Overview

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.

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Reviews

""You know, I suppose, the Charles Perkinses - with whom I lately spent an evening. Mrs. P. is spicy and Mr. P. - sugary, shall I say? - No, full of sweetness and light - especially sweetness. He is repeating before the Lowell Institute a course of lectures on Ancient Art, which he gave last winter to the University, Careful and sound, but without the divine afflatus."" - Henry James ""Mr. Charles C Perkins was one of those citizens who exerted, by his excellence of character and the ideal standard he imposed upon himself, an ennobling influence on whomsoever came across his path.... A man of ripened culture, familiar with the art centres of the Old World as with the streets of his native Boston, a skilled musician who had studied with the masters and heard all the greatest singers and instrumentalists of his day, it would have been but natural had he looked at the musical situation of Boston in 1851 with a disheartenment which should have caused him to turn from the vista of endless drudgery and fruitless labor. He had brought home from Europe a purpose and hopefulness and discerned the wants and capabilities of his native city and country.... It is to the lesson of Mr. Perkins's life that we wish to point. He had wealth and yet no more sought mere idle luxury than he did money. He chose the better part - labored early and late in directions where his taste reinforced his industry and gave the fruit of his research liberally to those who longed for knowledge and yet had not the wherewithal to enter its schools. Such lives are not frequently led by rich American scholars. Would that more men of wealth and cultivated tastes regarded themselves as did Mr. Perkins - as holding their culture as a public trust, with consequent responsibility to teach among the people"". - The Boston Evening Transcript ""As a critic of art and a writer upon art subjects Charles Callahan Perkins gained something more than a national reputation, .. Few men were better fitted to discuss artistic questions than he. His broad culture, his technical training, his wide study, his enthusiasm, and above all his eminently refined and exquisite taste, combined to make him 'facile princeps' among American connoisseurs."" - The New York Times

Author Information

Edward N. (Ned) Perkins was born in New York City in 1951. He was raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and Tyringham, Massachusetts and educated at Moravian Preparatory School, St. Paul's School, and the University of Denver. He was a founder of the publishing house Applewood Books and for many years managed the Excelsior Printing division of the Crane Paper Company. He is the great-great-grandson of Charles Callahan Perkins.

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