A photograph of Eleanor Harvey

Eleanor Jones Harvey

Senior Curator (19th-Century Art)

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).

Harvey joined the museum’s staff in 2003 as the curator for the museum’s Luce Foundation Center for American Art, an innovative visible storage study center. She served as chief curator from 2003 to 2012. In 2008, she was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City.

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).

The Civil War and American Art won the 2012 Southeastern Book Festival Award for Best Art or Photography Book and the 2014 Smithsonian Secretary’s Distinguished Research Award. Her essay on artist Sanford R. Gifford appeared in the exhibition catalogue Hudson River School Vision: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (2003). The book The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–1880 (1998), based on Harvey’s dissertation, won the 1999 Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America as the most significant contribution to nineteenth-century fine arts studies.

She holds a bachelor’s degree with distinction from the University of Virginia in 1983, and she earned both a master’s degree (1985) and doctorate in the history of art (1998) from Yale University. See full staff bio. 

Exhibitions

Books

  • A book cover with a natural bridge painting.
    Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture
    Explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt left a lasting impression on American visual arts, sciences, literature, and politics.
  • halff_500.jpg
    An Impressionist Sensibility: The Halff Collection
    This full-color catalogue provides a rare insight into a stunning private collection of American Art. Hugh and Marie Halff, connoisseurs based in San Antonio, Texas, have read, studied, and traveled widely in their quest. With unerring judgment, they have acquired masterpieces that not only please the eye, but challenge the mind. Presented here, twenty-six of their paintings brilliantly capture the aesthetic sensibility of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
  • CivilWar_500.jpg
    The Civil War and American Art
    The Civil War and American Art looks at the range of artwork created in the years between 1852 and 1877. Author Eleanor Jones Harvey surveys paintings made by some of America’s finest artists, including Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Gifford, Winslow Homer, and Eastman Johnson, and photographs taken by George Barnard, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O’Sullivan.
  • variations_500.jpg
    Variations on America: Masterworks from American Art Forum Collections
    The American Art Forum, a small group of collectors from across the United States, was begun twenty years ago by Charles C. Eldredge while he was director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Now, as part of the Forum’s twentieth anniversary celebrations, the Smithsonian American Art Museum is proud to offer Variations on America, a volume of seventy-two treasured artworks collected by members of the Forum. Chief curator Eleanor Jones Harvey, deputy chief curator George Gurney, senior curators Virginia M. Mecklenburg and Joann Moser, former Luce Foundation Center curator George Speer, and curatorial assistant Elaine Yau present significant and lively contributions about these works.

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