AGAS Lecture: Dr. Linda Merrill

Speaker Name: Dr. Linda Merrill
University or Organization: Emory University

“Translating the Ten O’Clock”

Linda Merrill, senior lecturer in Art History at Emory University, was for many years the curator of American Art at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and afterward the Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art at the High Museum in Atlanta. Dr. Merrill is an authority on the works of James McNeill Whistler but has also published and lectured widely on other, lesser-known American artists of the late nineteenth century, including D. W. Tryon and Albert Herter. Her publications include The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (1998), With Kindest Regards: The Correspondence of Charles Lang Freer and James McNeill Whistler, 1890–1903 (1995), Freer: A Legacy of Art (with Thomas Lawton, 1993), A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (1992), and An Ideal Country: Paintings by Dwight William Tryon in the Freer Gallery of Art (1990). In 2004 she originated an exhibition for the High Museum, After Whistler: The Artist and His Influence on American Painting, which was also shown at the Detroit Institute of Arts; and in 2016, with Robyn Asleson, she organized The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art for the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, which won the Global Fine Art Award for Best Thematic Impressionist/Modern Exhibition of that year. Dr. Merrill is currently writing a book on Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock” lecture of 1885.