Books are valuable for many reasons. Some tell good stories or offer different ways of thinking, while others help us to understand the evolution of a field. Jules Prown’s new collection of essays does all this and more, lifting the curtain on the life of a renowned art historian and a pioneer in material culture analysis. It is as if Prown beckons us aside, whispering secrets to his scholarly success: “Look closely, think broadly, and avoid narrow categories. Most important, change and grow.” Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture demonstrates how research can shimmy and shift, veer and circle back. Yet it all comes together in this celebration of a lifetime spent analyzing artistic production. Prown has tried, he explains, to “write about artists as sentient beings shaped by their culture, and about their art as material manifestations, like all artifacts, of that culture—solid evidence” (1). When my students speak of “Prownian” method, they understand that credo.

Eighteen chapters and a long personal introduction form this volume. For those who practice American art history and material culture, some of these essays are familiar—even seminal. It is their juxtaposition and explication that make this a singular volume. This book is certainly about important artists and craftspeople of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their work, but two other themes emerge: the vivid explication of how art-historical method has changed in nearly half a decade, and the way that a man’s life and work is intertwined. When the book is closed, we will have seen the evolution of art history and material culture, watched the infusion of new tools and theories, and observed how an idea can mature.

Prown begins with a simple goal: his introduction is an attempt “to explain briefly to the reader why I wrote what I wrote when I wrote it” (1). Opening this retrospective are three chapters that explore the art of John Singleton Copley. Prown himself thinks that this enterprise was one of his most important contributions to the field, and certainly when he began his investigation in the early 1960s much basic research on this painter still needed to be done. Such analysis now seems rather traditional, for the task then was finding and filling understudied areas. Included in this volume are lesser-known writings, such as a discussion of Copley’s “Anatomy Book,” originally published in 1963. In the essay Prown brings to light an important document from the British Museum and helps us to learn the ways that colonial artists made themselves proficient interpreters of the human body at rest and in motion. He follows with a second themed piece that tracks Copley’s New York production, where we can see how the author came to this project and how it was accomplished—a bit of serendipity, a lot of legwork, and that special facility to untangle small mysteries because of one’s key knowledge about an artist and his work. Again, the counterposing of the two articles is significant. In the second text, Prown groups, categorizes, and counts, taking a social-science approach to an artist. His work is the result of a generation of study, showing how computers can be used to weigh particular variables and glean new insights.

Hence, Prown’s work gives us another chapter in changing art-historical methods. A most amusing anecdote in the introduction describes the reception of his essay “The Art Historian and the Computer: An Analysis of Copley’s Patronage, 1753–1774,” a text that he considers one of his two most significant contributions to the field (and which is reprinted in the present volume). In explaining this new technology, he reminds us how far scholars have come. Using computers might jeopardize his chances for tenure, his department chair warned, and his IBM punch card slide at the College Art Association Annual Conference in 1966 generated boos from the audience. For those of us with closets still filled with lurking data punch cards, his depiction of technology and his deft and clear descriptions of variables and analyses lead to smiles. For new readers, it will help to enlighten the “dark age” before laptop computers and hence to see how radical ideas become commonplace.

A decade would pass as Prown built, consolidated, and directed what would become the Yale Center for British Art. In his introduction, Prown describes how his career now had split into two different directions, as a curator working with decorative-arts objects and as a teacher and scholar studying British painting. When he left his job at the center, how was he to resolve that incongruity?

In the end, Prown explains, he avoided choosing one of these defined camps, and instead brought the two together. He used his tools of close analysis to look more broadly at both art and artifacts as cultural evidence. He relates how he had been at first intimidated by younger scholars, with their basket of new theories and ideas, but then was encouraged by cultural historians such as Henry Glassie that he was on the right track. Prown tells how the repetition of teaching his “Art as Evidence” course at Yale rigorously tested his ideas, and he credits his students over and over again for opening up new avenues of thought. Seldom is it so clearly shown how the parts of academic life feed one another: teaching, discussions with colleagues, research, and writing. Out of these new methods emerged what Prown thinks is his second influential work, the article “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” published in 1982.

The scholarly approach found in “Mind in Matter” (and other related essays) was part of a swirling set of ideas from the 1970s in archaeology, social history, folklore, and geography. Newer theories joined with an interest in those artists and artisans who had little voice in the historical record. Glassie, James Deetz, and Dell Upton were just a few of the champions of the power of objects to demonstrate the vernacular expressiveness of ordinary people. Nonetheless, Prown’s brilliance was that he developed a particular practice that could be applied to both high and low, fine and decorative—the entire array of artistic expression. Prown put the artifact first—to analyze it is to move slowly, quietly, and methodically toward its cultural significance.

As the final chapters of this volume demonstrate, he continues to crash the boundaries between disciplines, challenging us to rethink our craft. In “The Promise and Perils of Context” (1997), for example, he acknowledges the sea change in the study of American art (“contextualization”) where “art has become less the object of study than the means of study” (243). But, he posits, style shared by multiple artifacts from a single place and time “acts like a cultural daydream expressing unspoken beliefs,” and “structural meanings can best be sprung loose by analyzing objects as artistic fictions” (249). Ultimately, he urges us to not merely construct a social history of art, but to demonstrate how art is a special kind of cultural evidence.

Prown has had a remarkable career. When I asked a colleague about this art historian’s work, he did not hesitate but grinned: “Tell him to leave some work for the rest of us.” Some of this breadth of study is shown in this volume, where great American artists—Copley, Benjamin West, John Trumbull, Charles Willson Peale, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins—receive the same evaluative gaze as chairs and buildings. When Ralph Earl painted Elijah Boardman in 1789, the artist depicted the merchant opening a door on his enticing stock of goods. Like Boardman, Jules Prown shows us riches and entreats us to look.