Philippe Halbert Appointed Curator of Decorative Arts and Design

The MMFA announces the appointment of Philippe Halbert as Curator of Decorative Arts and Design. A specialist in the history and material cultures of colonial America and modern Europe, he will be responsible for overseeing, studying and advancing the MMFA’s Decorative Arts and Design collection comprising more than 24,000 objects.

Franco-American Philippe Halbert brings with him a decade of museum, heritage, and academic experience. Until recently, he was Richard Koopman Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the oldest public art museum in the United States, located in Hartford, Connecticut. In this role, he was responsible for a collection of 3,000 objects dating from the 17th century to present day.

He has previously carried out a variety of assignments at historic institutions and sites like the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, the Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven, Historic Deerfield, in Massachusetts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Winterthur Museum, in Delaware. He has also written essays on diverse topics, ranging from 18th-century French cabinetmaking to the contribution of freed slave Dominique-François Mentor to Canadian silversmithing.

Philippe Halbert holds a PhD and a master’s in Art History from Yale University, a master’s in American Material Culture Studies from the University of Delaware, and a bachelor’s in History and French and Francophone Studies from the College of William & Mary. His doctoral thesis, which won the Yale Canadian Studies Prize, focused on the correspondence between Montreal-born Élisabeth Bégon and her son-in-law between 1748 and 1753, a valuable record of life in New France.

We wish him a warm welcome in the MMFA’s team.