Dora Jane Janson

Dora Jane Janson, née Heineberg (1916–2002) was an American art historian, who collaborated with her husband Horst W. Janson.^[1]

Life

Dora Jane Heineberg was born in Philadelphia.^[1] She studied art history at Radcliffe College, where she met Horst W. Janson, an émigré graduate student at Harvard University.^[2] The couple married after he had gained his PhD in 1941. Janson "never denied that she consciously sacrificed her career to raise children".^[1] She helped her husband with his 1952 monograph Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, providing an "exemplary index".^[3] She also collaborated as co-author with her husband on The Story of Painting for Young People (1954) and History of Art (1962). History of Art entirely excluded women painters.^[4]

Dora Janson's From slave to siren (1971), an extensive catalog of a Duke University Museum of Art exhibition on Victorian women's jewellery, related the jewelry to changing 19th-century ideals of feminine beauty and behaviour,^[5] reflected in cameo portraiture.^[6]

Janson died in Devon, Pennsylvania. Her son Anthony Janson is also an art historian.^[1]

Works

• (with H. W. Janson) The picture history of painting: from cave painting to modern times, 1957
• (ed. with H. W. Janson) Key monuments of the history of art: a visual survey, 1959
• (with H. W. Janson) History of art: a survey of the major visual arts from the dawn of history to the present day, 1962
• (with H. W. Janson and Joseph Kerman) A history of art and music, 1968
• From slave to siren: the Victorian woman and her jewelry, from neoclassic to art nouveau, 1971
• (with Hugh Johnson and David Revere McFadden) Wine, celebration and ceremony, 1985