Wendy Bellion
Assistant Professor
Department of Art History
318 Old College
Newark, DE 19716
302.831.8415
wbellion@udel.edu
Wendy Bellion teaches eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American art in the Department of Art History. Her research and teaching takes a broad view of early American visual culture, exploring paintings, prints, photographs, and other media in relation to questions of vision, representation, science, gender, and political culture. Her current book project, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Discernment in Early National Philadelphia, examines the exhibition of trompe l’oeil paintings, optical devices, and illusionistic spectacles within the context of cultural anxieties about perception and deception. Much of her research to date has centered on the post-revolutionary work of Charles Willson Peale, in particular his use of drawing instruments to sketch landscapes and silhouettes and his installation of the Staircase Group at the Columbianum exhibition of 1795. She taught at Rutgers University and the College of William and Mary before joining the University of Delaware in 2004, and she has helped organize exhibitions for the National Gallery of Art, the Newberry Library, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Publications:
Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Discernment in Early National Philadelphia, book mss. in progress.
“Eight Reasons to Study the Long Eighteenth Century,” American Art, forthcoming summer 2005
Exhibition review of “American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790-1840,” Winterthur Portfolio, forthcoming
Review of exhibition catalogue The Worlds of Jacob Eichholtz, The William and Mary Quarterly, forthcoming
“Extend the Sphere: Charles Willson Peale’s Panorama of Annapolis,” The Art Bulletin 86:3 (Sept. 2004), 529-49
“Illusion and Allusion: Charles Willson Peale’s Staircase Group at the Columbianum Exhibition,” American Art 17:2 (summer 2003), 18-39
“Heads of State: Profiles and Politics in Jeffersonian America,” in New Media, 1750-1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey P. Pingree (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003), 31-59.
Review of Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, CAA Reviews Online, March 2003, www.collegeart.org
“Pleasing Deceptions: The Material Culture of Optical Illusion,” Common-place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life, 3:1 (October 2002), www.common-place.org
Deceptions and Illusions – Five Centuries of Trompe-l’Oeil in Europe and America (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2002), contributing author
"The Artist in his Autobiography," review of The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale, vol. V, The Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale, Documentary Editing 23:1 (March 2001), 1-6
"Chronology," in Judith Barter et al., Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1998), 328-52
"The Aftermath of Conflict," Artweek 22:8 (5 September 1991), 14
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