Ira Spanierman

Ira Spanierman is the director of Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York, which for over fifty years has been dedicated to dealing in the finest American paintings, drawings, and sculpture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some important exhibitions held recently at the gallery include Twachtman in Gloucester: His Last Years, 1900-1902 (1987); Frank W. Benson: The Impressionist Years (1988); In the Sunlight: The Floral and Figurative Art of J. H. Twachtman (1989); Ten American Painters (1990); American Painters in Giverny, 1885-1920 (1993); William Merritt Chase: Master of American Impressionism (1994-95); Willard Leroy Metcalf: An American Impressionist (1995-96); Painters of Cape Ann, 1840-1940: One Hundred Years in Gloucester and Rockport (1996); Wilfrid-Gabriel de Glehn: John Singer Sargent’s Painting Companion (1997); Theodore Wores: Paintings from California to Japan (1998); and Arthur Wesley Dow: His Art and His Influence (1999).

Dr. William Gerdts

Dr. William H. Gerdts is professor emeritus of art history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, where he taught for twenty-eight years. He has held many previous museum and teaching posts; he has taught at the University of Maryland and was curator of painting and sculpture at the Newark Museum, New Jersey, for twelve years. His extensive writings in the field of American art encompass numerous articles and books, including American Neo-Classic Sculpture: The Marble Resurrection (1973), Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still-Life, 1801-1939 (1981), American Impressionism (1984); Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (with Mark Thistlewaite, 1988), Art Across America (1990); Monet's Giverny: An Impressionist Colony (1993); William Glackens (1996), Impressionist New York (1994), and California Impressionism (with Will South 1998). Gerdts received his B.A. from Amherst College, Massachusetts, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dr. Bruce Chambers

Bruce W. Chambers is a nationally recognized historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art. As the director of the Willard L. Metcalf Catalogue Raisonne for over a decade, he has been compiling a comprehensive record of Metcalf’s oils, watercolors, pastels, and drawings. He has also completed a catalogue raisonne of the work of the mid-nineteenth-century Pittsburgh political and social satirist, David Gilmour Blythe, and has published and lectured on a wide range of other artists and subjects, including Frank W. Benson, Thomas Cole, Robert Henri, Charles Burchfield, Southern art, and American trompe l’oeil money painting.

Chambers received his B.A. from Yale University, his M.A. from the University of Rochester, in art history, and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught at Emory University, the University of Rochester, and the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he also served as dean of Graduate Studies. He has been the chief curator of the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, and the director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. He currently works out of his home in Hamden, Connecticut, as a researcher and writer, and as a consultant to private collectors, museums, auction houses, galleries, and universities.