Dr. Carol Gibson Scholarship

DR. Carol Gibson

Dr. Carol Gibson did her B.A. in Fine Arts at the University of Western Ontario in 1972; she holds two M.A's in Art History and Philosophy, from UBC (1974) and UWO (1975) respectively. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Warburg Institute at the University of London in 1982. Her dissertation on art connoisseurship in Western art history received the distinction of publication in the Garland Series of Outstanding Doctoral Dissertations (1988).  She studied with Sir Ernst Gombrich and Michael Baxandall, both outstanding contributors to the discipline of art history. Her dissertation addressed important art historical questions such as determining authenticity as a basis for how works of art are attributed to a particular artist or workshop.

She was the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions during her career, which spanned a Lectureship at the University of Leeds; Assistant and Associate Professor at Queen’s University (1982-1991) when she received a teaching award for her contribution to her students at the undergraduate and graduate levels (the Queen’s University Arts and Science Undergraduate Society’s Award for Teaching Excellence); and a Lansdowne Chair in the Faculty of Fine Arts between 1991 and 2003.

Her passion for British art resulted in the publication of a monograph on Jonathan Richardson, which appeared with Yale University Press in 2000.  She examined the full range of Richardson’s socio-historic context, offering us a rich picture of the vibrancy of this talented and multi-faceted artist, writer, and philosopher. She wrote numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on British art; art theory and criticism. More recently, she was engaged in a SSHRC-funded study of picture consumption in London in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, she demonstrated how factors like taste and art production affected the art work in London at a key moment in art history.

In addition to her many scholarly achievements as a devoted researcher, she inspired many students, graduate and undergraduate, to master the diverse skills required in the discipline of art history. Whether she was teaching a first-year introductory lecture, lecture courses for undergraduates, or an advanced seminar, students invariably commented on how her research focused on interdisciplinary concerns, and that she urged them to build a diverse and rich intellectual platform for their own interests and talents. Her popularity was enormous and she had as many as 8 graduate student supervisions each year.

This award was created in Carol’s honour to benefit a new generation of students in the Department of History in Art at the University of Victoria. It will be awarded annually to a fourth year student in the honours program of the Department of History in Art.