Biography

Susan has an MA in Art History from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Before joining Northeastern University, she was Assistant Curator at the National Gallery in London and a Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she gained expertise in methods of scientific and technical analysis and in object-based methodologies. She has taught at several institutions in the US and the UK, including Rutgers University, Lafayette College, the Courtauld Institute of Art and UCL. In 2016-2018, she was employed full-time at the Courtauld Institute as Lecturer in Northern Renaissance, teaching several BA courses and the MA Special Option. Her research has been supported by grants and awards, including the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and Humanities, and the Frances A. Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute in London.

Susan Jones is a specialist in late medieval and early modern art and culture, with a particular focus on painting and its relationship to other media. Her research falls into four distinct areas: inscriptions, language and visual communication; intellectual and epistemological traditions; international trade and the beginnings of the commercial art market, and materials, techniques and workshop practice. 

Qualifications

Susan Frances Jones, Assistant Professor in Art History

Ph.D., History of Art. The Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), 1998

M.A. Hons. History of Art, First Class. Edinburgh University, 1990 

Research

Susan Jones’s current research investigates the transformation of oil painting in the fifteenth century against a backdrop of change and innovation in the wider culture.  It focuses on the question of Van Eyck: his position in art history, his practice, his authorial presence. Van Eyck is studied in his own right and as a representative of his age. The value of his painting rested on innate technical ability, which he perceived as a gift from God, and on his ability to tread a fine line between observation and invention. His paintings consequently pushed the capacity of the medium to represent individual identity, preserve memory and secure salvation. In addition, they show Van Eyck’s highly skilled and highly innovative representation of his own ‘voice’ and presence. Through the study of his signatures and inscriptions, and of his workshop practice, the research addresses Van Eyck’s sense of self and sense of time, his knowledge and literacy, his ideas about his medium, and his business practice.  A wider aim is to shed light on the complex period of the 14^th and 15^th centuries, which has variously been termed ‘late medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’.  

Research Projects

• The VERONA project (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access)

Susan Jones was Project Manager and Art Historian in the interdisciplinary team which carried out the VERONA project: the creation of high-resolution technical images of the oeuvre of Van Eyck and his circle, adopting a single, standardised imaging protocol for all of the paintings. The project had 29 museum partners across Europe and the US; it was funded by BELSPO (the Belgian Federal Science Policy), in Brussels. In 2018, the resulting images were made available for research in open access on a specially-designed website: Closer to Van Eyck | Further Works by Jan van Eyck (kikirpa.be). Susan has lectured on the project at a range of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Prado Museum, Columbia University and the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural Español in Madrid.  In 2015, the VERONA team were documented at work in a film by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid:Verona team in action at the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, Madrid Links to an external site. In 2019, the project won a European Heritage Award/ Europa Nostra Award in the category of Research.

• Research Project on the Inscriptions on the Exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece, currently under restoration by the KIK-IRPA

Susan also worked within an interdisciplinary team to examine, document and reconstruct the complex, four-part, Latin verse inscription painted on the frames of the reverse of the Van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece (an inscription uncovered by Gustav Waagen in 1823). The altarpiece—one of the most important altarpieces of the medieval period—is currently in the final phase of a three-part conservation treatment. The outputs, published in 2020, were: 1. A new reconstruction of the damaged inscription (http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/ghentaltarpiece/#home/sub=kwatrijn); 2. A scholarly article on the question of the inscription’s authenticity; 3. A set of transcriptions of all of the inscriptions on the exterior of the altarpiece (see Selected Publications, below).

Postgraduate Supervision

Susan Jones has supervised multiple MA dissertations; a selected list is below.

• Heraldry as Portraiture: The British Library’s Statuts de l’Ordre de la Toison d’Or

• Two Manuscripts of Flavius Josephus’s Antiquités Judaïques et la Guerre des Juifs, made in Flanders in c. 1478-1483

• The Typology of the Old Bawd in Woodcuts from early Editions of Fernando Rojas’ La Celestina 

• The Altarpiece of Our Lady of Compassion in the Trascoro of the Cathedral of Palencia

• The De Villa Family and the Unicorn Crest: the Use of Heraldic Achievement to identify Patrons

• From Monastic to Urban Contemplation: The Spieghel van der Menschen Behoudenisse in the British Library (Add. MS 11575) 

• A Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Rosary Prayer Book in the British Library (Add. MS 14042)

A Manuscript of Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes from the Library of John the Fearless

Selected Publications and Outputs

Books

Van Eyck to Gossaert.Towards a Northern Renaissance, London, National Gallery, Yale University Press, 2011

Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago. A Catalogue of the Collection, by Martha Wolff, Susan Frances Jones, Richard G. Mann and Judith Berg Sobré, with contributions by Ilse Hecht, Peter Klein, Cynthia Kuniej Berry, and Larry Silver, Yale University Press, 2008.

Journal Articles, Conference Proceedings, Book Chapters

Jan Dumolyn, Susan Frances Jones, Ward Leloup, Toon De Meester and Mathijs Speecke, ‘Margaret van Eyck, a House called ‘the Wild Sea’ and Jan van Eyck’s posthumous Workshop’, The Burlington Magazine, February 2022, pp. 120-29.

