My research documents the evolving, yet often overlooked, appreciation and taste for Neapolitan Baroque painting in England from the seventeenth century to the present and attests to its important role in the formation of English artistic sensibilities. It traces the evolution of English collecting and display practices and shifting tastes (and distaste) for the Neapolitan Baroque, investigating the ways in which the Neapolitan Baroque was perceived, valued, experienced, and interpreted by private collectors, museum curators, and the wider public across the country.
What emerges from this research are new perspectives that weave together Naples and England, migration and imagination, collecting and identity. It repositions Naples as one of the most far‑reaching Baroque cities, which was central, rather than peripheral, to the history of English collecting, and demonstrates how its visual culture became deeply embedded within English artistic imagination, taste, display and collecting traditions.