Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (born 15 October 1942) is a Dutch art historian based in the United States. A 1986 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written and edited several books, including Letters of Gustave Courbet (1992), The Popularization of Images (1994), The Most Arrogant Man in France (2007) and Qing Encounters (2015). She is Professor Emerita of Art History and Museum Studies at the Seton Hall University College of Human Development Culture and Media.
Petra ten-Doesschate was born on 15 October 1942 in Zeist, Netherlands; her father Jurriaan ten Doesschate was an ophthalmologist and her mother Lidy was a pediatrician. Her paternal grandfather Gezienus ten Doesschate was an ophthalmologist and art historian. While working as an au pair in Paris, she attended the University of Paris, where she obtained a diplôme supérieur in 1961. She then spent six years at the University of Utrecht, obtaining a doctoral degree there in 1967.
She decided to study in the United States after her father spent a year there as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, and she wrote letters to New York University and Columbia University, the latter of which accepted her to their doctoral program. A 1967-1971 Noble Fellow, she obtained a PhD in fine arts at Columbia in 1972; her dissertation French Realism and the Dutch Masters: The Influence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting on the Development of French Painting Between 1830 and 1870 was supervised by Theodore Reff and Allen Staley.
While studying at Columbia, she worked as an assistant at Roy Andries de Groot's New York City office, with one of her jobs being describing meals for his food journalism pieces (de Groot was blind); in 2025, Chu recalled to The New Yorker that "when he wrote what I had described, it was all in Technicolor". She also worked as a New York City history researcher at the Museum of the City of New York and a Dutch document translator at the New York State Education Department.
After working at the Institut Néerlandais from 1965 to 1972, she joined Seton Hall University in 1972 as an assistant professor, before being promoted to associate professor in 1977 and to full professor in 1980. She chaired Seton Hall's department of art and music from 1977 until 1998. She was eventually promoted to professor emerita. She and Barbara Cate co-founded Seton Hall's Master of Arts Program in Museum Professions.
As an academic, she specializes in 19th-century European art, especially in French art and Gustave Courbet. She has written and edited several books, including The Popularization of Images (1994), The Most Arrogant Man in France (2007) and Qing Encounters (2015). She edited and translated a volume of Gustave Courbet's letters, published as The Letters of Gustave Courbet in 1992. She co-edited the Princeton Series in Nineteenth-Century Art, Culture, and Society from 1991 to 1997. She also authored a textbook named Nineteenth Century European Art, published by Prentice Hall in 2002, and she wrote The Illustrated Bartschs two-part volume on Vivant Denon. In 2008, she and Laurinda S. Dixon published a festschrift on Gabriel P. Weisberg.
She also contributed to several exhibition catalogues, such as The Art of the July Monarchy (1990), French Paintings from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier (2003), and Anton Mauve 1838-1888 (2009). In addition to academic journals, she often contributed to magazines like Apollo and Arts Magazine.
In 1986, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1999, she served as president of the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art. She was one of the co-founders of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. He was also a 1990 Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, a 1994-1995 Metropolitan Museum of Art Whitney Art History Fellow, and 2013 Getty Research Institute Fellow. She won the 2015 College Art Association Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award.
In 1971, she married Fen-Dow Chu, a Taiwanese MIT-educated naval architect and son of artist I-Chao Chu. The two had met at a tenant party she and a roommate hosted in order to get a vacuum cleaner to borrow. They have four children.
She lives in South Orange, New Jersey. She is fluent in Dutch, English, French and German, She also started learning Chinese after the two married.