Art History Editing and Proofreading Services

A paragraph begins with what the painting means. The reader has a small reproduction, possibly in black and white, possibly cropped, and has not been told how big the picture is, where the light comes from, what is in the lower left corner or that the figure everybody discusses occupies about a twelfth of the surface. The argument may be excellent. It has been built on a foundation the reader was never given.

We edit what art historians write — journal articles and book chapters, formal descriptions and visual analysis passages, catalogue and exhibition texts, provenance and attribution discussions, technical examination integration, archival source discussion, thesis chapters and conference papers, museum interpretation and label copy, and conservation and condition reporting for scholarly audiences. Our editors work on the description that has to precede the interpretation.

Formal description before argument is the discipline's founding discipline, and its failure is interpretation resting on unstated observation. A claim about the tension between two figures requires the reader to know where those figures are and how much of the canvas they occupy. We work through these so the object is established first — the medium, the support, the dimensions in centimetres, the format and the condition — since a reader who thinks a work is a metre high when it is four cannot follow anything about scale or bodily relation; so the composition is described in a stated order the reader can follow, moving through the surface rather than jumping between details; so any claim about colour, surface or light states whether it is based on the original, a reproduction or a technical image, given that these differ enormously and much published description rests on transparencies made decades ago; so the passage that carries the argument is anchored to a location on the surface, because "the gesture in the middle ground" is findable and "the painting's central tension" is not; so what has been altered, restored, cut down or overpainted is stated before an argument depends on it; so the viewing conditions are given where they matter, including the original height and light; and so the description is complete enough that a reader could sketch the composition. Descriptions written this way make the interpretation testable.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished research, attribution work and museum documentation. We are editors rather than art historians or conservators, and we offer no view on attribution, interpretation or condition. What we can do is give the reader the object before the argument.