Judith Stapleton

Judith Stapleton studies British and Irish art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, entitled Sly Modernism: William Orpen, Irish Edwardian, examines the witty realism of the Edwardian era’s most prolific portrait painter, an artist whose commercial success has long belied his sustained investigation into the dissident possibilities of mimesis. Her project appraises Orpen’s position within the cognate fields of Irish, British, and continental modernism; charting the artist’s hybrid positionality in a period bracketed by Aestheticism, Irish Independence, and the First World War.

Judith holds a bachelor’s degree from Franklin & Marshall College, where she received the Williamson Medal for scholarship and leadership. In 2015, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for the pursuit of her M.A. degree at the University of Bristol. She is the curator of “An Indelible Mark: British Art of the First World War” (Yale Center for British Art) and co-curator of “Unto this Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin (Yale Center for British Art; Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, Surrey). Her research interests include transitional artistic exchange, histories of realism and modernism, and the art of the First World War.