JAMES HAMILTON

is a curator, writer and lecturer, who entered the University of Manchester to read Mechanical Engineering, and emerged with a degree in History of Art.

This radical change in direction has, thirty years later, distilled itself into a cycle of three books which look from a variety of angles at the society of art and science in London in the first half of the nineteenth century

James Hamilton will be at the Edinburgh International Literature Festival in August talking about London Lights. More information >>

‘James Hamilton is an outstanding biographer. He reveals Turner’s world for all its wild contradictions and, like Turner, brings to life what the eye cannot see.’
Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

‘James Hamilton is a wonderfully energetic writer who in London Lights has found a perfect subject in the story of the men and women who invented modern London. The book is a revelation’
Fiona MacCarthy, biographer of Eric Gill, William Morris and Lord Byron.

The Seven Lives of John Murray

Humphrey Carpenter's last book, The Seven Lives of John Murray, was edited by James Hamilton and is published by John Murrray in 2008.

James Hamilton

As a curator James Hamilton has organised dozens of exhibitions since the 1970s including Wilhelm Lehmbruck (Portsmouth City Museum, 1974), Arthur Rackham (Sheffield, Bristol and the V&A, 1979-80), The Danish Show – Contemporary Paintings (1986-87) and Turner’s Britain (Birmingham, 2003). Please go to Exhibitions for more details. He has written widely on nineteenth and twentieth century art, and in the Spectator, The Independent and the Financial Times. His writing on painting and printmaking explores in particular artists whose work crosses the boundaries which tend to separate art, literature and science.

He is University Curator and Honorary Reader at the University of Birmingham, and was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1998/99.

He has lectured across the United Kingdom and in Italy and the USA on Turner, Faraday, and the culture of Victorian Britain, and has contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4 on the art of
J M W Turner.