Colin T. Eisler

Who is Colin T. Eisler?

Colin Tobias Eisler is an art historian, Robert Lehman Professor of Fine Arts at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, and a widely published expert on early Netherlandish art.

Eisler was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1931. His family subsequently moved to the United States, where Eisler received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1952. He studied at Oxford from 1952 to 1953, then completed his masters degree at Harvard University the following year. He was hired to teach art history at Yale from 1955–1957 while he was working on his doctorate. Eisler received his PhD from Harvard in 1957, and spent the following year as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He has taught at New York University since 1958.

His research and writing have been furthered by many grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship, and a Henry Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was the recipient of a festschrift for his 70th birthday in 2011, when his colleagues published New Studies on Old Masters: Essays in Renaissance Art in Honour of Colin Eisler.