S. Hollis (Holly) Clayson

Northwestern University

September–December 2009

S. Hollis Clayson, professor of art history and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, specializes in the social history of nineteenth-century art rooted in Paris. Her publications include Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (Los Angeles, 1991; reprint 2003); a co-edited thematic study, Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained (New York, 2000; translated into six other languages); and Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870--71) (Chicago, 2002). She has most recently written three essays investigating the arts of privacy and the interior. At the Clark she heads back out into the street to work on Electric Paris: The City of Light in the Visual Cultures of the Transatlantic (1870--1914).