The Burlington’s editor Christopher Baker will moderate a panel to celebrate Constable at 250 that will include Annie Lyles, Susan Owens and Emma Roodhouse.
Christopher Baker is the Editor of The Burlington Magazine and an Hon. Professor at Edinburgh University. He served as a Director at the National Galleries of Scotland for ten years and has also worked at Christ Church, Oxford, and the National Gallery in London. His research has focused on 18th and 19th-century British and European art, works on paper and the history of collecting . He has curated numerous exhibitions across the U.K. and internationally.
Anne Lyles is an art historian and independent curator specialising in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British landscape painting. She worked at Tate Britain for twenty-five years, and has co-curated, and contributed to the catalogues of, many exhibitions on the art of J.M.W.Turner, John Constable and British watercolours. These include The Great Age of British Watercolours 1750-1880 (Royal Academy of Arts, London, and National Gallery of Art, Washington 1993); the Constable exhibition in Paris in 2002 selected by Lucian Freud; Constable: the Great Landscapes (Tate Britain, London, National Gallery of Art Washington and Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, 2006); and Late Constable ( Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2021). More recently she wrote about David Hockney’s Yorkshire paintings as assessed within the context of earlier British landscape art (for an exhibition at the Vuitton Foundation, Paris, 2025). To coincide with the 250th anniversary of Constable’s birth in 2026, she has selected and edited a number of the artist’s famous letters for a volume recently published by Pallas Athene (2026). She is a trustee of the Constable Trust.
Dr Susan Owens is a writer, art historian and former Curator of Paintings at the V&A. Her book Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons was published earlier this year. Her previous books include The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art, which won the Apollo Book of the Year award in 2024, and Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape.
Emma Roodhouse is an art curator and researcher, with a special interest in Suffolk artists. Emma has curated many exhibitions for Colchester and Ipswich Museums, including Constable 250, a year of celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of Constable (2026), which includes a focus on portraits and landscapes; Landscape Rebels: Turner, Constable and Monet (2022); Creating Constable (2021); Made in Suffolk: Ed Sheeran (2019); Kiss and Tell: Rodin and Suffolk Sculpture (2018); Women 100 (2018); Twists and Turns, Hairstyles in Art (2017) and A Year of Constable (2015). She is the recipient of awards for research into Constable’s paintings at the Yale Centre for British Art and Constable’s early career through a research grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Her publications include the first publication on the Colchester and Ipswich Museums Constable collection, Creating Constable and Constable 250: A Cast of Characters (Amberley); the award winning, The Art of Doris and Anna Zinkeisen (Unicorn) and contributions to Discover Constable & The Hay Wain (National Gallery) and Turner and Constable (Tate).