Isabella Galdone

Isabella Galdone studies nineteenth-century British art. Her research thus far has focused primarily on female creators associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Before beginning her PhD studies at Yale, she received a BA in History of Art and French Studies from Smith College and spent a year abroad at Université Paris-Sorbonne. She went on to earn an MA with Distinction from the University of York, focusing her studies on nineteenth century British painting and monumental sculpture, as well as British architectural sculpture and decorative arts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Her MA thesis focused on the work of nineteenth-century artist and poet Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, specifically Siddall’s use of the material and corporeal to communicate immaterial, abstract concepts such as moral character, spiritual and intellectual identity and emotional experience.

Isabella’s current work consists of a continuing study of Siddall, as well as the exploration of productive methodologies for discussing artists whose biographies and bodies of work exist in a fragmented state of preservation. Other interests include the visual and thematic role of represented textiles and clothing in nineteenth-century painting and the significance of female labor as a driving force behind Pre-Raphaelitism’s artistic subversion of the aesthetics of mass-production.