Discovering Degas: Close Encounters with a Complex Artist

Mary Crawford-Volk is an art historian trained at Yale University (MA, PhD) who has taught at Yale, Brown, and Tufts. She also has offered courses at Harvard Extension School since 1986. Her research interests range from European art and architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through European and American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also include the history of collecting, and the cultural role of art museums. She has served as curator or co-curator for loan exhibitions at Brown University in 1975, the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1992, and the Tate Gallery in London in 1998, and consulted on the John Singer Sargent/Joaquín Sorolla exhibition at the Museo Thyssen in Madrid in 2006. In addition to earlier publications on Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, and Titian, she wrote Sargent's El Jaleo to accompany the National Gallery 1992 exhibition by that name. Her essay Sargent in Public: On the Boston Murals' in the 1998 Tate exhibition catalogue, John Singer Sargent, won the Umhoeffer Prize of Excellence in the Humaniites in 2000. She received the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award from the Extension School in 2002. She has three essays on Boston art in the Phaidon Atlas of Site-Specific Art of the Americas (2013), an essay on Sargent's Boston Library Murals in the Museo Thyssen's exhibition, Sargent/Sorolla (2008) and another, "International Interlude: Sargent and Sorolla" in Sorolla in America, published in 2015 by Center for Spain in America. In 2019 and 2020 she was invited to give Intersession mini-courses at the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement, and will be a contributor in May 2022 to a Sargent lecture series at the Boston Public Library. She is currently working on the final chapter to her book, Sargent At Large, for Yale University Press.