Curator and Chair, Department of Painting and Sculpture
National Portrait Gallery
Smithsonian Institution
PO Box 37012
MRC 973
Washington, D.C. 20013-7012
milese@npg.si.edu
Research Interests
American and European portraiture, 1700-1865; Imagery in American portraits; Portraits of George Washington.
Current Research Projects
Portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart; Phrenology, physiognomy, and American portraiture, 1700-1865.
Current or Projected Exhibits
A Brush with History: Paintings from the National Portrait Gallery (for exhibition in 2001-2003, while the gallery is closed). The work of Gilbert Stuart, with Carrie Rebora Barratt of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (to open at the Metropolitan in 2004).
Recent Publications
Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America, edited by Dru Dowdy; a Barra Foundation book published by the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Press, Washington, D.C., 1994
American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Systematic Catalogue; with Contributions by Patricia Burda, Cynthia J. Mills and Leslie Kaye Reinhardt (Washington, D.C. and Oxford University Press, 1995)
Entries in The Dictionary of Art, Jane Turner, ed., 34 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1996): Thomas Hudson (vol. 14, pp. 841-43), Justus Engelhardt Kuhn (vol. 18, p. 501), Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin (Vol. 27, p. 567), and James and Rolinda Sharples (vol. 28, p. 558)
"’Memorials of great & good men who were my friends’: Portraits in the Life of Oliver Wolcott, Jr.," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 107, part 1 (1997): 105-159.
Biography and entries on paintings by Rembrandt Peale, in American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2, by Robert Wilson Torchia (The Collections of the National Gallery of Art, Systematic Catalogue, Washington, D.C. distributed by Oxford University Press, 1998): 46-75.
George and Martha Washington: Portraits from the Presidential Years (University Press of Virginia, 1999)
Biographies in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) of Joseph Badger (vol. 1, 857-58), Pierre Eugene Du Simitière (vol. 7, 169-170), John Hesselius (vol. 10, 706-707), Henrietta Johnston (vol. 12, 152-53), Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin (vol. 19, 201-203), Edward Savage (vol. 19, 315-317), and James Sharples (vol. 19, 725-26). A Brush with History: Paintings from the National Portrait Gallery, with Carolyn Kinder Carr (National Portrait Gallery, distributed by the University Press of New England, 2001)