Janson, Dora Jane, née Heineberg

Date born:  1916

Place Born:  Philadelphia, PA

Date died:  2002

Place died:  Devon, PA

Wife of art historian Horst W. Janson (q.v.) and co-author of his books. Heineberg met her husband while an undergraduate at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, MA, and he a graduate student at Harvard.  Janson had fled Germany in 1935 using a graduate scholarship. After his Ph.D. was completed in 1941, they were married. Dora Janson never denied that she consciously sacrificed her career to raise children. She collaborated with her husband on Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in 1952, which won her husband a Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association in 1956, and The Story of Painting for Young People (1954). In 1962, her husband's famous History of Art, appeared, which has been updated through numerous editions and for which most of the popular readership knows their names. In 1971 she wrote an innovative exhibition catalog for the art museum at Duke University on Art Nouveau jewelry, From Slave to Siren: The Victorian Woman and Her Jewelry from Neoclassic to Art Nouveau. Her son, Anthony Janson, is also an art historian.

Home Country:  United States

Sources:  CAA News 27 no. 6 (November 2002),

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