Professor William Pressly
Eighteenth-Century Art

Art History & Archaeology
1211-A Art-Sociology Building
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742-1335
Email: wpressly@umd.edu
Telephone: (301) 405-1479

William Pressly devotes his scholarship to the art of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with an emphasis on British painting. His numerous publications include two books on the eighteenth-century Irish painter James Barry: The Life and Art of James Barry and James Barry: The Artist as Hero. He has also prepared an edition of the memoirs of John Francis Rigaud (Journal of the Walpole Society, 1984). He published A Catalogue of Paintings in the Folger Shakespeare Library (Yale University Press, 1993) and contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue John Singleton Copley in England (National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1995-1996). His most recent book, The French Revolution as Blasphemy: Johan Zoffany's Paintings of the Massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792, was published by the University of California Press.

Pressly has held grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. At Maryland, he has served as Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology.