Francis Henry Taylor

Background

He was born in Philadelphia on April 23, 1903. He was the son of William Johnson Taylor, a former president of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and president of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Emily Buckley Newbold.

Education

He prepared at the Kent (Connecticut) School for the University of Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated in 1924. While an undergraduate, Taylor decided to specialize in the humanities.

He then did graduate work at the universities of Paris and Florence, the Institut d'Estudis Catalans in Barcelona, and the American Academy in Rome.

Career

After graduation he taught English at the Lycée de Chartres while following courses at the Sorbonne in Paris (he had spoken French from childhood).

From 1927 to 1931 he served as assistant and then curator of medieval art and as editor at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Taylor's unique talents were revealed when he became director of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in 1931 at the exceptionally young age of twenty-eight. In this post he demonstrated his broad conception of the role of the museum in the community. His purchase of works of art in every field and from every period and the outstanding exhibitions he staged with brilliant showmanship reflected his wide knowledge of art history and underlined his driving purpose to build bridges between scholarly understanding and public awareness. He made the Worcester Museum the liveliest and best of its kind in the nation.

Taylor's accomplishments there and his fresh, invigorating approach to his profession in general led to his being chosen in 1939 as the fifth director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

From the start he was heavily burdened by problems arising from a depressed economy, by the imminence of war, and then by America's entry into the global struggle. At that point the most important parts of the museum's vast holdings had to be moved to a place of safety, temporary exhibitions had to be improvised, and the general public still had to be served day by day. In the midst of the pressures these difficulties imposed, Taylor laid bold plans for the reconstruction of the musuem and the modernization of its program. With the coming of peace these plans were energetically pursued. At a time when many great European collections had not yet been returned to their permanent quarters from emergency storage, he undertook a series of international loans on an unprecedented scale.

The Metropolitan organized unique exhibitions of art treasures, never before seen in this country, from Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Holland, and Japan. Taylor recognized the rewarding possibilities of associating the relevant aspects of industry with museum activities. One outstanding result of this vision was the incorporation of the Costume Institute into the general structure of the Metropolitan. In effect, he so altered the concept of an art museum's usefulness to society that a generation later it is hard to recall the prewar American museum world.

As is often the case with those who spend themselves setting new patterns, many of his innovations were left to be fully realized by others in years to come. During his administration, attendance at the museum soared, membership almost tripled, the endowment was almost doubled, gallery space was substantially enlarged, and, among other developments, a newly constructed auditorium (with every provision to facilitate television broadcasting when that medium was still in its early stages) was almost immediately booked to capacity with musical and educational events.

Taylor also found time for government service before and during the war, bringing to many foreign countries a better understanding of the United States and its cultural resources. After the war, he published The Taste of Angels (1948), a history of art collecting from Rameses to Napoleon. His worldwide contributions to the arts and humanities were recognized with awards from a half-dozen foreign nations.

In 1954 he decided to resume his old post at Worcester, and left the Metropolitan in 1955. He died in Worcester just three years later, following a kidney operation. An obituary in the Worcester Telegram rightly observed that America had lost "one of the rarest and most delightful personalities of this age. "

Achievements

• He is famous for heading the Metropolitan Museum of Art for fifteen years.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Fifty Centuries of Art

    (This beautiful book is the first general survey of art, f...)

  • Babel's Tower the Dilemma of the Modern Museum

    (1945 Columbia University Press; Hardcover)

  • Pierpont Morgan as Collector and Patron, 1837-1913

    (Taylor, Francis Henry)

  • The Taste of Angels: A History of Art Collecting from Rameses to Napolean

Views

Quotations: As he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, "The American Museum is after all not an abandoned European palace, a solution for storing and classifying the accumulated national wealth of the past, but an American phenomenon, developed by the people, for the people, and of the people. "

Membership

In 1926-1927 Taylor was a Carnegie fellow at the Graduate College in Princeton.

Personality

Francis Taylor was inevitably a controversial figure. His temper was volatile, but his spirit was charitable. He was a man of impressive bulk, with striking features that lent him an air of command. His energy was boundless. He could not tolerate cant or preciosity. He had a ready, pungent wit and was quick to puncture any sign of pomposity in those about him. Yet he wore his erudition and his academic honors with ease and grace. His conversation was salted by an irrepressible and bawdy sense of humor that could brighten the most solemn occasion.

Connections

On November 3, 1928, he married Pamela Coyne, a fellow Philadelphian; they had four children.

Father:

William Johnson Taylor

Mother:

Emily Buckley Newbold

Spouse:

Pamela Coyne