Obituaries
Carol Jean Purtle: In Memoriam
Richard R. Ranta is dean of the College of Communication and Fine Arts at the University of Memphis in Tennessee.
Carol Jean Purtle, the Benjamin W. Rawlins, Jr. Professor of Art History Emeritus at the University of Memphis, died on December 12, 2008, at the age of 69. She had only retired the previous May and had entered into an agreement for postretirement teaching in the Department of Art at her school.
A distinguished scholar of fifteenth-century Flemish art, Purtle was looking forward to teaching her graduate seminar on Netherlandish art during spring semesters while devoting her research activities to putting the finishing touches on a forthcoming book, Looking at Jan van Eyck and the Art of Painting, to be published by Ludion with an English edition by Thames and Hudson. An earlier book published by Princeton University Press, The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (1982), as well as numerous presentations, journal articles, and book chapters, established her as one of the foremost experts on van Eyck. In 1982, a symposium she organized and hosted at the University of Memphis, “600 Years of Netherlandish Art,” led to the formation of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, of which she was a founding member. Her honors include the University of Memphis Distinguished Research Award in the Humanities in 2001, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Coolidge Fellowship, selection as a Danforth Associate, and her appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Flemish Academy for Science and the Arts.
Before joining the Department of Art at the University of Memphis in 1977, Purtle taught at Maryville University and Washington University in St. Louis, from which she received her PhD. She also served for thirty-two years as a nun in the Religious of the Sacred Heart. She was devoted to her students, who deeply appreciated the extensive knowledge, insights, engagement, and enthusiasm that she brought to her classes. For almost thirty years, Purtle was the coordinator for the Art History Program and for the past thirteen was the director of the Dorothy K. Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History.
She is deeply missed by her students, colleagues, and friends. The Department of Art has begun a memorial fund in her honor, and the leadership of the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art plans a special recognition of her in its inaugural June issue.
Jeffrey Chipps Smith of the University of Texas at Austin has also written an obituary for Carol Purtle for HNA News, the newsletter of the Historians of Netherlandish Art.
Published on May 13, 2009.
