Abstract: This talk presents how one can blend historical and social scientific methods to provide fresh insights into the history of art. With examples particularly focused on nineteenth-century art, it presents how data culled from exhibitions and museums can help us better address long-standing art historical questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and other factors on the art world. Economic approaches to art have long been applied to the art market; in this talk I will argue that there is data that allows us to go beyond analyses of purely market-related topics like prices and the histories of dealers and auction houses. This is not to deny the importance of the history of art markets, but rather to show that data-driven histories of art can serve as a bridge between traditionally economic and art historical questions.

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian. Her work uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the United States and France. Her first book “Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art” was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. Currently, she is the Assistant Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., working in the departments of American and British Paintings and Modern Prints and Drawings. She received a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford, co-supervised by Professor Kevin O’Rourke and Professor Michael Hatt (University of Warwick). Before doctoral study, Diana earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Columbia University.