Yale Center for British Art

10/23/2026

The Yale Center for British Art is thrilled to announce that internationally renowned artist Richard Long will create a monumental site-specific installation for the museum’s Entrance Court: “Gravity.”

“Richard Long: Gravity” debuts Wednesday, November 4. For the installation, Long uses his hands to sweep clay across the surface of a free-standing wall, making a dynamic composition that sets off a dialogue with the iconic flat, steel surfaces of the Louis Kahn–designed YCBA building. There will also be an artist talk on November 4 at 5 pm in the YCBA’s Lecture Hall, free to everyone and open to all.

Visible from the street and welcoming visitors into the museum, the commission is the first in a series of contemporary art installations for the YCBA’s Entrance Court made possible by a transformative grant from the Bukhman Foundation. Building on the museum’s previous activations of this space, the initiative brings two installations to the Entrance Court each year and will expand opportunities for audiences to encounter and interpret contemporary art in dialogue with the museum’s historic collections.

The Bukhman Foundation grant also supports interpretative materials and free youth, public, and community programs.

https://britishart.yale.edu/news-and-press/richard-long-activate-yale-center-british-arts-entrance-court-new-site-specific

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Image credit: Richard Long, 2017 © The Artist; Courtesy, Lisson. Photograph by Jack Hems.

NEW HAVEN, CT (October 22, 2026)—The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) announced today a commission by internationally renowned artist Richard Long. Gravity is a monumental site-specific installation for the museum’s Entrance Court, inaugurating a year of programming marking the institution’s...

10/22/2026

Join us this Saturday for Exploring Art-ism, a free program for families with children ages 5-12 with sensory processing differences. The program runs from 10:30 am to 12 pm includes engaging with artwork in the galleries and creating a hands-on project in a museum classroom. Parents, siblings, and relatives welcome, too!

It’s a FREE program for children on the autism spectrum and those with sensory-processing needs. Exploring Art-ism includes:• Looking in the galleries• Exploring materials• Quiet Room with sensory toys and blankets While the needs of individuals with sensory processing differences are priori...

10/21/2026

In celebration of , we’re exploring the YCBA's rich collection of mezzotints through Jacques Christophe Le Blon’s “Narcissus” (ca. 1714).

Mezzotint’s soft tonal gradations make it well-suited to reproducing oil paintings. Le Blon extended those possibilities by inventing a system for printing full-color images from three copper plates inked in blue, yellow, and red, the colors overlapping and mixing to create a complete range from flesh tones to green. Le Blon’s ambition was to translate painting’s colors and tonal richness into print.

Narcissus’s luminous body draws our attention. His pale radiance recalls Ovid’s descriptions of his ivory neck and marble-white breast, linking beauty with the appearance of sculpture. Additionally, Ovid identifies him as the son of a river god and a nymph, while a later tradition connects his parentage with Selene, goddess of the moon—such associations suggest possible contexts for his luminosity.

Reaching into the water, Narcissus tries to embrace his own reflection. At the lower right, Cupid can be read as an emblem of the self-desire that ensnares Narcissus, while the dog recalls his identity as a hunter.

Narcissus’s fascination with his reflection gives Le Blon’s choice of subject a self-referential quality. While Narcissus falls in love with an image, mezzotint seeks to capture the allure of painting. The myth becomes a way of thinking about printmaking itself: an art of creating a repeatable likeness that can captivate us as powerfully as the sensuously painted original.

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Jacques Christophe Le Blon, Narcissus, ca. 1714, color printed mezzotint with hand coloring in watercolor and gouache on medium, slightly textured, cream laid paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

10/20/2026

In the "London Review of Books," Elizabeth Goldring traces Paul Mellon’s journey as a collector, from his love of George Stubbs to the extraordinary gift that established the Yale Center for British Art. Reflecting on the museum’s recently conserved Louis Kahn building and its evolving collection, Goldring explores how Mellon’s vision continues to shape the YCBA as we approach our fiftieth anniversary in 2027.

Read “At the YCBA: On Paul Mellon” here:

The Yale Centre for British Art is home to the largest collection of British art outside the UK. At the museum’s core...

10/19/2026

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Executive Director Courtney J. Martin will deliver the second YCBA Paul Mellon Lecture of the fall semester at the Yale Club, of New York City, on Thursday, October 29, at 6 pm.

