Jacqueline Riding

Dr Jacqueline Riding, former curator of the Palace of Westminster and Director of the Handel House Museum, is an independent scholar, freelance curator and author specialising in British art and history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a current academic focus on William Hogarth’s drawings. She is a historical adviser on feature films (Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner and Peterloo); consultant for museums, galleries and historic buildings; Contributing Editor, Books for The Art Newspaper; a trustee of JMW Turner’s House and the Jacobite Studies Trust; a Paul Mellon Centre Mid-Career Fellow; and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Department of History of Art University of York, and the Royal Historical Society. Her recent and forthcoming projects include: curator of the Foundling Museum’s exhibition Basic Instincts: Love, Passion and Violence in the Art of Joseph Highmore (2017) and author of the accompanying publication based on her PhD from the University of York (Paul Holberton Publishing 2017); scriptwriter/adviser for the Foundling Museum’s exhibition/soundscape Hogarth & the Art of Noise (2019); exhibition co-curator of Between the Sheets: Turner’s Female Nudes (Turner’s House 2022); exhibition co-curator of Hogarth’s Britons (Derby Museum and Art Gallery 2023) and author of the accompanying publication/catalogue (Paul Holberton Publishing 2023, with contributions by Lucy Bamford). Her trade history books include Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion (Bloomsbury 2016), Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre (Head of Zeus 2018), Hogarth: Life in Progress (Profile 2021) the Sunday Times Art Book of the Year, and her current book project is Hard Streets: Working Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London (Profile 2025).