Frank Jewett Mather (1868-1953) was a patrician intellectual who began his career as a teacher and scholar, then became a newspaperman and finally, a respected art historian and museum director. Mather was from an old New England family and was a direct descendant of the famous Puritan minister Reverend Richard Mather. The son of a prominent attorney, Mather matriculated at Williams College in Massachusetts and then went to the graduate school of the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he concentrated on the study of Anglo-Saxon, English, German studies and Philosophy, graduating in 1892 with a Ph.D. Mather returned to Williams College to teach literature, but he soon tired of teaching to disinterested students and left for New

     Mather had catholic tastes and a healthy dose of common sense, which served him well as an art reviewer, but the pace of life in New York and the contraction of typhoid hastened a physical collapse, so he and his new wife Ellen Mills Mather moved to Italy where they could live inexpensively and enjoy the slower pace of life. What was intended to be a short stay in Italy turned into years, and Mather was happy living abroad, submitting articles to New York publications from Italy, until he met the wealthy patron of the arts and art historian Allan Marquand. Marquand convinced Mather to return to the United States to teach at Princeton, which was his alma mater, where Marquand was establishing comprehensive programs in art history and archeology.

     Mather's career as a critic came at a propitious time in American art. He wrote at the time that modern art was first emerging into the public consciousness. In his reviews he wrote thoughtfully about Impressionism, American Social Realism, Post Impressionism, the Fauves, the Cubists, the Futists, the Synchromists and finally the Dadaists. His long career spanned a period from the apex of Winslow Homer's career to the apogee of Salvador Dali's.

     For an academic and art historian, Mather's art criticism was written clearly and well. He knew not only how to turn a clever phrase but how to use it to illuminate a crucial point. Mather used his knowledge of art history and familiarity with contemporary art to put an exhibition or work of art into its proper contex.t Never overly technical in his reviews as he sought to include the public in the discussion, he was skeptical of critics who were too confident in their taste and assumed the certainty of their authority and expertise.

     Frank Jewett's Modern Painting was adapted from the Lowell Lectures that he gave in 1916, but during the 1920s the author expanded and rewrote the lectures, adding two new chapters on the most "progressive" modern styles. It is a synthesis of the ideas that he developed over the course of twenty years of criticism. In the foreward Mather speaks of being swept up in "the false aesthetic of the 1890s" and then having his eyes opened by fellow critic Irving Babbitt. He concludes that the modern age "has witnessed a progressive exaggeration of individualism which, apparently enriching, actually has confused and impoverished all the arts."

     Modern Painting is an excellent overview of the period that begins in 1815 - marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which had been an impediment to the development of arts, as painters need to be free to travel and exchange ideas with other artists - and ends in 1914, with the outbreak of what was then called "The Great War," as no one thought another even more titanic struggle would soon occur. In a chapter titled "The Academic Background," Mather covers the formation of the French Acadmey, setting the stage for the art of the 19th century. He then moves on to the modern movements, "Offical Art in the 19th Century," "Landscape Painting Before Impressionism, " "Impressionism," "Great Traditionalists," "Mural Painting" and "The Reaction Against Impressionism." The concluding chapter is on "Modernist Movements in the 20th Century."

Excerpt from Frank Jewett Mather on Millet's "The Sower:"

"...It has with the specific beauty of painting, the simplicity and dignity of sculpture. The appeal is heroic. One of an apostolic succession of toilers who have made possible the ever recurrent harvest, looms suddenly and unforgettably before us. We assist at the immemorial act which marks man as man. Nothing human antecedes the Sower, and nothing can supersede him. It is to have made such an eternal symbol out of a mere observation - in his own words 'to have given character to the type' -that marks the humanistic greatness of Millet, attuning his particular vision with all the most valuable perceptions and reverences of the race."