Eleanor Jones Harvey

Eleanor Jones Harvey is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her research interests include eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art, notably landscape painting, southwestern abstraction and Texas art. Her most recent exhibition, Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture (2020), considers how deeply entwined the heralded naturalist’s ideas were with America’s emerging identity, grounded in an appreciation of the landscape.

Previously, Harvey organized the critically acclaimed The Civil War and American Art (2012), Variations on America: Masterworks from the American Art Forum Collections (2007), and An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection (2006).

From 1992 to 2002, Harvey was curator of American art at the Dallas Museum of Art, where she organized several exhibitions, including The Voyage of The Icebergs: Frederic Church’s Arctic Masterpiece (2002), Thomas Moran and the Spirit of Place (2001) and The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880 (1998).

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Eleanor

Harvey

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Humboldt in America, Winter 2021 | Vol. 66, No. 1

When the leading European naturalist visited America and met with Thomas Jefferson, it had a profound impact on the young nation.

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