has published widely on British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her books include Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in England 1780-1890 (Yale University Press, 1993), Where the Sea meets the Land: Artists on the Coast in Nineteenth-century Britain (Sansom and Company, 2007), John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter (Yale University Press, 2010) and Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870 (Sansom and Company, 2017).
Exhibitions that she has curated or co-curated in the past include Objects of Affection: Pre-Raphaelite Portraits by John Brett (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, 2010), A Walk in the Woods: A Celebration of Trees in British Art (Higgins Art Gallery and Museum, Bedford, 2017-18), Fire: Flashes to Ashes in British Art 1692-2019 (RWA, Bristol, 2019), and Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2021).
Current co-curated exhibitions are Body and Soul (the Higgins Art Gallery and Museum, Bedford, April-October 2022) and Earth: Digging Deep in British Art 1781-2022 (RWA Bristol, July-September 2022). She is also working on a book about American artists, writers and trees, c. 1820-1870.
