Karen Hearn FSA is a British art historian and curator. She has Master's degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of London. [1] She is an Honorary Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University College London. [2] From 1992 to 2012 Hearn was the Curator of 16th & 17th Century British Art at the Tate where she curated major exhibitions on Tudor and Jacobean paintings, Anthony van Dyck, and Rubens. She was co-curator of Royalist Refugees at The Rubenshuis in Antwerp. She has also curated recent exhibitions at The National Portrait Gallery in London, The Harley Gallery, and The Foundling Museum. [3] She was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 1 January 2005. [1]
She researches, writes, teaches, lectures and broadcasts on art produced in Britain between about 1500 and about 1710, and in particular on the numerous Netherlandish-British artistic and cross-cultural links of that period. One long-standing focus is the life and work of the 17th-century portrait-painter Cornelius Johnson, (
Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen). She is currently working on a full-scale Johnson monograph.[
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Hearn also writes on the British career of Anthony van Dyck. In 2009 she curated the major Tate Britain exhibition ‘Van Dyck & Britain’, and has subsequently published a key essay on his London studio/workshop (2018).[ citation needed]
For many years she has taught at university level on the centrality of migrant artists to 16th- and 17th-century (Tudor and Stuart period) British art.[ citation needed]