During the first quarter of the twentieth century, Marquand was not only writing his famous books on the della Robbia family of sculptors, but, as the department's first chairman, was building a staff of scholars in the history of art whose teaching and writing during the second quarter of the century were to bring Princeton national and international renown. Among them were Charles Rufus Morey, who became the most formidable historian of mediaeval art in America; Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., a gifted writer on many aspects of art who gave courses on Italian and northern European painting; George Elderkin, historian of Greek art; Albert M. Friend, masterly preceptor and brilliant medievalist; and W. Frederick Stohlman, another fine mediaevalist, who also gave enlightening lectures on Renaissance sculpture.
The two decades after Morey became chairman in 1924 were the department's period of greatest power and influence. Morey rounded out the department by appointing five new members, all of whom added to Princeton's fame: two mediaevalists -- Ernest DeWald, who also gave a popular course in Italian painting, and Kurt Weitzmann, the celebrated Byzantinist: George Rowley, the father of Princeton's studies in Far Eastern art; Richard Stillwell, the distinguished classical archaeologist; and Donald Egbert, whose courses in American art and architecture widely influenced the study of these subjects in this country. Morey raised large sums of money for departmental endowment and for the Marquand Library, founded by Marquand and now one of the great art libraries of the world. He also established the world-famous Index of Christian Art, a photographic record with bibliography of works of Christian art produced before 1400 -- an invaluable aid to scholarship. And under Morey the department's great period of colonization began. While Harvard by and large staffed the country's museums, Princeton in good measure provided teachers and departmental chairmen for a relatively new discipline that was beginning to expand across the country. This spreading of Princeton's heritage has continued ever since. Finally Morey started the department's handsome publication fund. With the Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology (numbering 41 volumes) and with the series in the History of Manuscript Illumination, Princeton is, in programmatic publication in the history of art, ahead of every American university.
Morey's successor, in 1945, was Baldwin Smith, a great teacher and an eminent historian of ancient and early Christian architecture. He added to the staff three young men who became distinguished teachers and scholars in their fields: David Coffin in Renaissance architecture; John Rupert Martin in the Baroque art of Italy and northern Europe; and Robert Koch in the Northern Renaissance, a field in which Bert Friend had earlier given a memorable course. During Smith's chairmanship, Princeton's tradition of field archaeology, initiated by Butler's early expedition to Sardis, and carried forward in the great collaborative dig at Antioch in the 1930s, entered a new phase with the model and productive excavation of the ancient Greek city of Morgantina in Sicily under Richard Stillwell and another eminent classicist who had joined the department in 1951, Eric Sj”qvist, formerly archaeological secretary to King Gustav of Sweden.
Under Rensselaer Lee, who succeeded Smith as chairman in 1956, funds were secured for a new expedition, directed by Kurt Weitzmann and by George H. Forsyth, Jr. '23 of the University of Michigan (the University of Alexandria in Egypt was a cosponsor), to the ancient monastery of St. Sinai. This led to the publication by Forsyth of the monastery's architecture and by Weitzmann of its great apse mosaic and its unique collection of early Byzantine paintings. Also plans were completed for the new McCormick Hall and for the Art Museum, then ably directed by Patrick J. Kelleher. Graduate work and museum collections in Oriental art developed imposingly under Wen Fong who persuaded the eminent Japanese scholar, Shujiro Shimada, to join the faculty; and the department acquired among others Felton Gibbons, a rising star in the field of Italian Renaissance art. Several preeminent scholars at the Institute for Advanced Study have greatly strengthened the graduate curriculum. Under Lee's chairmanship Erwin Panofsky was persuaded to teach courses regularly; Millard Meiss also contributed to instruction and with his wife endowed a fund for the purchase of photographs.
During the chairmanship of Lee's successors, Coffin (1964-1970) and Fong (1970-1973), the department maintained and increased its offerings in the traditional fields. It also kept up with the times in establishing new courses in twentieth-century art, Spanish art, and graphic arts, the art of Latin America, and the art of photography, the last taught by Peter Bunnell, director of the Art Museum, and first incumbent of the new chair in photography endowed by David H. McAlpin 20 in 1972.
Under Coffin the department's new buildings were completed, and strong appointments in classical art were made to replace Stillwell and Sj”qvist, who had retired: Theodore Leslie Shear, Jr., field director of the excavations in the Athenian Agora, and Evelyn Harrison, the first woman to be appointed a full professor in the department (lost, unfortunately, in 1974 to the graduate Institute of Fine Arts at New York University).
Under Fong, one of the country's most distinguished young scholars in the field of Chinese painting, important acquisitions continued to enrich the oriental collections in the Art Museum; also three women were added to the faculty, and after coeducation the department's enrollment increased notably as women showed strong interest in its courses.
As this is written, John R. Martin is serving his fourth year as chairman. His international repute as a teacher-scholar, his energy, and his sense of the department's great history and tradition augur well for its future.
Rensselaer W. Lee