The seminars have been jointly organized since 2007 by the Van Gogh Museum and the University of Amsterdam, as part of the Art History Master’s course. The aim is to encourage students to perform in-depth study of an important theme relating to the Van Gogh Museum’s collection.
Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow
Every year, a leading art historian is invited to lead a seminar as part of the programme ‘Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of Nineteenth-Century Art’.
Visiting Fellow 2026
This year’s Visiting Fellow is Professor André Dombrowski (University of Pennsylvania). He will explore fresh ways of looking at famous Impressionist painters like Édouard Manet and Claude Monet.
He will study their work in relation to topics such as environmental change, globalisation, changing ideas about law and time, and new financial systems. Through these themes, he will examine why these artists broke with tradition and how they painted the modern world in new ways.
In his lecture The Trash at Manet’s Feet on 7 June 2026, he will look at everyday objects in Édouard Manet’s paintings, like lemons placed in unusual spots or oddly arranged meals. These details often seem strange or out of place. Dombrowski will explain how they reflect the world of buying, selling, reusing, and recycling in Manet’s time. This offers a new way to understand his art.
About André Dombrowski
André Dombrowski is the Frances Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor of 19th-Century European Art, and Interim Chair of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has worked since 2008.
His research focuses on the arts and material culture in late 19th-century France and Germany. He is studies the social and intellectual ideas that shaped the rise of avant-garde painting in the 1860s to 1880s, including Impressionism.
He is the author of Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life (University of California Press, 2013), which won the Phillips Book Prize. The book examines Cézanne’s early work and its themes of violence and troubled domestic life.
His second book, Monet’s Minutes: Impressionism and the Industrialization of Time (Yale University Press, 2023) explores how new technologies and changing ideas about time influenced Impressionist painting, and its focus on the fleeting moment.
Dombrowski has also written articles on influential artists such as Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Caillebotte, and Menzel, as well as on queer desire in 19th-century arts.
Contact
Dr Rachel Esner: r.esner@uva.nl