Eleanor Axson Sayre was an American author. She was a curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Background
Eleanor Axson Sayre was born on March 26, 1916, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. She was a daughter of Francis Bowes and Jessie Woodrow Wilson Sayre. Following the death of his first wife, Francis B. Sayre, Sr. on January 15, 1933 married secondly on June 28, 1937 to Elizabeth Evans Graves. Eleanor was the granddaughter of President Woodrow Wilson. She had two siblings.
Education
Eleanor Axson Sayre received early schooling in Siam, France, England, and Switzerland, as well as the United States. In 1938 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bryn Mawr College. Sayre completed two years of graduate study at Harvard University.
Eleanor Axson Sayre's early employments included curatorial and educational positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Lyman Allen Museum in New London, Connecticut, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art in Providence. She joined the staff of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1945 as an assistant curator of prints and drawings, becoming a curator in 1967.
In addition to her work on Goya, Sayre organized exhibitions on the prints of Rembrandt and Durer. In 1977, she brought to the Boston museum a large exhibition of the drawings and book illustrations of Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, and in collaboration with the Boston park system embellished the show with a small zoo in the museum's courtyard. In 1975, she was also responsible for an innovative curatorial exchange whereby she and Hugh MacAndrew of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University exchanged positions and houses for a year. She retired in 1984 and was named curator emeritus. Until her health prevented it, she worked every day in her office at the museum on a manuscript about "Los Caprichos," Goya's politically charged suite of etchings.
She authored two books, one on the artistic works of Francisco Goya titled Late Caprichos by Goya: Fragments from a Series, and a book of pictures and writings called A Christmas Book.