Lawrence O. Goedde

Professor, Art History


Larry Goedde is Professor of Art History in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia.  He joined the faculty in 1981 as an Acting Assistant Professor and served as department Chair for a total of nineteen years.  During his terms as Chair, he oversaw the department’s participation in planning the renovation of FayerweatherHall for Art History and the new building for Studio Art, Ruffin Hall, and represented the department during the construction phase of each project.

His research interests have focused on landscape and marine painting in the historical Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and on still life painting as well. His work on these genres has tended to emphasize issues of interpretive method, particularly as it pertains to understanding iconographic change and the relationship between works of art and contexts of significant historical, social, and cultural change, such as the phenomenal success of Dutch sea faring in the seventeenth century or the so-called Little Ice Age of the same era. 

Larry’s publications include Tempest and Shipwreck in Dutch and Flemish Art: Convention, Rhetoric, and Interpretation (Penn State Press, 1989), and more recently an essay surveying Renaissance and Baroque landscape traditions in A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).  Publications on marine painting include an essay, “Natural Metaphors and Naturalism in Netherlandish Marine Painting,” in the exhibition catalogue Turmoil and Tranquility: The Sea Through the Eyes of Dutch and Flemish Masters, 1550-1700, for the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in 2008; and the essay “Les différentes manières de suggérer l’inhumanitédes catastrophes en mer: tempêtes et naufrages dans la peinture flamande de l’âge d’or,” in the catalogue to the exhibition La Flandre et la mer: de Pieter l’Ancien à Jan Brueghel de Velours at the Musée de Flandre in Cassel, France (2015).

Other essays include “Bethlehem in the Snow and Holland on the Ice: Climatic Change and the Invention of the Winter Landscape, 1560-1620,” in KulturelleKonsequenzen der “Kleinen Eiszeit” (2005); and "A Little World Made Cunningly:  Dutch Still Life and Ekphrasis,” in Still Lifes of the Golden Age: Northern European Paintings from the Heinz Family Collection, National Gallery of Art, 1989.

Recent exhibitions include, for the Fralin Art Museum at UVA, “Traces of the Hand: Master Drawings from the Collection of Frederick and Lucy S. Herman” (2014); and, for the Gibbes Art Museum, Charleston, SC, "Charleston Collects: Devotion and Fantasy, Witchcraft and the World's End," drawn from the private collection of a UVA alumnus (2020).

Larry did his undergraduate work at Washington University in St. Louis, and his MA and PhD at Columbia University.  At UVA he regularly teaches courses on Italian, Spanish, and French Baroque art and architecture, as well as courses on Dutch and Flemish art of the seventeenth-century and on Northern Renaissance painting, printmaking, and sculpture.  He also works closely with the Fralin Art Museum on its collections of works on paper, and teaches graduate and undergraduate seminars on the history and connoisseurship of prints and drawings using the museum’s collections.