John Wilmerding, photograph by D. Applewhite

John Wilmerding is currently the Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University and visiting curator in the department of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is trustee emeritus of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont and a member of the boards of trustees of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the College of the Atlantic in Maine. He serves on advisory boards or committees for Smithsonian Studies in American Art, the Archives of American Art, Harvard University Art Museums, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. He also holds a presidential appointment to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.

Wilmerding is the author of many books and catalogues on American art, including American Marine Painting (1987); American Views (1991); monographic studies of Robert Salmon, Fitz Hugh Lane, John F. Peto, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins; The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast (1994); and Compass and Clock (1999). His most recent book, Signs of the Artist: Signatures and Self-Expression in American Painting (2003), is a study of autobiographical embodiments of artists in their works expressed through their signatures.