The Education of Charles Callahan Perkins: How Art Came to America

The first complete biography of Charles Callahan Perkins (1823-1886), the noted Art Historian who founded the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and who played a key role in the introduction of Art Education to the United States.Charles Callahan Perkins was born in Boston, the scion of fabulously wealthy heirs to a China Trade Fortune. His father died young and after his mother remarried George Washington Doane, the Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey, Perkins was raised by a variety of guardians and mentors including Karl Follen (the Transcendentalist associate of Ralph Waldo Emerson), and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He attended Harvard and then traveled to Europe to study Art.(with Ary Scheffer in Paris) and Music (with Ignaz Moscheles in Leipzig) He was hailed as a musical prodigy; as a young man he composed the First Symphony by a native born composer performed in the United States; he delivered the First College Level Lectures in the country on the History of Art; was acclaimed in both the United States and in Europe for his groundbreaking histories of Early Italian Sculptors and his scholarly biographies of Raphael, Michelangelo and Ghiberti; and was honored as the first American member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts.As a patron of the arts, he played a critical role encouraging the sculptor Thomas Crawford, whose Statue of Freedom crowns the U.S. Capitol dome to this day. He revived the popular Boston Art Club, was the largest benefactor in the establishment of the country's first symphony hall, the Boston Music Hall, and led the Handel and Haydn Society for many years. THE EDUCATION OF CHARLES CALLAHAN PERKINS; HOW ART CAME TO AMERICA provides a vivid portrait of the American expatriates who lived in Paris, Rome, and Florence in the mid-nineteenth century and an important account of how (and why) they returned to this country and, led by Perkins, founded the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and, through his leadership on the Boston School Committee, introduced universal Art Education to the American schools, and in doing so, transformed the cultural life of the United States. Read more