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Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership - Student Profiles

 

Biography

After completing the History of Art BA at King’s College, Cambridge, in 2014, I worked for Art Fund, the national fundraising organisation for museums and galleries. I resumed my studies in Cambridge in 2015 to read the MPhil in History of Art at Peterhouse, where I continued to work with my supervisor Jean Michel Massing exploring the imagery of proverbs. My research covered representations of proverbs in early eighteenth-century playing cards, depictions of ‘broomstick weddings’, and adages surrounding the scent of melons.

My doctoral research is dedicated to challenging the prevailing desensitised art historical narrative of the seventeenth century, by investigating the visual representations of the perfumed and the fetid, and exploring what meanings they held in Dutch society. The research addresses how artists strove to visualise the olfactory in an array of subject matters: from scenes of foul anatomical dissections, to portraits of women adorned with fragrant pomanders.

In September 2018 – August 2019 I was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. I remain in the Netherlands to complete my PhD and work with the Mauritshuis, The Hague, on the exhibition 'Fleeting – Scents in Colour' (11 February – 6 June 2021), supported by the AHRC-DTP Student Development Fund.

Photo credit: Rijksmuseum.

Department: History of Art
Supervisor: Jean Michel Massing
College: Pembroke
AHRC Subject Area: History of Art
Title of Thesis: Piquant Perfumes and Putrid Effluvia: Visualising Smell in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art
 Lizzie  Marx

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