Frank Jewett Mather

Born in 1868, Frank Jewett Mather Jr. became one of the early American scholars to champion modern art. He taught at Princeton University, where he is remembered as the department’s first distinctly modern-minded professor of art and archaeology, and he built a reputation as an influential critic as well as a teacher.

Alongside his academic work, he wrote extensively on art for a broader public. His papers at Princeton describe him as an educator, art critic, and museum director, reflecting a career that moved between scholarship, public criticism, and institutional life.

Mather died in 1953. Today he is mainly remembered for helping shape American art criticism during a period when ideas about modern painting were changing quickly, and for encouraging readers to look at art with curiosity rather than just deference.