Tales of an Epoch: The Origins of Art Education in America

The art museum as we know it today has diverse origins some going back centuries, but the object-centered Museum Course taught by Paul Sachs and others in close affiliation with Harvard’s laboratory-oriented Fogg Art Museum deserves a special place, both for its radical impact and ongoing relevance. As Harvard celebrates 150 years of fine arts education, Paul Sachs’s engaging memoir Tales of an Epoch is being published for the first time, thoughtfully introduced, edited and contextualized by Felipe Pereda, Fernando Zóbel de Ayala Professor of Spanish Art and head of Graduate Studies in Harvard’s Department of History of Art & Architecture.

Recognition of Paul Sachs has faded with time, but his legacy lives. A telling measure of his influence is the cast of students, colleagues and friends populating Tales of an Epoch. Future museum directors and curators enrolled in the course include Chick Austin (Wadsworth Atheneum), Alfred Barr (Museum of Modern Art), Sherman Lee (Cleveland Art Museum), James Rorimer (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Perry Rathbone (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and John Walker (National Gallery of Art). The future director of the Fogg and a research assistant for Sachs, Agnes Mongan was named Keeper of Drawings at the Fogg in 1937, a title only elevated to Curator in 1947 after the war. Future collectors include Lincoln Kirstein, Henry McIlhenny, Joseph Pulitzer and E.M.M. Warburg. Illustrious colleagues, mentors and protégés include Aby Warburg, Bernard Berenson, John Coolidge, Edward Waldo Forbes, Maurice Wertheim, and Grenville Winthrop.

Tales of an Epoch and a “where did they go” list tracking the careers of Museum Course alumni in the Appendix amplifies the depth and range of Sachs’s influence on museums as we experience them today.
Both scholars and general readers with an interest in the cultural evolution of museums over the past 100 hundred years will find the pairing of Sachs and Pereda both illuminating and thought provoking—not just in retrospect, but in looking ahead.

Written some seventy years ago in “the leisure of old age,” the memoirs of Paul J. Sachs (1878–1965), one of the driving forces behind the invention of formalized art education in the United States, have remained unpublished to date. Yet Sachs, whose unusual life trajectory took him from investment banking on Wall Street to a long-time career at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum (1915–45), intended for his memory book to reach a large audience. This newly edited version of Sachs’s personal narrative realizes that objective, providing twenty-first century readers with a remarkably vivid picture of a formative era in American and European academic and museum culture. Complemented by an introduction by Felipe Pereda that positions institution-building at Harvard’s Fogg in relation to comparable initiatives in Europe, including Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Sachs’s information-rich text affords insights into a wide array of art objects, museums, universities, scholars, collectors, dealers, and transatlantic exchanges that helped to shape the increasingly professionalized study of the visual arts during the early twentieth century. —Kathryn Brush, PhD, FRSC, Distinguished University Professor Emerita, University of Western Ontario, and author of Vastly More Than Brick and Mortar: Reinventing the Fogg Art Museum in the 1920s

This is an extraordinary book, a must-read for anyone interested in the history of American museums or the collecting of old-master drawings. Paul Sachs was at the center of the international art world during the first half of the 20th century; he trained every museum director from James Rorimer and Alfred H. Barr to Perry Rathbone
and Sherman Lee. Sachs knew everyone and traveled everywhere; his connections
with German donors and museum officials before and during the Nazi years are especially illuminating. —Theodore E. Stebbins,
author of Rethinking American Art (2025)