Martin’s lecture will focus on the life and work of Rasheed Araeen, one of Britain’s foremost minimalist sculptors. Born in Karachi in 1935, Araeen has worked across painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and collage for more than six decades.

In “Structure, Not Sculpture: Rasheed Araeen 1964-1975,” Martin will examine Araeen’s concept of participatory transformation. Central to his mid-career and later work were early sculptures that he defined as structures. Alongside an otherwise minimalist practice, Araeen began to write about his objects, shifting his definition of them as sculpture into the more sociocultural designation of structure.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation between Martin and Kellie Jones (), Rauschenberg Foundation Board Member, Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History & Archaeology and a Professor in the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

Visit the link in bio to register for the lecture. Space is limited.

Image 1: Courtney J. Martin delivers the first of two Paul Mellon
Lectures at the Yale Club of New York City, September 18, 2026. Photo credit: Yann Chashanovski

Image 2: Rasheed Araeen, “Drawing for Sculpture,” 1966, graphite on paper © Rasheed Araeen. Image courtesy Tate Images

10/17/2026

Georgia Oakley’s new adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” opened in US theaters yesterday, and we're marking the release with a closer look at “Lady Jane Mathew (née Bertie) and Her Daughters” (ca. 1790).

In this portrait, the daughters’ practice of needlework marks them as accomplished, patient, and genteel, qualities prized in Austen’s world and closely tied to ideas of marital suitability. Yet this image of feminine respectability also raises a question: what possibilities did women have beyond the roles they were expected to perform?

In “Sense and Sensibility,” Austen brings that tension into focus through Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Despite their contrasting temperaments, the sisters both face financial vulnerability in a society that makes marriage consequential to their security.

The portrait’s connection to Austen is also more than thematic. The woman standing with a book is Anne Mathew, who married Austen’s brother James in 1792. After Anne’s death in 1795, their young daughter Anna found comfort with her aunts at Steventon Rectory, Austen’s childhood home in Hampshire. There, she heard an early draft of “Pride and Prejudice” read aloud; Jane also transcribed Anna’s stories and entertained her with continuing tales of adventure.

Together, “Sense and Sensibility,” this family history, and the Mathew portrait invite us to look beyond domestic accomplishment to the bonds of sisterhood, care, and shared imagination that sustained women’s lives.

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Unknown artist, “Lady Jane Mathew (née Bertie) and Her Daughters,” ca. 1790, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

See the work in our ongoing fourth-floor exhibition, “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art.”

10/15/2026

Continuing today at the YCBA! Join us October 15–16 for “Hogarth: His Art, Life, and Times,” a symposium exploring William Hogarth’s art and world through new research on drawing, nation and empire, and social and political critique. The symposium celebrates the legacy of Hogarth scholar Ronald Paulson.

Sessions begin at 10:15 am today and Friday in the Lecture Hall. Free and open to all; registration requested. Visit the link below for the full schedule and registration:

https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/hogarth-symposium-day-one

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William Hogarth, The Montagu Family and an Unknown Attendant, between 1730 and 1735, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

10/14/2026

In honor of Frieze Week, opening today in London, we're taking a closer look at a work of contemporary art in our collection: Cecily Brown's "The Hound with the Horses' Hooves" (2019). Inspired by British hunting pictures that traditionally hung in wealthy landowners’ estates, Brown’s fractured composition blurs horses, hounds, and woodland, evoking both the violence of the hunt and oppressiveness of the British class system. See it in our ongoing fourth-floor exhibition, "In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art.”

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Cecily Brown, born 1969, "The Hound with the Horses' Hooves," 2019, oil on linen. Yale Center for British Art, purchased with an anonymous gift

10/11/2026

Get a fresh perspective on “John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined” with five things to know about the exhibition from YaleNews, and discover how Constable reshaped landscape painting.

“John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined,” a new exhibition at the YCBA, explores the celebrated British artist’s innovative open-air paintings, which radically transformed the trajectory of European landscape painting.

10/06/2026

Join us at the Yale Center for British Art, October 14–16, for Hogarth: His Art, Life, and Times, a three-day symposium exploring William Hogarth’s work through multidisciplinary perspectives. The symposium is free and open to the public. Learn more and register here:

October 14-16, 2026 William Hogarth is a renowned English engraver and painter described by described by Horace Walpole as “that great and original genius.” This symposium celebrates Professor Ronald Paulson […]