Xavier Bray

Dr Xavier Bray has been Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery since January 2011. He completed his doctoral dissertation, Royal Religious Commissions as Political Propaganda in Spain under Charles III at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1999. Between 1998 and 2000, he was Assistant Curator at the National Gallery in London, where he co-curated exhibitions such as Orazio Gentileschi at the Court of Charles I (1998-99), A Brush with Nature. The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches (1999) and The Image of Christ: Seeing Salvation (2000). He was also the curator of a Room 1 exhibition at the British Museum on Goya's Family of the Infante Don Luis (2001-2002). Between 2000 and 2002 he was Chief Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao where he organised exhibitions such as An Intimate Vision - Women Impressionists (2001-2002) and a focused exhibition on Vicente Lopez: Court Painter to Fernando VII (2002). On his return to the National Gallery in 2002 as Assistant Curator of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European paintings, he was the co-curator of El Greco (2004), Caravaggio (2005), Velazquez (2006). He recently curated his first solo show The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700 (2009) and is now working on an exhibition of Goya's Portraits for the National Gallery due to open in 2015.