Professor Nick Pearce holds the Richmond Chair of Fine Art at the University of Glasgow, where he is a specialist in the arts of China. He was previously a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Burrell Collection, and Durham Oriental Museum. In 1998, he joined the University of Glasgow where he has been the Head of History of Art and Head of the School of Culture & Creative Arts. He is a Smithsonian Research Associate, a trustee of the Sir William Burrell Trust, and a former trustee of the National Galleries Scotland.
Research interests
- Photography in China, particularly Western photographers and their work in China from the mid-19th to the early 20th century, but also Chinese photographers and how photography was received in China during this period.
- Collectors and patterns of collecting of Chinese art both in the West and in China, during the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. This includes the growth of both private collectors and institutional collecting and the mechanisms that fuelled these activities.
- Historiography of Chinese art studies in the West from the late-19th through to the first-half of the 20th century.
- Provenance research in Chinese art
- Other contributions to the Scottish Centre for Chinese Research (SCCR)
Selected publications
Professor Pearce was a co-guest editor for the special issue of Art Market Studies Journal: “Asian Art: The Formation of Collections” (2020). Other recent publications include:
Pearce, Nick. “From Relic to Relic: A Brief History of the Skull of Confucius”, Journal of the History of Collection Collections 26, no. 2 (2014): 207-222.
Pearce, Nick. “From the Summer Palace 1860: Provenance and Politics.” In Collecting and Displaying China’s “Summer Palace” in the West: The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France, edited by Louise Tythacott, 38-50. New York and London: Routledge, 2018.
Pearce, Nick, and Jane Milosch, eds. Collecting and Provenance: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).
Pearce, Nick. “ ‘I Shall Set at Once about the Work’: Some Agents in China.” In Art Markets, Agents and Collectors: Collecting Strategies in Europe and the United States, 1550-1950, editied by A. Turpin and S. Bracken, 241-251. New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021.
Pearce, Nick. ” ‘Twice as valuable as that of Eumorphopulos and twice as famous…’ (Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, 1931)—The Real and Imaginary World of the Chinese Art Collector.” Journal for Art Market Studies 5, no.1 (2021): fokum.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/04_Pearce.pdf.
Pearce, Nick, and Jason Steuber, eds. Original Intentions: Essays on Production, Reproduction and Interpretation in the Arts of China (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2012).
Pearce, Nick.Collecting and Provenance: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019).