Ellen McBreen

Ellen McBreen is an art historian specializing in late 19th-early 20th century French art and visual culture. She is assistant professor in art history at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She holds a BA from Harvard University and an MA/PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

McBreen has given lectures on Matisse's work to museum and academic audiences around the world, from Madrid to Providence, RI. In 2011, she was invited by the Guggenheim Museum to deliver the first annual Robert Rosenblum lecture for emerging art historians.

She is currently preparing an international loan exhibition that will reunite several objects from Matisse's personal collection--Islamic furniture and metalwork, Chinese porcelain, Oceanic textiles--with the paintings and sculptures inspired by pictorial concepts gleaned from these same objects. The exhibition and its related scholarly catalog will cover episodes from the entirety of Matisse's career (roughly 40 years) in an effort to chart how these different cultural traditions played very different and complex roles at successive moments in the artist's development. She divides her time between Providence and Paris, France.