Back to Calendar

The American Watercolor Movement Comes to Boston

A woman with blonde hair is standing and is making eye contact with the viewer. She is smiling and her arms are crossed.

Lecture

Enthusiasm for watercolor painting swept the United States in the years after the founding of the American Watercolor Society in New York in 1866. Early proponents in the Boston area, including many women artists, were inspired by Ruskin, the Aesthetic Movement, and the rise of Impressionism. In this lecture, curator Kathleen A. Foster from the Philadelphia Museum of Art will discuss this early period of watercolor painting in Boston.

Led by:
Kathleen A. Foster, Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art, and Director, Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

This talk will take place online via Zoom. Free admission, but registration is required. To register, please complete this online form.

For instructions on how to join a meeting in Zoom, please click here. If you have any questions, please contact am_register@harvard.edu.

The Harvard Art Museums are committed to accessibility for all visitors. For anyone requiring accessibility accommodations for our programs, please contact us at am_register@harvard.edu at least 48 hours in advance.

Support for the lecture is provided by the Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Fund for American Art.

Kathleen A. Foster is the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Senior Curator of American Art and director of the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With degrees from Wellesley and Yale, she has held curatorial posts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Indiana University Art Museum, and has taught at Williams College, Temple, Indiana University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently an adjunct professor in the history of art. She has published on topics in American art from the late 18th century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the work of Thomas Eakins, including the prize-winning Thomas Eakins Rediscovered (1997), two essays in the catalogue for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Thomas Eakins (2001), the reconstruction of Eakins’s own drawing manual (2005), and the book An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing “The Gross Clinic” Anew (2012). Her most recent project at the PMA was the exhibition and book American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent (2017), with its affiliated research website. She is currently leading the museum’s team in planning an expansion of the American galleries, slated to open this spring.