Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art

Description

A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon. Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited-and potentially biased-sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialisation, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that - to date - have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the United States to work in lower-prestige genres, and how images of empire were largely absent from the walls of London's Royal Academy at the height of British imperial power. Ultimately, Greenwald considers how many works may have been excluded from art historical inquiry and shows how data can help reintegrate them into the history of art, even after such pieces have disappeared or faded into obscurity. Upending traditional perspectives on the art historical canon, Painting by Numbers offers an innovative look at the nineteenth-century art world and its legacy.

Diana Seave Greenwald is assistant curator of the collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

"Winner of a Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant, College Art Association" "Painting by Numbers...[is] careful and systematic...it is a solid demonstration that "counting things" matters. It leaves audiences to wonder what work the book will inspire as other researchers draw from the quantitative foundation Greenwald has established... [I]t's clear that the author's expertise in art and data pair brilliantly" -Lydia Pyne, Hyperallergic" "The real power of [Painting by Numbers] is. . . . prompting art historians to ask questions about the values underpinning their definition of their objects of study. . . . [Diana Greenwald] has done a valuable service to the field in asking us to rethink our fundamental categories of disciplinary concern and our responsibilities to the vast range of visual and material culture that might fall within their purview." * CAA Reviews * "Diana Seave Greenwald's Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art is an ambitious study that synthesizes two disparate approaches of scholarship: art history and economic analysis. . . . Greenwald is a pioneer in the field who is willing to explore new perspectives and challenge past presumptions. The book paves the way for similar interdisciplinary studies to follow. . . . Painting by Numbers shows the promise of what can be achieved when an abundance of information is wedded with insightful scholarship."---Matt Garklavs, ARLIS/NA Reviews "[Diana Greenwald] presents novel evidence on the artistic production of the nineteenth-century in France, the USA, and England and focusses on crucial topics in the art history of that period, namely, industrialization, gender, and the history of empire, providing new points of view. . . . [Painting by Numbers] represents a concrete application of the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach in humanities and social sciences."---Laura Paganl, Journal of Cultural Economics "[A] great benefit to art historians unpracticed in economic theory."---Elizabeth L. Block, Panorama