Rosalind Polly Blakesley

Rosalind Polly Blakesley is Professor of Russian and European Art at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and co-founder of the Cambridge Courtauld Russian Art Centre. A Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum and former Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in London, she has curated exhibitions in Britain, Russia and the USA, including Russia and the Arts: The Age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky at the National Portrait Gallery in 2016.

Blakesley’s most recent book, The Russian Canvas: Painting in Imperial Russia 1757-1881, was awarded the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, the Art Newspaper Russia Best Book Award, and Honorable Mention from the Heldt Prize Committee for Best Book by a Woman in Slavic Studies. Other books include Russia and the Arts (2016), The Arts and Crafts Movement (2006) and Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (2000, under her maiden name of Gray), as well as the co-edited volumes From Realism to the Silver Age (2014), Russian Art and the West (2007), and An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (the catalogue of an exhibition Blakesley curated at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, in 2003). In 2017 Blakesley was awarded the Pushkin Medal by the Russian Federation for services to Anglo-Russian relations and Russian art.