PRESS RELEASE : Two new appointments and two reappointments to RCEWA for four-year terms [September 2023]

Dr Helen Jacobsen

Appointed for a four year term from 1 September 2023.

Dr Helen Jacobsen is Executive Director of The Attingham Trust, a charitable educational trust that organises study programmes on historic houses for professionals in the heritage sector. Formerly Senior Curator and Curator of 18th-century Decorative Arts at the Wallace Collection, where she was responsible for furniture, porcelain, clocks, gilt bronze and gold boxes, she has curated exhibitions and published on eighteenth-century decorative art and collecting history. She is a member of the Council of the French Porcelain Society and of the Grants Committee of the Furniture History Society, and is a trustee of the Leche Trust.

Dr Caroline Shenton

Appointed for a four year term from 1 September 2023.

Dr Caroline Shenton is the former Director of the Parliamentary Archives and a former senior archivist at the UK National Archives. Originally a mediaeval historian, she has an MA from St Andrews University and a doctorate on the court of Edward III from Worcester College, Oxford. She qualified as an archivist at UCL, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Historical Society. Caroline taught Public History to postgraduates at the Centre for Archives and Information Studies at the University of Dundee for a number of years, and in 2017 was a Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library. She is now Secretary to Council at Girton College, Cambridge.

As well as writing various academic and technical publications during her professional career, in 2013 she began to specialise in popular histories of heritage in peril. Her first trade book The Day Parliament Burned Down (OUP, 2012), won the Political Book of the Year Award, beating Alastair Campbell, Nick Robinson and Andrew Marr to top prize. It was also shortlisted for a number of other prizes, and was a Book of the Year for The New Statesman, Daily Telegraph, Mail on Sunday and Herald Scotland.

Its highly-acclaimed sequel, Mr Barry’s War (OUP, 2016) about the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster, was a Book of the Year in for The Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine. Her third book, National Treasures, about the evacuation of London’s galleries and museums in the Second World War, was published by John Murray in November 2021 and was shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown, and was a Book of the Year for London Historians.

Christopher Baker

Reappointed for a four year term commencing 1 October 2023.

Christopher Baker is an Hon. Professor at Edinburgh University and holds a number of non-executive roles and trusteeships. He served for ten years as a Director of the National Galleries of Scotland, where he was responsible for the collection and programme at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art and the Paul Mellon Rome Fellow and worked at Christ Church, Oxford, and the National Gallery in London. Christopher is a member of the Spoliation Advisory Panel, the Recognition Committee (Museums Galleries Scotland) and the Advisory Board of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI).

He has organised numerous exhibitions in the U.K. and internationally on aspects of British art pre-1900, drawings and watercolours, and old master paintings. His publications include: Fuseli, The Realm of Dreams and the Fantastic (2022, co-author); J. M.W. Turner: The Vaughan Bequest (2018); Landseer: The Monarch of the Glen (2017); Jean-Étienne Liotard (2015, co-author); John Ruskin: Artist and Observer (2014, co-author); Catalogue of English Drawings and Watercolours 1600-1900, National Gallery of Scotland (2011); and The National Gallery [London] Complete Illustrated Catalogue, (1995, co-author).

Stuart Lochhead

Reappointed for a four year term commencing 1 October 2023.

In 2018 Stuart set up his own firm dealing in European Sculpture from the late Mediaeval period to Rodin based in St James’s, London and has since sold a number of important works of sculpture to various international museums, including a sculpture by Giovanni Pisano to the Musée de Cluny, a rare portrait bust by François Girardon to the Château de Versailles, and the original model of Why Be Born a Slave by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Upon graduating from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1994 Stuart Lochhead joined Daniel Katz at his newly opened gallery in Jermyn Street. In the following years Stuart mounted numerous exhibitions in New York and London on European Sculpture. He organised three major loan exhibitions at the gallery on Renaissance and Baroque bronzes from The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Stuart was formerly on the board of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, The Sculpture Journal and Chairman of the Courtauld Association. Stuart organised the first gift by a UK company to a museum through the Cultural Gifts Scheme.

Remuneration and Governance Code

Members of the RCEWA are not remunerated. These appointments have been made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Christopher Baker, Dr Helen Jacobsen, Stuart Lochhead and Dr Caroline Shenton have not declared any significant political activity.