Sarah Rapoport

Sarah Rapoport is a specialist in nineteenth-century French and British visual and decorative arts, with a focus on transnational and multimedial histories of modern art. Her dissertation, “Industrial Japonisme: Japanese ‘Art Work’ in England and France, 1865-1891,” offers the first critical account of the relationship between Japonisme and industrialization. Through case studies on Félix Bracquemond, James McNeill Whistler, and James Tissot, the project considers how racialized ideas about Japanese craft helped artists, critics, and designers grapple with emergent questions about industrial production, artistic labor, and the relationship between technological change and aesthetic development. Sarah has presented research drawn from this project at the IFA-Frick Symposium (2026) and at AHNCA’s Annual Graduate Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art (2025), where her paper on industry and national identity in Tissot’s cloisonné enamels was awarded the Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation Prize for distinguished paper. Her work has been supported by the Decorative Arts Trust, the MacMillan Center’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and the History of Art Department. 

 

Sarah holds an A. B. in Art & Archaeology with Highest Honors from Princeton University, where her thesis on James Tissot and ‘vulgarity’ received the Stella and Rensselaer W. Lee Prize. She has worked in curatorial departments at the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Huntington. In 2022-23, she returned to the Museum of Modern Art as the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow in Drawings at Prints, where she assisted with a Käthe Kollwitz retrospective and authored a catalogue essay examining the artist’s influence on the visual culture of the American Left. Currently, she is a research assistant in European Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, where she is working on an exhibition on Édouard Manet’s Bohémienne and histories of race and identity in nineteenth-century France.