American art historian Barbara Novak attended Barnard College and Harvard. Novak’s ground-breaking ‘American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism and the American Experience’, was published in 1969 and followed by ‘Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825-1875’ in 1980. She served on the boards of the American Art Journal, the National Academy of Design and the New York Historical Society. Novak is also an accomplished watercolour painter.