Now online: Issue 29 of “British Art Studies”
James VI and I with three attendants going to Parliament (detail), from Michael van Meer’s album amicorum, 1614–15, pen and brown ink, watercolor with gold on paper, 13 × 19 cm. Collection of the University of Edinburgh (La.III.283, fol. 159v). Digital image courtesy of the University of Edinburgh.
December 18, 2025
Issue 29 of British Art Studies is now online! Marking the four-hundred-year anniversary of the death of King James VI and I, this special issue brings together studies of state portraits, luxury objects, dress, miniature paintings, jewellery, rare books, and manuscripts to reassess the material and visual cultures of the Jacobean era. It offers a fresh scholarly appraisal of a monarch and court whose artistic endeavours have long remained obscured.
The issue aims to be both corrective and generative. It challenges the enduring assumption that James was indifferent to art, demonstrating instead the vitality and ambition of the artistic cultures that flourished under his rule. At the same time, it repositions Jacobean culture within a broader geography that embraces the British Isles as a whole—Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales—and situates it within wider global networks. In doing so, the Jacobean court emerges as a dynamic centre of artistic, diplomatic, and commercial exchange.
British Art Studies is an innovative space for new peer-reviewed scholarship on all aspects of British art, co-published by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art.
