Elizabeth Cropper
Elizabeth Cropper is an historian with a special interest in Italian and French Renaissance and Baroque art and art literature. She was the dean of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) from December 2000 through May 2020, and previously held positions as Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University and director of the university’s Charles S. Singleton Center for Italian Studies at Villa Spelman in Florence. She is the co-author, with Charles Dempsey, of Nicolas Poussin: The Love of Painting (Princeton University Press, 1996).
In his introduction to this English translation of Nicolas Poussin’s letters, Klaus Ottmann describes these as among the “rarest and most unique documents of Western art history.” He is not wrong in this, but it takes an informed and contextual reading to understand why. The documents are rare because few artists working before 1700 wrote such a body of letters, and few collections of them have survived.
