Background

John Ellerton Lodge was born on August 1, 1876 in Nahant, Massachusetts, United States, the second son and youngest of the three children of Henry Cabot Lodge and Anna Cabot Mills (Davis) Lodge. The poet George Cabot Lodge was his brother.

Education

Ellerton Lodge, as he was known, was educated by private tutors and, after 1887, when his father took his seat in Congress, at Mr. Young's School in Washington, D. C. He entered Harvard College in the autumn of 1896 but left early in his sophomore year because of eye trouble. Later he studied at the New England Conservatory in 1899-1900.

Career

Lodge lived in Boston, devoting himself to music and painting, for which he had a natural gift. In 1907 he set the choral odes and lyric scenes of Aeschylus's Agamemnon to music for a performance by the Harvard Greek department. When a board of trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1918, Lodge was a member; he served until 1931.

Lodge stumbled into his true career when in May 1911 he joined the staff of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as temporary assistant to Kakuzo Okakura, curator of Chinese and Japanese art. The museum had in the previous thirty years acquired the greatest collection of Japanese art in the Western world, and in 1905 had persuaded Okakura--a kind of Japanese William Morris--to join its staff. Lodge's three months' appointment introduced him to the art of the Far East, which became the major interest of his life. At the end of this period he was made assistant in charge of paintings and exhibitions, with responsibility for cataloguing and installing objects in the galleries. He soon devised plans for a storage-study for the safe and accessible keeping of some four thousand paintings.

He was promoted to assistant curator in January 1913 and to acting curator in September of that year after Okakura's premature death. Lodge became curator of Chinese and Japanese art in January 1916. He studied Oriental languages, reading widely in them, and built up a library in the museum on the art, religion, and philosophy of China and Japan. He attended quietly and effectively to the improvement of exhibition and conservation arrangements, and maintained the highest standards in the acquisition of objects.

In December 1920 Lodge took on the added responsibility of the collection that Charles L. Freer had given to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. At the time of Freer's death in the autumn of 1919, the Freer Gallery of Art, which was built on the Mall, had almost been completed, but it fell to Lodge to convert this great private collection into an operating public institution. Although appointed director of the Freer Gallery in 1921, he retained his Boston curatorship for a decade thereafter, dividing his time between the two institutions.

The gallery in Washington was opened on May 2, 1923; it then became his responsibility to use the funds bequeathed by Freer for "the acquisition and study of Oriental Fine Arts. " In his acquisitions for this Gallery he showed the same discriminating taste that had marked his purchases for Boston. He also stressed the importance of scholarly examination and comparison and the use of archaeological evidence, maintaining a field staff in China which worked in cooperation with the Chinese government in the investigation of ancient sites and in the study and translation of texts and inscriptions from numerous Oriental languages.

Lodge resigned the Boston curatorship in the spring of 1931 but continued as director of the Freer Gallery until his death. He died in Washington in 1942 of a coronary occlusion following an operation for cancer. Although he wrote little, Lodge left an impress upon two great collections of Oriental art.

Achievements

• Under Lodge's leadership, The Freer Gallery became a valuable research center, as well as the most subtle artistic amenity in the Smithsonian complex. Upon the basis of Freer's collection, he built up notable holdings of Chinese bronze, jade, sculpture, painting, and pottery; Indian sculpture and painting; Armenian, Arabic, and Persian manuscripts and painting; Islamic glass, pottery, and metal work.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Aeschylus Agamemnon: The Choral Odes And Lyric Scenes

    ( This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)

  • A Descriptive and Illustrative Catalogue of Chinese Bronzes: Acquired During the Administration of John Ellerton Lodge (Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, Oriental Studies No. 3)

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "He refused to be influenced by his own personal likes and dislikes. In selecting an object, his motto was always 'the best of its kind, ' a simple phrase but one difficult to adhere to. Through his almost uncanny insight, he was able to choose the best in whatever branch of art was involved. "- Kojiro Tomita

Connections

On August 31, 1911, Lodge married Mary Catherine Connolly of Lourdes, Nova Scotia. There were no children.

Father:

Henry Cabot Lodge

Mother:

Anna Cabot Mills (Davis) Lodge

Spouse:

Mary Catherine Connolly

Brother:

George Cabot Lodge

poet

References

• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History (2 Volumes)