Sophie Lynford

Sophie Lynford is a doctoral candidate
in the History of Art at Yale University. She specializes in British and
American art with a focus on the visual and material exchange between
Britain and America in the nineteenth century. She received her M.A. and
M.Phil from Yale and her B.A. in the History of Art and Architecture
from Brown University, where her work investigated the relationship
between the critic Clement Greenberg and the sculptor David Smith. She
has contributed to catalogs and exhibitions at the New-York Historical
Society and the Yale Center for British Art, most recently to Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting, which was on view in New Haven this past fall.

Sophie’s
dissertation, “Painting Dissent: The Pre-Raphaelite Experiment in
America,” argues that the work of the American Pre-Raphaelites
incorporated a much wider range of styles and ideologies than has been
previously understood. Employing an Atlanticist approach, she evaluates
the American Pre-Raphaelites’ reception and subsequent absorption of
British models of landscape theory and practice. In September 2017,
Sophie will be the Douglass Foundation Fellow in American Art at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.