On February 20, 2020, Guillaume Lacroix, Consul General at the Consulate General of France in Chicago, awarded Lynne D. Ambrosini, Deputy Director and the Sallie Robinson Wadsworth Chief Curator, with the insignia of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in a ceremony held at the Taft Museum of Art (OH) for her many years of contributions to French & Franco-American Exhibitions, Acquisitions & Events.

Lynne Ambrosini is today considered one of the most eminent specialists in nineteenth-century French painting and sculpture.

Her already long career as an exhibition curator and museum curator has taken place in the service of major American museums, most of which are encyclopedic museums. In the majority of cases, French collections, particularly Impressionist ones, serve as a starting point for these modern institutions. Consequently, Lynne Ambrosini knows and serves the D.N.A. of major American museums, notably two located in the Midwest: the Taft Museum of Art (Cincinnati) and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Lynne Ambrosini promotes the study and influence of the great French masters: Manet, Monet, Rodin, Courbet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Daubigny, Millet, Pissarro, the Barbizon school, Giverny. She heads the curatorial team at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. She has organized nearly twenty exhibitions in the last twenty years. She has also published about twenty works. Each of her projects, intended for the general public or her peers, revisits French artistic heritage, notably by highlighting the very rich American collections, without ever neglecting an active lending policy with French museums.

Recently, Lynne Ambrosini organized the very first retrospective of the painter Charles-François Daubigny, whose name is attached to the Barbizon school and who is considered one of the precursors of Impressionist painting. Little known to the general public, his contribution is nevertheless fundamental. Without the determination of Lynne Ambrosini, this ambitious international exhibition would never have seen the light of day in Cincinnati, Edinburgh (Scottish National Gallery) and Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum) in 2016-2017. More than 335,000 visitors have discovered it. This tour de force is the result of some fifteen years of work and quality relationships forged by Lynne Ambrosini with her curatorial colleagues in the United States and Europe. A colloquium and a catalogue raisonné complete this masterful scientific contribution.