Dr Paul Spencer-Longhurst, FSA read Modern History at Oxford, took an MA in Romantic art at the Courtauld Institute, and was Official Lecturer at The National Gallery. He then became Assistant to the Director at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, where from 1997 to 2009 he held the positions of Senior Curator and Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and was awarded a PhD for his publications in 2001.

Paul has published widely on French Neoclassical and Romantic art, British painting of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the history of collecting and patronage. He has curated major exhibitions in Britain and the USA, featuring the works of Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, Rossetti, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, J. C. Dahl and other artists. He was co-curator of 'Behind Closed Doors: Birmingham Private Collections from Van Dyck to Cornelia Parker' (Barber Institute, 2008) and sole curator of 'Northern Lights: Swedish Landscapes from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm' (Barber Institute, 2009).

He has been a Visiting Fellow at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, an Expert Adviser to the Acceptance in Lieu Panel and is a Trustee of the Public Picture Gallery Fund of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and the Gerald Coke Handel Foundation. In 2010 he was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, where he contributed to the exhibition 'Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting' and is now Editor of Richard Wilson Online (www.richardwilsononline.ac.uk), the digital catalogue raisonné of the work of Richard Wilson.