Unfortunately, this lecture is cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Join us to hear Dr. Robyn Asleson speak about Mary Cassatt’s extraordinary life and work, touching on her take on domestic imagery and her support of women’s suffrage. Asleson will discuss many of Cassatt’s important works on view in Mary Cassatt: Labor & Leisure, including Banjo Lesson, In the Omnibus, and Under the Horse Chestnut Tree.

This lecture is part of the Kittredge-Wilson lecture series made possible by the generous support of Paul Wilson.

Robyn Asleson joined the National Portrait Gallery in 2016. Her exhibition projects at the Portrait Gallery include “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939” (2024), the team-curated “Kinship” (2022), and “Portraits of the World” (2016-20), a series of spotlight exhibitions featuring individual portraits on loan from international museums, placed in conversation with works from the Portrait Gallery collection. She was venue curator for the exhibition “John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal” (2020) and is currently developing an exhibition of nineteenth-century American theatrical portraits, “Staging America: Theater and National Identity, 1812-1912” (2026).

In 2016, Asleson co-organized the exhibition “The Lost Symphony: Whistler and the Perfection of Art” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. The exhibition built on Asleson’s many publications on the Aesthetic Movement in the United States and Great Britain, including a monograph on the influential English painter Albert Moore (2000) and her prize-winning doctoral dissertation, Classic into Modern: The Inspiration of Antiquity in English Painting,1864-1918 (1993). Asleson holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University.