Department of Art History and Art

Department of Art History and Art Catherine B. Scallen

Dr. Scallen is a specialist in Northern Baroque art, with a particular emphasis on the art of Rembrandt. At Princeton she wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Rembrandt's etchings of Saint Jerome, and served as a lecturer on the faculty for a year. After obtaining her doctorate, she conducted research on Dutch paintings in the J. Paul Getty Museum (then in Malibu) as a Graduate Fellow in the Paintings Department. Earlier, at Williams she co-curated a traveling exhibition, "Cubism and American Photography, 1910-1930," and worked for the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute.

First arriving at Case Western Reserve University in 1991-92 as a visiting professor of art history, she rejoined the Case Western Reserve University full time in 1995 and was tenured in 2001. From 1992 to 1995 she taught at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Dr. Scallen has published articles and catalogue essays on various topics in the art of Rembrandt, the historiography of art history, as well as on seventeenth-century Flemish drawings, nineteenth-century French paintings, and American photography. Her book, Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship (Amsterdam University Press, 2004), traces the development of modern Rembrandt connoisseurship in the formative period from 1890 to 1935 as a study in the professionalization of art-historical practices. She is currently at work on several projects about the relationships between art dealers and Rembrandt scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on the historiography of Rembrandt prints.