Sophie Lynford is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art at Yale University. She specializes in British and American art with a focus on the visual and material exchange between Britain and America in the nineteenth century. She received her M.A. and M.Phil from Yale and her B.A. in the History of Art and Architecture from Brown University, where her work investigated the relationship between the critic Clement Greenberg and the sculptor David Smith. She has contributed to catalogs and exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society and the Yale Center for British Art, most recently to Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting, which was on view in New Haven this past fall.
Sophie’s dissertation, "Painting Dissent: The Pre-Raphaelite Experiment in America," argues that the work of the American Pre-Raphaelites incorporated a much wider range of styles and ideologies than has been previously understood. Employing an Atlanticist approach, she evaluates the American Pre-Raphaelites’ reception and subsequent absorption of British models of landscape theory and practice. In September 2017, Sophie will be the Douglass Foundation Fellow in American Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
