The Harvard Art Museums have trained scores of museum leaders who have gone on to make remarkable contributions to the curatorial, conservation, and education fields. We offer a number of opportunities for emerging graduate and postgraduate scholars interested in the production and presentation of original scholarship within the museum context. In this regular series of interviews, we catch up with these museum professionals to see where they are now.
Ron Spronk, Curatorial Intern, Department for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts, 1994–5; Special Conservation Intern, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, 1995–6; Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellow, Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, 1996–7
Q What is your current position?
A I am currently Professor of Art History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In addition, I hold the Hieronymus Bosch Chair at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Q Can you tell us about your early experiences at the Harvard Art Museums—your curatorial and conservation internships, as well as your fellowship in the Straus Center?
A In September 1994 I came to the Harvard Art Museums as a curatorial intern, to work with curator Ivan Gaskell. I had come to Indiana University, Bloomington, from the Netherlands the year before to continue my art historical and technical studies of the early Netherlandish painter Jan Provoost. The internship at the Fogg Museum provided me with a unique opportunity to work on an important painting by this master, which had just entered the collections, using the rich resources of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. This research of The Last Judgment (c. 1505) led to a wealth of new insights, and, in close collaboration with colleagues in conservation, I was able to secure its attribution to Provoost, which was generally not accepted at the time. A key method of study for my research was infrared reflectography (IRR), which allows one to reveal an artist’s underdrawing, the sketch that prepares a composition, from beneath paint layers. At the time, Henry Lie, the director of the Straus Center, was doing major work with IRR as well, and he offered me a consecutive internship.
During that second year, we examined several Netherlandish paintings in the museums’ rich holdings, and we also worked on improving IRR through applications of digital imaging. I was able to publish my research in a special issue of the museums’ Bulletin and organize a symposium on technical studies of early Netherlandish paintings, at which I spoke on the work of Edward Forbes, Rutherford Gettens, and George Stout in this area. After hearing my presentation, Angelica Rudenstine (former program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) suggested that I become a Mellon Fellow and begin a historiographical study of the early work in conservation and technical studies at Harvard. I was extremely fortunate to receive such a thorough training in this interdisciplinary field while taking advantage of Harvard’s fantastic resources—its art and library collections, equipment, and specialized know-how. But, when collaborating closely with so many colleagues in different fields, one’s education never really stops!
Q Can you tell us about your professional career at the Harvard Art Museums that followed your training here?
A After these three initial years, I stayed on at the Straus Center for another decade, as Research Associate (1997–99), Associate Curator for Research (1999–2006), and Research Curator (2006–7). It was an absolutely wonderful time and quite productive as well. To mention just a few highlights, I was able to initiate and co-organize two large interdisciplinary research and exhibition projects. With Harry Cooper, who was Curator of Modern Art at the Harvard Art Museums, I worked on Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, which revealed important new information on the artist's methods. Through studying 11 late paintings, Harry and I were able to establish that these works were produced in surprisingly elaborate processes, in which the final compositions were achieved after many reworkings, some of which were highly invasive. This exhibition opened at the Busch-Reisinger Museum in 2001 before traveling on to the Dallas Museum of Art.
Another project that I initiated was Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, a collaboration between the Harvard Art Museums and the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition opened at the National Gallery in 2006 and traveled to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Through the examination of around 50 panel paintings, the research team established that the two wings of a diptych were often produced in different ways, with one wing being made “on spec,” while the other was commissioned. This was an important find, since this format became highly popular in the second half of the 15th century, at the same time that the open art market emerged in full force. The opening of the exhibition was a wonderfully festive moment because we managed to bring several ensembles together from their different collections, and some diptych wings had not been together since they were separated in the 19th century.
Q What have you gone on to do following your time at the Harvard Art Museums?
A I left the Harvard Art Museums in 2007 for my current position.
Q How did your training and later work at the Harvard Art Museums help you to prepare for the work that you are doing now?
A I sometimes feel that I learned everything that I know during my 13 years at the Harvard Art Museums because I use those experiences on a daily basis. I learned from curators and conservators how to look at paintings, and I also learned how to collaborate within interdisciplinary teams and to organize technical examination projects on location. These are all highly useful experiences for some of my current projects, such as the restoration and documentation of the Ghent Altarpiece, the Bosch Research and Conservation Project, and QU-MOLTAH, a mobile laboratory for technical art history that I am building at Queen’s. I also learned how to use the Web as an educational tool in the museums, and I largely formed my professional network there. My own research on Netherlandish paintings at the Harvard Art Museums still forms the foundation for my classes at Queen’s, which is something that the students love. I also learned about fundraising and grant writing there, but I could go on and on!
Q Was there a specific event during your training at the Harvard Art Museums that you found particularly powerful?
A During my first years at the Harvard Art Museums I worked extensively on the Portrait of a Man (1541) by the Master of the 1540s, an unknown painter from Antwerp. I was deeply touched when the late benefactor and philanthropist Mel Seiden donated that panel to the museums in my honor.
