Tuesday 8 December 2015


The Berger Prize 2015

Winner of the £5000 annual prize

William L Pressly
James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art
published by Cork University Press

William L Pressly has won the 2015 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History for his brilliant analysis of the murals in the Royal Society of Arts, London, by the 18th-century Irish painter James Barry

Dr Loyd Grossman CBE (right) presented Professor Pressly with the £5000 prize at a reception last night, Monday 7 December 2015, at the Society of Antiquaries of London




‘Nothing could be more fitting than that this superbly produced book should have been published by Cork University Press, in the city of James Barry’s birth,’ said Robin Simon, the editor of The British Art Journal, which administers the prize. ‘Barry’s strange and wonderful murals, hidden away in the heart of London, are one of the great episodes in British and Irish art and one of the most mysterious. Professor Pressly’s remarkable explanation is a triumph of research and reflection and the book is beautifully written.’

Friday 30 October 2015

William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2015 Short List


Michael Hall
George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America
Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
hb col 200 bw 100 pp352
ISBN 978-0300208023 £50
‘A life’s work… a huge achievement… identifies Bodley’s voice… shows that he was not just a follower but took the style forward into Modernism’


Ruth Guilding
Owning the Past: Why the English collected Antique Sculpture, 1640–1840
Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
hb col 100 bw 200
pp410 ISBN 978-0-300-20819-1 £55
‘Guilding writes with brio, style and charm… highly informative with unusual illustrations, many of them droll… a most original approach to a well-known subject’


Paul Binski
Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290-1350
Yale University Press
hb col 175 bw 100 pp448 ISBN 978-0-300-20400-1 £40
‘Binski’s riveting, original account… analyses so well that it was part aesthetics, part technology… how fundamental the style was to the world of Gothic in the most enduring sense’


William L Pressly
James Barry’s Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art
Cork University Press hb col 122 bw 3 pp384
ISBN 978-1-78205-108-4 Euro 49
‘Pressly’s detailed and unusual study throws light upon one of the most extraordinary episodes in British and Irish art, and in a marvellous and inspirational way’


Jane Munro
Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish
Yale University Press in Association with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
hb col 220 bw 50 pp275
ISBN 978-0-300-20822-1 £40
‘Loved it… a very rich account of the artist’s “significant other”… many insights into the technology of art, the backroom and how the studio held together and functioned… fascinating illustrations’


Malcolm Baker
The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
hb col 100 bw 300 pp420
ISBN 978-0-300-20134-6 £50
‘Crazy title… wonderful book… and we discover where it comes from… Baker shows that sculpture was absolutely central to the period – and this book is now central to our understanding of it ’


Hors concours
Martin Postle, Robin Simon, eds, Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting Yale Center for British Art/Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum Wales/Yale University Press col 280 pp416 ISBN 978-0300203851 £45

Assessors John Wilson (Berger Collection Educational Trust), Robin Simon (The British Art Journal), Andrew Wilton, Rosemary Hill, James Hamilton

Please note Simon Swynfen Jervis and Dudley Dodd, Roman Splendour, English Arcadia… was inadvertently included in this year’s Long List. It will be go forward to next year’s Long List



The Prize of £5000 will be awarded by Dr Loyd Grossman CBE FSA at a reception in central London on the evening of Monday 7 December 2015