Petra ten-Doesschate Chu

Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (born 15 October 1942) is a Dutch art historian based in the United States. A 1986 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written and edited several books, including Letters of Gustave Courbet, The Popularization of Images (1994), The Most Arrogant Man in France (2007) and Qing Encounters (2015). She is Professor Emerita of Art History and Museum Studies at the Seton Hall University College of Human Development Culture and Media. While working as an au pair in Paris, she attended the University of Paris,

While studying at Columbia, she worked as an assistant at Roy Andries de Groot's New York City office, with one of her jobs being describing meals for his food journalism pieces (de Groot was blind); in 2025, Chu recalled to The New Yorker that "when he wrote what I had described, it was all in Technicolor". She also worked as a New York City history researcher at the Museum of the City of New York and a Dutch document translator at the New York State Education Department. She edited and translated a volume of Gustave Courbet's letters, published as The Letters of Gustave Courbet in 1992. and she wrote The Illustrated Bartsch'''s two-part volume on Vivant Denon. In addition to academic journals, she often contributed to magazines like Apollo and Arts Magazine. In 1999, she served as president of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art. He was also a 1990 Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, a 1994-1995 Metropolitan Museum of Art Whitney Art History Fellow, and 2013 Getty Research Institute Fellow. Personal life In 1971, she married Fen-Dow Chu, a Taiwanese MIT-educated naval architect and son of artist I-Chao Chu. The two had met at a tenant party she and a roommate hosted in order to get a vacuum cleaner to borrow. (with Gabriel P. Weisberg) The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830-1900 (1980) Dominique Vivant Denon (vol. 121 of The Illustrated Bartsch; 1985 and 1988) (ed. with Gabriel P. Weisberg) The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy (1994) (with Jörg Zutter) Courbet: Artiste et promoteur de son oeuvre (1998, exhibition catalogue) (ed. with Laurinda S. Dixon) Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Art: Essays in Honor of Gabriel P. Weisberg (2008) (ed. with Ning Ding) Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West'' (2015)