Cassandra Albinson

A photograph of art historian Cassandra Albinson next to a photograph of a portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour applying pink rouge to her cheeks

Cassandra Albinson

Photograph by Stu Rosner; Painting: Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1750) by François Boucher/Courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Charles E. Dunlap

Visiting a Victorian house museum with her mother (an architect), young Cassandra Albinson glimpsed a member of the staff open a small door under the stairs and disappear below. Her interest piqued, then fanned by an art-history course at Washington University in her native St. Louis, she pursued her studies at Wellesley and Yale. Now the Harvard Art Museums’ Winthrop curator of European art and head of the division of European and American art, she aims in turn to ignite the interest of young visitors. Her specialty is portraits of aristocratic women in nineteenth-century Britain and France. “Walking by one of these portraits, you might say, ‘Oh, that’s just a portrait of a beautiful woman,’” she says. But these powerful women “worked closely with artists” to present “their own images to society.” Take the museums’ portrait of Madame de Pompadour, which depicts Louis XV’s mistress as she applies makeup to her cheeks. Albinson notes its portrayal of motherhood, codification of race, and use of color. Pink, then new, occupied the space between the sensuality of red and the innocence of white: a fashionable way of signaling interest in new ideas circulating among the elite about women as intellectual beings with their own thoughts and desires—a kind of freedom. Not having access to the collection during the pandemic, she says, has been a shock. “There’s a real depth to these highly crafted and carefully thought-out objects”: the honing of the artists’ skills, the labor, the expensive materials, the time and the effort put into the paintings make them very complex. “They draw out a lot of attention in me that’s quite different than physical objects at home,” Albinson says. “I think it’s an emotional attachment.”

Click here for the January-February 2021 issue table of contents

Read more articles by Jonathan Shaw

You might also like

Sister Acts and Cyanotypes

Julia Rooney’s paintings cross the analog-digital divide.

Pony Plunges

Scrapbooking a woman who rode horses into the sea

Rendering Dreams in Art

South Korean artist’s socially themed photographs at the Peabody Essex Museum

Most popular

In Federal Court, Harvard and the Government Have Friends

A look at the amicus curiae briefs in Harvard’s funding case

Trump Administration Alleges Harvard Violated Student Civil Rights

In a court filing, the University says government has ignored procedure to “inflict pain.”

John Goldberg named Dean of Harvard Law School

A professor at HLS since 2008, he steps up from the interim role.

Explore More From Current Issue

Julia Rooney’s Cyanotype Art At Harvard

Julia Rooney’s paintings cross the analog-digital divide.

Harvard Economist Nicole Maestas on Aging and Health Policy

The Harvard health economist not afraid to get in the weeds

New Harvard Overseers and HAA Directors

Alumni showed increased interest in this year’s elections.