The UW School of Art + Art History + Design is pleased to announce Rachael Z. DeLue as the 2026 Kollar Lecturer in American Art History. DeLue's lecture, titled "Picturing the Heavens: Étienne-Leopold Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings", takes place on February 26th at 6:00 pm in the Husky Union Building's Lyceum.
The Kollar lecture is free and open to the public, made possible by the Allan and Mary Kollar Endowed Chair in American Art History.
About the Lecturer
Rachael Z. DeLue is the Christopher Binyon Sarofim ’86 Professor in American Art at Princeton University, jointly appointed in Art & Archaeology and the Effron Center for the Study of America and associated faculty in the High Meadows Environmental Institute. She also serves as the Director of the Princeton Humanities Initiative. She specializes in the history of transatlantic art and visual culture, focusing on intersections between art and science and the significance of the visual within the history and theory of knowledge and on the transnational and transcultural formation of “America” as a geography, identity, and idea. Publications include the books George Inness and the Science of Landscape, Landscape Theory, and Arthur Dove: Always Connect as well as articles on Camille Pissarro, Winslow Homer, Romare Bearden, Charles Darwin’s “Tree of Life” diagram, Alexander von Humboldt’s groundbreaking visualizations of physical geography, and constructions of Native America within Anglo-American archaeology in the early American republic. She is currently completing a book entitled Impossible Images and the Perils of Picturing, on the visualization of unseeable and immeasurable phenomena in the fine arts and the sciences.
About the Lecture
Picturing the Heavens: Étienne-Leopold Trouvelot’s Astronomical Drawings
In this talk, Rachael Z. DeLue will share insights from her current research and teaching on the relationship between art and science in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, focusing on a suite of extraordinary chromolithographs created in the 1880s by the astronomer and illustrator Étienne-Leopold Trouvelot. Based on his work at the Harvard Observatory and the United States Naval Observatory, the chromolithographs represent the cross-pollination of art and science in an attempt to generate knowledge about astronomical phenomena that eluded perception and resisted visualization. Prof. DeLue will consider Trouvelot’s prints in relation to other such attempts on the part of fine artists and scientific illustrators to picture the celestial sphere at a time when technology was limited and space travel was still the stuff of science fiction.