Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
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.C. C. Perkins was born in Boston, the scion of fabulously wealthy heirs to a China Trade Fortune. He attended Harvard and then traveled to Europe to study Art (with Ary Scheffer in Paris) and Music (with Ignaz Moscheles in Leipzig). Perkins was hailed as a musical prodigy in his youth who composed the First Symphony by a native born composer performed in the United States; he delivered the First College Lectures in the country on the History of Art; was acclaimed for his histories of Tuscan and Italian Sculptors and his biographies of Raphael, Michelangelo and Ghiberti; and was honored as the First American member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts. He served as an American representative to the Paris Exposition of 1867 where he was impressed by the profound impact that European countries experienced through their state support for Art. Returning to Boston he led a concerted effort to introduce Art Education to the United States, which resulted in the Massachusetts Drawing Act of 1870, the founding of the Massachusetts Normal School (now MassArt) to train Art Educators, and culminated in the opening of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and its attached Museum School.THE EDUCATION OF CHARLES CALLAHAN PERKINS; HOW ART CAME TO AMERICA provides a vivid portrayal of the life of the first Director of the MFA and the American expatriates who lived in Paris, Rome, and Florence in the mid-nineteenth century, the real people who inspired the novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton, and gives an important account of how (and why) they returned to this country and, led by Perkins, transformed the cultural life of the United States. 6
