Classics Colloquium with Lee Pearcy

Recent scholarship on plaster casts from Greek and Roman sculpture has not illuminated the collection whose acquisition marked the beginning of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1805. In this talk I will explore the roles of multiple agents in the founding of that collection and of PAFA and argue for the crucial role of the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon in the collection’s formation. I will also take a brief look at the first collection as part of classical reception in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia and at tensions between artists and cultural capitalists in that period.