Francesca Kaes

Leave to Supplicate Granted: January 2025

DPhil Research Topic

The Art of Blotting: Alexander Cozens's New Method as Intermedial Practice

Dr Francesca Kaes is a curator and historian of British art with a focus on works on paper of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is the Monument Trust Curator of British Drawings at the British Museum, where she is responsible for the care and curation of British drawings of the early modern period (1500–1880).

Prior to joining the British Museum, she was a Getty Paper Project Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2022-23), an Anne Christopherson Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum (2016), and a Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation Curatorial Intern at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2014-15).

Francesca received her DPhil in art history from the University of Oxford in 2025 with a thesis on eighteenth-century drawing master Alexander Cozens. Her research interests include the relationship between printmaking and other media and the intertwined nature of artistic practice and theoretical thought as embodied epistemology. She previously studied for her BA in art history at Ruprecht-Karls University Heidelberg, her MA at Humboldt University Berlin, and spent her Erasmus year at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.