author
Frank Jewett Mather
1868–1953
An influential American art critic and teacher, he helped open Princeton’s art department to modern art while also writing widely for newspapers and journals. His work connected scholarship, criticism, and museum life at a time when American audiences were learning how to look at both Renaissance masters and newer painters.
3 Audiobooks
The Collectors: Being Cases mostly under the Ninth and Tenth Commandments
by Frank Jewett Mather
A history of Italian painting
by Frank Jewett Mather
The Mentor: Two Early German Painters, Dürer and Holbein, Vol. 1, Num. 48, Serial No. 48
by Frank Jewett Mather
About the author
Born in Deep River, Connecticut, in 1868, Frank Jewett Mather Jr. studied at Williams College and earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins before continuing his studies in Berlin and Paris. He first taught English and Romance languages at Williams, then moved more fully into art history and criticism.
Mather became one of the key early figures in American art criticism. He worked with publications including The Nation and the New York Evening Post, and later served as professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University from 1910 to 1933. Sources describe him as the department’s first modernist-minded professor, someone who helped widen attention beyond classical traditions.
He was also known as a scholar of Italian painting and as a supporter of museums and collecting. His papers, preserved at Princeton, reflect a long career that linked teaching, writing, and public advocacy for the visual arts. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1953.