Feature
portraits of the good and the great By D. Dodge Thompson ’66 In my 40 years of public service at the National Gallery of Art in Washington I have had the great privilege of organizing about 750 art exhibitions. In truth, the first time I ever heard the term “art history” was in 1965 when I unwittingly sat down in the Choate classroom of M. Jean-Pierre Cosnard des Closets to discover I had enrolled in a course called “French Civilization Seen through the Arts.” I faced three obstacles: I had to learn to take notes in a dark classroom, I was immobilized by the powerful images that flickered across the screen, and I didn’t speak French. Nonetheless, the lessons and images have stayed with me to this day.
P H OTO G RA P H S COURTESY OF T H E NATIONAL P ORTRAIT G ALLERY
