Ann Sutherland Harris

Past PhD(s): Saskia Beranek, Marianne Berardi, Anne Bertrand, John Chvostal, James Jewitt, Kathy Johnston-Keane, Patrizia Costa-Frezza; See a listing of Past PhDs for details

Professor Harris’s research and teaching has embraced a wide range of topics in the history of art and architecture in European late Renaissance and seventeenth-century art in various media.  The literature on seventeenth-century Italian painters was sparse in the 1960s when she began her career. She helped to reconstruct the careers of several artists, including P. F. Mola and Pietro Testa, by publishing documentary information, identifying both paintings and drawings by them and creating a more logical chronology of their work. Her monograph on Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661) is regarded as one of the best of the studies on a major seicento painter published in recent years. She also specializes in artists’ drawings, both their correct identification, and their function in the production of both painting and sculpture, with particular emphasis on the drawings of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.  She has identified and published drawings by Michelangelo, Bernini, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and many less well-known artists.  She has also been interested in the education of artists, including the role of academies and artists’ levels of literacy.

The exhibition Women Artists, 1550-1950, co-curated with Linda Nochlin, shown in Los Angeles, Austin, Pittsburgh and Brooklyn in 1976-77, helped to open up the field of women’s studies in the discipline.  She has continued to write about women artists of the past and present, especially Artemisia Gentileschi and Alice Neel, as well as the artistic politics and rivalries among both male and female artists.

Her most recent book is Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture London [Laurence King], 2005; 2^nd ed., 2008.  While written for use as a textbook in the United States, it has sold well to the general reader in English-speaking countries looking for an introduction to the arts of this century.  It makes teaching this period much easier than before and should encourage future research in this rich century of artistic production.