Smithsonian Journeys Experts

Catherine Scallen is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland OH, where she taught art history from 1995 to 2022. A specialist in Dutch, Flemish and Netherlandish art from 1400 to 1800, her scholarship has focused on the art of the Dutch painter and printmaker Rembrandt van Rijn, as in her book Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship (2004) and in numerous articles and reviews. She has also made two courses for the Great Courses (Wondrium) company, Art of the Northern Renaissance and Museum Masterpieces: The National Gallery, London. In recent years she has begun publishing on the art market in Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Catherine Scallen has lectured at museums and universities in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, Cambridge MA and Poughkeepsie NY, among other locales. A regular faculty participant in CWRU’s Senior Scholars program, the university’s adult education program, she has offered numerous courses that complement special exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art. As a seasoned traveler to western Europe, especially Belgium and The Netherlands, she has traveled as a faculty lecturer for groups from Princeton University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and CWRU.