2026 Berger Prize longlist announced

The 2026 Berger Prize longlist was announced last night, 8 July, by Dr Jonny Yarker, Chair of the Berger Prize judging panel, at an event at the Warburg Institute. We are delighted to share the fifteen shortlisted titles:

Kate Anderson, Catriona Murray, Jemma Field, Anna Groundwater, Karen Hearn, Liz Louis

Art & Court of James VI & I

National Galleries Scotland

Christine Casey

Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice

Paul Mellon Centre

Apurba Chatterjee

An Empire of Images: Visual Culture and the British in India

Cambridge University Press

Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi

Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso

Yale University Press

Amy Concannon

Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals

Tate Publishing

Alexis Goodin et al

A Room of Her Own: Women Artist Activists in Britain, 1875-1945

Clark Art Institute

John Hilary

Magnates and Masterpieces: The German-Jewish Collectors of Edwardian Britain

Yale University Press

Peter Humfrey

Regency Collectors: Buying and Displaying Old Masters in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Paul Holberton Publishing

James King

‘Our Little Gang’: The Lives of the Vorticists

Reaktion Books

Catherine Lampert and Toby Treves

Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings

Modern Art Press

Jonathan Marsden

European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty The King

Modern Art Press

Stephanie O’Rourke

Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and Its Colonial Networks, 1780–1850

University of Chicago Press

Sam Smiles

Turner and the Slave Trade

Paul Mellon Centre

Anne Stutchbury, Tessa Wild, Stephen Ponder and Alice M. Strickland

Standen: Philip Webb, Morris & Co. and the Creation of an Arts and Crafts Home

Yale University Press

Ian Warrell, with a contribution by Gillian Forrester

Turner

Yale Centre for British Art

We were also joined by Laura Freeman, Chief Art Critic at The Times, and shortlisted author for the 2024 Berger Prize for her book Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists, who delivered a wonderful talk: "Doorstepping: House Museums and Shaking Hands with the Past"

The winner of the 2026 Berger Prize will be announced at an event at the Warburg Institute on 3 December.