Katherine Manthorne

About the Author

Katherine Manthorne is a distinguished art historian and professor emerita at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she has dedicated her career to exploring the intersections of art, nature, and culture across continents. With a focus on 19th-century landscape painting, her scholarship illuminates how artists captured the sublime beauty of mountains and wilderness, bridging European Romanticism with American frontier visions. In her acclaimed book The Rockies and the Alps: Bierstadt, Calame and the Romance of the Mountains, Manthorne delves into the works of Albert Bierstadt and Alexandre Calame, revealing how their canvases romanticized alpine and Rocky Mountain terrains to evoke awe and national identity. A prolific writer and curator, she has contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications, enriching our understanding of transatlantic artistic exchanges and environmental themes in visual culture.