Francis Henry Taylor (1903–1957) was a distinguished American

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

director and

curator A curator (from la, cura, meaning "to take care") is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the parti ...

, who served as the

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of the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

for fifteen years. He was born in Philadelphia, and started his career as a curator at the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

. In 1931 he became director of the

Worcester Art Museum The Worcester Art Museum, also known by its acronym WAM, houses over 38,000 works of art dating from antiquity to the present day and representing cultures from all over the world. WAM opened in 1898 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and ranks among th ...

Massachusetts, before joining the Metropolitan Museum in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

as its director in 1940. Taylor was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 1939 and the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

in 1946. Sometimes described as a showman, he developed a theory of the museum as an institution of active public service, not simply a repository of art. He was credited with doubling the number of people visiting the museum, up to 2.3 million a year."Custodian of the Attic"
''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...

'', December 29, 1952. Retrieved October 13, 2006.

Books

His writings include: * ''Babel's Tower: The Dilemma of the Modern Museum'' (1945) * ''The Taste of Angels: A History of Art Collecting from Rameses to Napoleon'' (1948, reprint 1955) - * ''Fifty Centuries of Art'' (1954) * ''Pierpont Morgan as Collector and Patron, 1837-1913'' (1957), Pierpont Morgan Library -

References

External links

Image of Francis Henry Taylor, Smithsonian Archives of American ArtFrancis Henry Taylor records, 1892-1956
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York.
Photo by Yousuf Karsh
*
Francis Henry Taylor papers, 1920-1958
from Houghton Library, Harvard College Library. {{DEFAULTSORT:Taylor, Francis Henry 1903 births 1957 deaths People from Philadelphia American art curators Directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art People associated with the Worcester Art Museum Directors of museums in the United States People associated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Members of the American Philosophical Society

Books

See also

References

External links