Curatorial Divisions

The Division of European and American Art is responsible for more than 70,000 drawings, paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and objects of decorative art dating from the twelfth century to around 1900. These works are held by the Fogg Museum and Busch-Reisinger Museum.

The European holdings are particularly strong in early-Renaissance Italian painting, seventeenth-century Dutch drawings, and nineteenth-century British and French drawings, paintings, and prints, and include signature works by Fra Angelico, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Claude Monet, Nicolas Poussin, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Rembrandt van Rijn. The collection of American art is best known for colonial- and federal-period painting, late nineteenth-century painting and sculpture, and drawings and watercolors of all periods. It includes works by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

The division oversees the world’s largest collection of terracotta studies by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and an exceptionally fine group of works by Auguste Rodin. Decorative arts include silver from America and the British Isles, eighteenth-century German and Austrian porcelain, and a celebrated group of ceramics designed by Josiah Wedgwood. Among the photography holdings are key nineteenth-century images that represent the history and development of photography as an art form in the United States and Western Europe. Among the highlights are unique daguerreotypes by Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, large-scale portraits by Mathew B. Brady and Studio, and photographs of the American West by Timothy H. O’Sullivan.