Dr. Mitchell Merling

Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art

Dr. Mitchell Merling, Paul Mellon Curator and Head of the Department of European Art, has been with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts since 2005. He previously served as Curator at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art and Curator of European Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Before that, Merling held predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, where he contributed to the Systematic Catalog volume on Italian Baroque Painting as well as to the Glory of Venice exhibition catalogue, coproduced with London’s Royal Academy. He is currently collaborating on a major loan exhibition of 19th-century French floral still lives to be held at VMFA and the Dallas Museum of Art in 2014 – 15, as well as anticipating the Fall 2014 publication of his exhibition catalog for Catching Sight: The World of the British Sporting Print. At VMFA, Merling oversees the Mellon collections of French, British Sporting, and American art, as well as the general European collections from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century. In addition, he serves as the in-house curator of the Gans Collection of English Silver. He is also supervising the acquisition of the Frank Raysor Collection of approximately 10,000 European and American prints.