Hugh Belsey a graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham, has lectured to groups in Europe, America, Australia and Britain. For twenty-three years he was the curator of Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury where he formed one of the largest collections of the artist’s paintings and drawings. In 2004 he was awarded an MBE in recognition of his museum work. He has taught at the Universities of Melbourne and Buckingham and curated many exhibitions including Gainsborough and the Theatre at the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath in October 2018. He has also appeared as an expert witness in both the BBC series Fake or Fortune? and in BBC4’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces. His long-awaited catalogue of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough was published by Yale University Press in February 2019 and it was awarded the William W B Berger Prize for British Art History in 2020. As a sequel, he is now working on a catalogue of the work of Gainsborough Dupont.