Bart Fransen, Susan Jones and Christina Currie, ‘Dernière découverte. Le baldaquin de la Vierge au Chancelier Rolin’, Dossier de l’Art, No. 288, 2021, pp. 24-25

Susan Frances Jones, Bart Fransen, Christina Currie and Geert Van der Snickt, ‘Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Margaret van Eyck. New Imaging by the VERONA Project (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access)’, Science and Art VII. Science and technologies applied to heritage conservation, Proceedings of an International Congress organised by the IPCE (Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España) and the Museo del Prado, Madrid, 24-26 October 2018, 2021, pp. 74-95

Susan Frances Jones, Anne-Sophie Augustyniak and Hélène Dubois, ‘The Authenticity of the Quatrain and the other Frame Inscriptions’, in The Ghent Altarpiece. Research and Conservation of the Exterior. First Phase, (Contributions to the Study of the Flemish Primitives 14), eds. B. Fransen, C. Stroo, KIK-IRPA (The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage), Brussels, 2020, pp. 273-308

Susan Frances Jones and Marc H. Smith, ‘The Inscriptions on the Exterior of the Altarpiece’, in The Ghent Altarpiece. Research and Conservation of the Exterior. First Phase, (Contributions to the Study of the Flemish Primitives 14), eds. B. Fransen, C. Stroo, KIK-IRPA (The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage), Brussels, 2020, pp. 373-76  

Marc H. Smith, Susan Frances Jones and Anne-Sophie Augustyniak, ‘A New Reconstruction of the Quatrain of the Ghent Altarpiece’, in The Ghent Altarpiece. Research and Conservation of the Exterior. First Phase, (Contributions to the Study of the Flemish Primitives 14), eds. B. Fransen, C. Stroo, KIK-IRPA (The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage), Brussels, 2020, pp. 377-380.

Toon De Meester, Jan Dumolyn, Susan Frances Jones, Ward Leloup, Bernard Schotte and Mathijs Speecke, ‘Meester Jans huus van Eicke. Jan van Eyck’s House, Workshop and Milieu in Bruges: New Archival Data’, eds. T.-H. Borchert, M. Martens and J. Dumolyn, Van Eyck. An Optical Revolution, exh. cat., Hannibal, Ghent, 2020, pp. 127-37.

‘Reconsidering Jan van Eyck: Texts, Objects and a Regional Revival’, in Der Genter Altar – Reproduktionen, Deutungen, Forschungskontroversen, eds. S. Kemperdick and J. Rößler, Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg, 2017, pp. 129-48

‘Jan van Eyck’s Greek, Hebrew and Trilingual Inscriptions’, in Van Eyck Studies, Papers presented at the eighteenth Symposium for the Study of Underdrawing and Technology in Painting, Brussels, 19-21 September 2012, ed. Christina Currie, Lee Preedy et al, Peeters, Paris, Leuven, Walpole MA, 2016, pp. 290-308

‘Jan van Eyck and Spain’, Boletín del Museo del Prado, vol. 32, no. 50, 2014, pp. 30-49

‘New evidence for the date, function and historical significance of Jan van Eyck’s Van Maelbeke Virgin’, The Burlington Magazine, February 2006, pp. 73-81

Reviews          

Exhibition Review:

Hugo van der Goes. Between Bliss and Pain. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. 31 March 2023-16 July 2023. The Burlington Magazine, June 2023, pp. 778-781

Book Reviews:

Forthcoming for the Historians of Netherlandish Art (Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews (hnanews.org): Maryan W. Ainsworth, Sophie Scully, and Silvia Centeno, Jan Van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment. Solving a Conundrum, Brepols, 2022.

Das Geheimnis des Jan van Eyck, Die frühen niederländischen Zeichnungen und Gemälde in Dresden, by Thomas Ketelsen and Uta Neidhardt with the collaboration of Konstanze Krüger and Christien Melzer, Deutsche Kunstverlag, Berlin 2005. Historians of Netherlandish Art Newsletter, November 2007

The Northern Renaissance, by Jeffrey Chipps Smith. Phaidon, London/ New York, 2004. Historians of Netherlandish Art Newsletter, November 2005 

Corpus de la Peinture des Anciens Pays-Bas Méridionaux et de la Principauté de Liège au Quinzième Siècle (Le Musée du Louvre II), 2 vols., by Micheline Comblen-Sonkes and Philippe Lorentz. Centre Internationale d’Etude de la Peinture Médiévale des Bassins de l’Escaut et de la Meuse, Brussels, 1995. The Burlington Magazine, vol. 138, March 1996, p. 195

TV and Digital Media

Segments for a documentary film on the Ghent altarpiece by Supermouche Productions (Épinal, Paris) and Les Productions du Verger (Brussels); available on DVD; shorter version made for TV shown on the European channel Arte (2020)

Video made by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid showing the VERONA team at work, 2015 (online at: http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/verona/#home/sub=video)