DHMS: Painting by Numbers with Diana Seave Greenwald

This talk presents how one can blend historical and social scientific methods to provide fresh insights into nineteenth-century art. It describes the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, one can address long-standing art historical questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world.

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.