Department of Art History

Congratulations to Chloé M. Pelletier (PhD ’21), who has been appointed the Curator of European Art (before 1800) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

As a specialist of European art, Chloe will be responsible for an extensive collection of paintings, works on paper, and sculptures dating from the Middle Ages to the 18th century, including masterpieces of French and Italian art, an impressive body of religious objects, and a distinguished collection of paintings from the Dutch and Flemish Golden Age.

Pelletier will be establishing a vision for, and enriching and promoting this collection that comprises nearly 1,100 works. She will also oversee the European art acquisition program and develop exhibitions in this subject area. She will also contribute to publications and research reports of the museum and to lend her expertise in lectures and mediation activities.

Originally from Texas, Chloé M. Pelletier has held positions in prominent museums in the United States, including the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining the MMFA, she was Curatorial Associate in the Art Institute’s Department of Painting and Sculpture of Europe. She has, among other projects, contributed to exhibitions on the sculpture of Antonio Canova and Camille Claudel. Pelletier holds a Master’s and a PhD from the department, where she specialized in Italian Renaissance painting with secondary fields in Environmental Studies and Arts of the Early Modern Atlantic world. Her ground-breaking dissertation reevaluated the social and environmental dimensions of the emergence of landscape backgrounds in Adriatic painting in the fifteenth century that has transformed our understanding of “naturalism” in the Western tradition. Her essays and articles have notably been published in the exhibition catalogue Ornament and Illusion: Carlo Crivelli of Venice (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and the journal postmedieval.