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Alba Campo Rosillo

Alba Campo Rosillo was the 2019-2020 National Portrait Gallery Predoctoral Fellow, where she researched the intersections of portraiture, industry and politics in mid-nineteenth-century American art. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware writing her dissertation “Artistry and Industry: The Portraiture of George Peter Alexander Healy (1830-1871).” She has held museum and research positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Winterthur Museum, the Delaware Museum of Art, the Netherlands National Service for Cultural Heritage (RCE), and Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD). Campo Rosillo has been a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois and the University of Delaware, and has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC), the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Fellowship (the Netherlands).

A Painted Homage to A Political Giant: G.P.A. Healy’s Posthumous Portrait of President Lincoln

U.S. artist George Peter Alexander Healy’s (1813 – 1894) 1887 portrait of President Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865) was the culmination of a career devoted to presidential portraiture. The image, conceived years after the sitter passed away, helps us understand the practice of nineteenth-century portraiture as much as the challenge of posthumous portrait painting. The result of Healy’s work is an iconic image of a political giant that still resonates today.

Alba Campo Rosillo

January 19, 2021