Frank Jewett Jr. Mather

Background

Frank Jewett Mather was born on July 6, 1868 at Deep River, Connecticut. He was the son of Frank Jewett Mather, a lawyer, and Caroline Arms Graves Mather.

Education

Mather graduated with a B. A. from Williams College in 1889 and took the Ph. D. in English philology and literature at Johns Hopkins in 1892. (His dissertation was on the conditional sentence in Anglo-Saxon literature. ) After attending the University of Berlin for a year, Mather returned to Williams (1893 - 1900), where he taught English and Romance languages and met Irving Babbitt, who was an influential friend for the rest of his life. He also studied (1897 - 1898) at the École des Hautes Études in Paris under Gaston Paris.

Career

In 1901 Mather left teaching for journalism. He became an assistant editor of the Nation and an editorial writer for the New York Evening Post. He was also art critic for the Post in 1905-1906 and again in 1910-1911. After an attack of typhoid, in 1906 he left New York for Italy, where he was a free-lance journalist. In Italy he met Allan Marquand, the founder and patron of the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University. Mather was invited to join the department, and returned in 1910 to a career of teaching, this time the history of art. He held this post until 1933. Long an ardent yachtsman, Mather served as an ensign in the Naval Reserve in World War I. In 1912 Mather published The Collectors, short stories with settings in junk shops, auction rooms, villas, and castles in Spain that reflect his adventurous spirit of collecting. One story contains a portrait of Bernard Berenson, a good friend to whom Mather dedicated his History of Italian Painting (1923), the standard college text on the subject for many years. Mather's other art history books include Portraits of Dante (1921), The Isaac Master (1932), Venetian Painters (1936), and Western European Painting of the Renaissance (1939), which dealt with the great Renaissance and baroque painters in Flanders, Germany, France, and Spain. Another excursion into belles lettres was his imaginative drama Ulysses in Ithaca (1926). In 1927 he published Modern Painting, a general account extending from David to Cézanne and beyond. He also tried his hand at aesthetics in Concerning Beauty (1935), a very personal book marked by range of reference, fine insights, and common sense. Mather died on November 11, 1953 at Princeton, New Jersey.

Achievements

• Mather was one of the first Americans to reach Messina after the great earthquake of 1908, an experience he never forgot. From 1922 until 1946 he also served as the first director of the Museum of Historic Art, now the Princeton University Art Museum.

Works

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  • The Conditional Sentence in Anglo-Saxon: A Dissertation Presented to the Board of University Studies of Johns Hopkins University Baltimore for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Conditional Sentence in Anglo-Saxon: A D...)

  • Estimates in Art

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Homer Martin: Poet In Landscape (1912)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The Portraits Of Dante: Compared With The Measurement Of His Skull And Reclassified (1921)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Homer Martin, Poet in Landscape (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Homer Martin, Poet in Landscape Rs. Martin'...)

  • Do the Arts Make for Peace: International Conciliation, No. 51, February, 1912
  • CONCERNING BEAUTY
  • Venetian painters/by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.
  • Charles Herbert Moore: Landscape Painter

Views

He wrote about art intelligently, allusively (his knowledge of literature was always ready to hand), and "happily, with a pleasure one shares. " Mather was a humanist in a wide and rich sense, always aware of aesthetic quality, even in "disorderly geniuses, " but always believing that the greatest art is the interpreter of thought and emotion, and is related to the general concerns of living. Thus, while appreciating the elements of genius and beauty in modern painting, he criticized its subjective quality of undisciplined imagination. In the dedication of his Modern Painting to Babbitt, to whose "revived humanism" he felt he owed much, he summed up his own critical attitude: "You will find me more indulgent than yourself towards the pleasanter by-products of error . .. but you will also find me fighting beside you for such art as is humanistic, traditional, and socially available. "

Personality

He built a ketch, named Four Winds, with proceeds from the sale of a painting that had appreciated in value. Mather was a passionate collector of works of art and also an amateur artist who took pride in works that he felt bore a resemblance to those of Vincent van Gogh. A man of abundant talents, wide interests, and vast energy, Mather was first of all a writer; his training in journalism was responsible for the scope and quality of his writing during his years at Princeton. His first book, Homer Martin, Poet in Landscape (1912), showed his special feeling for American art, which is also manifested in the second volume of his Estimates in Art, published as late as 1931, which collects sensitive essays on American painters written much earlier. Mather, as Van Wyck Brooks remarked, was perhaps the first to state the opinion, now generally accepted, that Thomas Eakins, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Winslow Homer were more important figures than John Singer Sargent and James Whistler. (The first volume of Estimates, published in 1916, contained illuminating works on various art topics, from Botticelli and El Greco to the art of the Far East. )

Mather was also a great teacher whose lectures brilliant, witty, and elegant held students spellbound. Also, the splendid collection of paintings, drawings, and minor arts he amassed and generously gave to the university was largely the foundation of the Princeton Art Museum. As the dean of American art critics, Mather was sensible and free of cant in a field in which pontification can be a vocational malady. He was also a remarkable talker--fluent, pungent, humorous, provocative, and immensely entertaining.

Connections

On February 23, 1905, Mather married Ellen Suydam Mills; they had two children.

Mother:

Caroline Arms Graves Mather

father:

Frank Jewett Mather

Was a lawyer.

Wife:

Ellen Suydam Mills