"In good company: Robert S. Duncanson and American Landscape painting" | Melinda and Paul Sullivan Distinguished Lecturer Eleanor Harvey, Senior Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Join us in celebration of our new acquisition Robert S. Duncanson's Landscape with a very special public talk delivered by Melinda and Paul Sullivan Distinguished Lecturer Eleanor Harvey. 

A light reception will follow the 5 p.m. talk. 

About Eleanor Harvey:

Eleanor Jones Harvey is senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She earned a B.A. with distinction in art history from the University of Virginia, and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University. Dr. Harvey specializes in the intersection of landscape painting and American culture. She organized the widely-praised exhibition The Civil War and American Art, which was on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012-2013 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the summer of 2013. The accompanying book won the Southeastern Book Festival Award for Best Art or Photography Book for 2012, and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Distinguished Research Award for 2014. Her most recent exhibition was Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture, (SAAM, 2020-2021), which also won the Secretary’s Distinguished Research Prize, in 2021.

Prior to coming to the Smithsonian she served as the curator of American art at the Dallas Museum of Art. During her tenure (1992–2002), she organized several exhibitions, including The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880, Thomas Moran and the Spirit of Place, and The Voyage of the Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece. Her first book, The Painted Sketch, based on her dissertation, received the 1999 Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America for the most significant contribution to 19th-century studies published that year.

She has contributed essays to numerous books, including Cosmos: From Romanticism to the Avante-Garde, organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada, and Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her current research includes the topic of todays’ talk, on the significance of African American artist Robert S. Duncanson.