Professor Hallett moved to the Paul Mellon Centre in October 2012, after having spent eighteen years teaching at the University of York, where he was appointed a Professor in 2006. He was Head of the History of Art department at York between 2007 and 2012, and a member of the University’s Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. He took his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University, graduating in 1986, and studied for a master's degree and a PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Yale University in 1990–91. As an art-historian, Hallett is best known for his writings on eighteenth-century graphic satire, exhibition culture and portraiture, and for his books and catalogues on the artists William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds. He also co-edited the major online publication, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. More recently, he has begun researching and writing on twentieth-century British art. He has also been involved in curating a number of major exhibitions, including James Gillray: The Art of Caricature ; Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity ; Hogarth ; William Etty: Art and Controversy ; Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint ; The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition ; and George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field.
Eighteenth Century York: Culture, Space and Society, ed. with Jane Rendall, Borthwick Institute, 2003
Hogarth, Phaidon Press, 2000
The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth, Yale University Press, 1999
Online Publications
, 1769–2018 Paul Mellon Centre, 2018
"Looking for "the Longitude". British Art Studies. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale Center for British Art
Articles and Essays
‘A Double Capacity: Gainsborough at the Summer Exhibition’, in Christoph Vogtherr, Thomas Gainsborough: The Modern Landscape, Hamburger Kunstalle, 2018
, Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World, Yale University Press, 2017
‘A monument to intimacy: Joshua Reynolds's The Marlborough Family', in Art History, Vol.31, no. 5, 2008
'Reynolds, Celebrity and the Exhibition Space', and numerous catalogue entries, in Martin Postle Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, Tate Publishing, 2005
Reading the Walls: Pictorial Dialogue at the British Royal Academy', in Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 37, no. 4
'From Out of the Shadows: Sir Joshua Reynolds' Captain Robert Orme', in Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2004
'Manly Satire: William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress' in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, The Other Hogarth: The Aesthetics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 2001.
'James Gillray and the Language of Graphic Satire', in Richard Godfrey Gillray and the Art of Caricature, Tate Gallery Publications, 2001.
'The Business of Criticism: the Press and the Royal Academy Exhibition in Eighteenth-Century London' in David SolkinArt on the line: the Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836, Yale University Press, 2001.
'The view across the City: William Hogarth and the visual culture of eighteenth-century London' in David Bindman, Frederic Ogee and Peter Wagner, Hogarth: Representing Nature's Machines, Manchester University Press, 2001.
'Painting: Exhibitions, Audiences, Critics, 1780–1830', in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, edited by Iain McCalman, Oxford University Press, 1999
'Framing the Modern City: Canaletto's Images of London', in Michael Liversidge and Jane Farrington, Canaletto and England, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 1993
'The Medley Print in Early Eighteenth-Century London', in Art History, Vol 20, no. 2, June 1997
