Dr Robert Wilkes is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). He holds degrees from Oxford Brookes University and the University of York, and wrote his PhD thesis (Oxford Brookes, 2020) about the art and writings of Frederic George Stephens. He has published articles in The Burlington Magazine and The British Art Journal and an essay in the exhibition catalogue Pre-Raphaelites: Drawings and Watercolours (Ashmolean Museum, 2021). He has co-edited a forthcoming volume of essays, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters: Art, Poetry and Female Agency in Victorian Britain (Peter Lang, expected Spring 2022). He has also been delivering lectures on nineteenth-century British art at Unicamp.
His current research examines the British professional and amateur artists who travelled to Brazil in the nineteenth century, including Charles Landseer and Marianne North, with reference to the landscape genre. The project investigates these artists’ working practices in Brazil and how their works were disseminated back in Britain, helping to create a popular image of the tropical landscape for Georgian and Victorian audiences.
