Hugh Belsey is an independent scholar, curator, writer, broadcaster and lecturer. For 23 years he curated Gainsborough's House in Sudbury where he transformed the museum and built up one of the largest collections of the artist's work in the world. The collection is especially rich in Gainsborough's drawings.
In 2004 he was awarded an MBE in recognition of his museum work. Since then he has taught at the Universities of Buckingham and Melbourne and he has lectured throughout Britain and also in Australia, America and Europe. In 2018 he co-curated the exhibition 'Gainsborough and the Theatre' at the Holburne Museum in Bath. From 2005 until 2017 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, tasked with writing a catalogue of Gainsborough's portraits, his fancy pictures and copies after Old Master paintings, a book that was published by Yale University Press in February 2019.
