Marcia Rachel Pointon, distinguished art historian, is professor emerita in the history of art at the University of Manchester and Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Born in 1943, the second daughter of Margaret Elsie and James Robert Verrall Collin, she was educated at the Quaker Ackworth School in Yorkshire, where her father taught, and then at the University of Manchester, obtaining a BA in English and the History of Art in 1966, followed by an MA in 1967, with a dissertation on Milton and English Art. She was awarded a PhD by the University of Manchester in 1974 for her thesis ‘The Work of William Dyce R.A. 1806-1864’.
Following a research fellowship at the Barber Institute, University of Birmingham (1973-1975), Pointon moved to the University of Sussex, where she remained for seventeen years being appointed Professor of the History of Art in 1989. She returned to Manchester in 1992 as Pilkington Professor of the History of Art, serving also as Research and Graduate Dean for the Faculty of Arts (1999-2002). She retired from the University of Manchester in 2002. In the following year the University awarded her the degree of Doctor of Letters and she retains the title of professor emerita. She continues to research and to serve on numerous advisory boards and panels. She has held fellowships at the Getty, the Clark Art Institute, Winterthur Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Mellon Centre. She served on the Advisory Board of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (1998-2004 and 2006-2011), and the Council of Tate Britain (2004-2007). She is a Trustee of the Art Fund and has been a member of the National Portrait Gallery’s Research Advisory Board since 2014.
Pointon’s professional interests range widely across many aspects of visual culture, imagery and representation in Western media from around 1700 to the present day. She has written extensively on portraiture, landscape, book illustration, the body in representation, gender and imagery and on the interrelations between the applied arts of jewellery and other forms of historical visual evidence. Her work has been heavily informed by feminist issues of gender and by critical theory.
Her major works include: Milton & English Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019); William Dyce RA 1806-64: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); History of Art: A Students’ Handbook (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980; numerous subsequent editions); Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830-1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993); Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture 1650-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 2013); and Rocks, Ice and Dirty Stones: Diamond Histories (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).