What We Are Reading Today: Painting by Numbers by Diana Seave Greenwald

Painting by Numbers presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of 19th-century artistic production.
With new quantitative evidence for more than 500,000 works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the 19th century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited — and potentially biased — sample of artwork from that time.
She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities, says a review on the Princeton University Press website.
Examining art in France, the US, and the UK, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that — to date — have been used primarily as finding aids.
From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to the countryside for painters showing images of nature at the Paris Salon, the ways in which time-consuming domestic responsibilities pushed women artists in the US to work in lower-prestige genres.