Jules David Prown
Jules David Prown is the Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University. He served as the first Director of the Yale Center for British Art from 1968 to 1976.
Prown, Jules David
Prown, Jules David
United States of America
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Description: Paul Mellon’s Legacy: A Passion for British Art
When I became director of what was then called the Paul Mellon Center for British Art and British Studies in the summer of 1968, the president of Yale, Kingman Brewster, told me that my first job was to recommend an architect. At that time I was an associate professor of the History of Art at Yale, curator of American Art at the Yale University Art Gallery, and a member of the University Committee...
PublisherYale Center for British Art
Related print edition pages: pp.15-24
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00232.002
Description: Paul Mellon’s Legacy: A Passion for British Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00232
Paul Mellon (1907–1999) was an unparalleled collector of British art. His collection, now at Yale in the museum and study center he founded to house it, rivals those in Britain’s national museums and is unquestionably the most comprehensive representation of British art held outside of the United Kingdom. This book celebrates the centenary of his birth. Five introductory essays examine Mellon’s extraordinary collecting activity, as well as his role in creating both the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London as gifts to his alma mater (Yale 1929). The catalogue section showcases 148 of the most exquisite and important paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, sculpture, rare books, and manuscript material in the Yale Center’s collection, including major works by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date June 2007 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300117462
EISBN 9780300259520
Illustrations 240
Print Status in print
Description: Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West
Our picture of the Old West, a West distant in time and now physically transformed—the West of cowboys and Indians, of wagon trains rolling westward and herds of buffalo grazing on vast prairies—has been colored by countless romanticizations in film and fiction and art. One purpose of this book, and of the accompanying exhibition, is to re-examine surviving contemporary paintings,...
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.xi-xv
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00038.003
Description: Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West
A common theme of western American art—from the depictions of Indians by early explorers to the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the vibrant images of Georgia O’Keeffe—is the transformation of the land through European-American exploration and resettlement. In this book, leading authorities look at western American art of the past three centuries, reevaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history, and American studies.

Jules David Prown begins the book by discussing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to broaden the study of western American art. Nancy K. Anderson then calls for a reconsideration of western art as art rather than documentation and for the adoption of new methods to probe its aesthetic, historical, political, and cultural complexities. William Cronon explores what an environmental historian might learn from American landscape art, concluding that each image must be read as a multilayered view intertwining past, present, and future within a larger context of progress and expansionism. Examining representations of American Indians, Brian W. Dippie finds that early works pictured them caught in a process of dramatic change while later artists showed them frozen outside of time: when the frontier ended, western art made nostalgia its defining characteristic. Martha A. Sandweiss argues that the ways in which views of the American west and its peoples reached nineteenth-century audiences—through large-edition prints, book illustrations, or theatrical exhibitions—significantly affected both the images and the meanings attached to them. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer challenges popular perceptions of the frontier as a womanless domain, discovering abundant pictures of Native American women in the art of the western fur trade. Howard R. Lamar concludes by discussing the changing perceptions of western artists and inhabitants of their region’s landscape in the twentieth century.
Print publication date May 1992 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300057225
EISBN 9780300234312
Illustrations 132 illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter
It seems deceptively easy to place John Trumbull in the development of American art. When the major artists of the preceding generation, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, remained in England after the War of Independence, Trumbull and Gilbert Stuart carried forward in America the arts of history painting and portraiture, respectively, during the early years of the Republic. Trumbull’s...
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
Related print edition pages: pp.22-41
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00071.010
Description: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University...
If one had to choose a single word to describe the change that has taken place in the study of American art over the past half century, the word would be...
PublisherYale University Art Gallery
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.9-13
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00075.006