Denman Waldo Ross (1853–1935) was an American painter, art collector, and scholar of art history and theory. He was a professor of art at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and a trustee of the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

Early life

Denman Waldo Ross was born in 1853. He completed his undergraduate studies at

in 1875, and earned his doctorate in political economy from the same institution five years later.

Career

Ross came to be interested in art soon after this, and began teaching courses in design and art theory at Harvard by 1889. Ross would spend much of the rest of his life lecturing on these and related topics, working with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on their burgeoning Oriental Art department, and traveling the world in search of artworks to add to his personal collection. Ross was also a member of some of Boston's elite inner circles, and is known to have brushed elbows not only with other prominent people associated with the Museum of Fine Arts and the art world, but also with the likes of

Louis Brandeis Louis Dembitz Brandeis (; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an American lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939. Starting in 1890, he helped develop the "right to privacy" concept ...

John Singer Sargent John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more ...

Joseph Lindon Smith Joseph Lindon Smith (October 11, 1863 – October 18, 1950)), was an American painter, best known for his extraordinarily faithful and lively representations of antiquities, especially Egyptian tomb reliefs. He was a founding member of the a ...

Isabella Stewart Gardner Isabella Stewart Gardner (April 14, 1840 – July 17, 1924) was a leading American art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. She founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Gardner possessed an energetic intellectual cur ...

and various members of Boston's most prominent families. A number of his students at Harvard, the Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere he lectured, went on to become prominent artists.

Hyman Bloom Hyman Bloom (March 29, 1913 – August 26, 2009) was a Latvian-born American painter. His work was influenced by his Jewish heritage and Eastern religions as well as by artists including Altdorfer, Grünewald, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Blake, Bre ...

and

Jack Levine Jack Levine (January 3, 1915November 8, 2010) was an American Social Realist painter and printmaker best known for his satires on modern life, political corruption, and biblical narratives. Levine is considered one of the key artists of the Bo ...

were among these, as was

Marie Danforth Page Marie Danforth Page (1869–1940) was an American painter, mainly of portraits. A native of Boston, Page began drawing lessons with Helen M. Knowlton at 17. These continued until 1889, when she began five years of lessons at the School of the ...

. The collection of objects donated by Ross to the Museum of Fine Arts over the course of his career as a collector covers a wide geographical, chronological, and material diversity. He collected a myriad of European art objects, along with a great many Chinese and Japanese paintings and textiles. Among the many objects in the Denman Waldo Ross collection at the Museum are a stone head from

Angkor Wat Angkor Wat (; km, អង្គរវត្ត, "City/Capital of Temples") is a temple complex in Cambodia and is the largest religious monument in the world, on a site measuring . Originally constructed as a Hinduism, Hindu temple dedicated ...

, a 7th-century Chinese scroll painting attributed to

Yan Liben Yan may refer to: Chinese states * Yan (state) (11th century – 222 BC), a major state in northern China during the Zhou dynasty * Yan (Han dynasty kingdom), first appearing in 206 BC * Yan (Three Kingdoms kingdom), officially claimed indep ...

, a set of ''

ukiyo-e Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...

'' folding screen paintings of

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

's pleasure quarters, and a number of Chinese Buddhist

stele A stele ( ),Anglicized plural steles ( ); Greek plural stelai ( ), from Greek , ''stēlē''. The Greek plural is written , ''stēlai'', but this is only rarely encountered in English. or occasionally stela (plural ''stelas'' or ''stelæ''), whe ...

s and paintings. In 1907, he published a manual of design : "A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm" by Houghton-Mifflin and co. and he contributed essays on design to magazines including '' Photo Era''.''The Buffalo Review'' Saturday 13 Jan 1900, p.4

Death

Denman Ross, ''Sitting redhair nude youth''. Ross died in 1935.

References

*"A History of the Asiatic Department: A Series of Illustrated Lectures Given in 1957 by Kojiro Tomita (1890-1976)." Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1990.
"A Theory of Pure Design, Harmony, Balance, Rhythm"

Early life

Career

Death

References

Further reading