Art historian Jules David Prown (1930- ) is a Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. He is an authority on American art and material culture. Prown is a graduate of Lafayette College and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture at the University of Delaware. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1961 with a dissertation on John Singleton Copley. That year he joined the faculty of the Department of the History of Art at Yale University where he was also Curator of American Art at the University Art Gallery and the founding Director of the Yale Center for British Art. In 1966 he published the two-volume John Singleton Copley. While working on the publication he conducted an in-depth computer analysis of Copley's 240 American sitters. Prown retired from Yale in 1999.