The nineteenth century is significant both to art history – as the ‘golden age’ of the living painter – and to copyright history – as the time of the emergence of modern copyright. In an online exhibition (launched with a talk at the Victorian Picture Gallery, Royal Holloway in November 2025) Dr Elena Cooper brings these two scholarly perspectives into conversation: how does closely engaging with painting help us better to understand copyright history? And how does copyright history help us better to understand painting? As the online exhibition shows, there is no better place to explore these questions as regards the nineteenth century than Royal Holloway: the Gallery holds what, at that time, was seen as one of the very best collections of modern art, and, when viewed through a legal lens, its paintings can bring copyright history to life. The exhibition makes accessible to a wider audience key findings from the scholarly monograph E. Cooper Art and Copyright: The Contested Image (CUP, 2018) which was shortlisted by the Society of Legal Scholars for the Birks’ Book prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship and formed the basis of Elena’s election as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2021 and the Royal Society of Arts in 2020.

Following on from the exhibition, further knowledge exchange is anticipated: there are a number of paintings in UK art collections which have an important place in copyright history, yet this perspective is not widely known, e.g. The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt held by Keble College, Oxford and Second Class by Abraham Solomon held by Southampton City Art Gallery. Accordingly, this project aims to provide such galleries with publicly accessible information about the significance of paintings in their collections to copyright history, with a view to furthering galleries’ knowledge exchange to the public.