David Sellin

Who is David Sellin?

David Frost Sellin was an American art historian, educator, and author. He taught at a number of universities, worked on the staffs of several museums, and served as curator of the U.S. Capitol, 1976-1980.

He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he attended Quaker schools. As a teenager, he studied privately with painter Frank B. A. Linton, a former student of Thomas Eakins, and spent a year in Sweden in the atelier of painter Otte Sköld. He received bachelor's and master's degrees in art history from the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to Stockholm to study for a year at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, and studied for two years in Rome as a Fulbright scholar.

He returned to Philadelphia, worked as a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and completed a doctorate in art history at the University of Pennsylvania. He became director of schools at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a position Eakins once had held.

His research into the influence of France on 19th-century Philadelphia artists – especially Joseph A. Bailly, Mary Cassatt, Eakins, and Howard Roberts – culminated in a 1973 exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sellin curated three additional exhibitions that had Eakins as a subject: American Art in the Making: Preparatory Studies for Masterpieces of American Painting, 1800-1900; Thomas Eakins, Susan Macdowell Eakins, Elizabeth Macdowell Kenton; and Thomas Eakins and His Fellow Artists at the Philadelphia Sketch Club. His research into expatriate American artists who settled in France led to a 1982 joint exhibition by PAFA and the Phoenix Art Museum, that also traveled to France.