Sam Smiles

Sam Smiles is Programme Director for Art History and Visual Culture at Exeter University. His principal research interest is British art of the last 250 years. His other major research interest is concerned with the ways in which knowledge can be transmitted visually. His first book, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination examined how the remote past was portrayed by painters, sculptors and landscape gardeners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He followed this up with Eye Witness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain 1770-1830 , which was designed to examine the claims made in that period for images as bearers of objective knowledge. His most recent publications include: J.M.W. Turner: The Making of a Modern Artist, The Turner Book , Samuel Palmer Revisited and Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image.