Xanthe Brooke has been the curator of Continental European Fine Art at the Walker Art Gallery (presently part of National Museums Liverpool) since 1990. Over those years she has curated many exhibitions with accompanying catalogues, including 'Face to Face: Three Centuries of Artists Self-portraiture' (WAG 1994–1995), 'Mantegna to Rubens: The Weld-Blundell drawings collection' (WAG and British Museum, 1998–1999), 'Henry VIII Revealed: Holbein's Portrait and its Legacy' (WAG, 2003), and two devoted to the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Murillo (1990 at the Walker, and 2001 at Dulwich Picture Gallery, co-curated with Dr Peter Cherry of Trinity College Dublin).
Her most recent publication was an essay on the Walker's Murillo altarpiece the Virgin and Child in Glory and its related modello, published in Murillo ante su IV centenario perspectivas historiográficas y culturales (University of Seville, 2019). Her study of seventeenth-century Spanish art and its reception in Britain stems from her postgraduate research at the Courtauld Institute (1981–1983). Since the mid-1990s she has also researched the collections and cultural activities of William Roscoe (1753–1831), the core of whose pioneering collection of early Renaissance Italian and Netherlandish art is held by the Walker.
