Student Works Collection, 1899-1948

The Harvard Art Museums Student Works Collection is comprised of student-produced work and teaching aids from various courses taught in the Harvard University’s Division of Fine Arts. The department got its start in 1874 when Harvard appointed its first professor of art history, Charles Eliot Norton, an influential lecturer with a focus on the Middle Ages and Renaissance Italy. Almost immediately, Norton hired landscape artist Charles Herbert Moore to teach drawing and design courses. This combination of lecture and hands-on learning would be refined as the department developed, and the emphasis on practical education would lend itself well to the next major development in the department’s history: its home in Harvard’s new art museum. The Fogg Museum was completed in 1895 and Moore was named director. Though he and Norton had serious misgivings about the building itself, it was a boon to the department. The museum, with its classrooms, lecture spaces, and offices, accommodated increased faculty, among them Arthur Pope, Martin Mower, and Edgar O. Parker, and added courses, such as those of the School of Architecture’s Denman W. Ross. When Moore retired as director in 1909, one of Norton’s students, Edward W. Forbes, was appointed to the position. In 1927, Forbes, along with associate director Paul J. Sachs, facilitated the opening of a second, and much-improved, Fogg Museum in its current location on Quincy Street. Now housed in this new museum building, the Division of Fine Arts could further innovate within the emerging discipline of art history.

In 1909, upon being named director and starting the lectureship that accompanied the position, Forbes began to develop his signature course, Methods and Processes of Painting. It was a half-year course that included drawing and hands-on painting techniques such as egg tempera mixing and fresco painting, the term assignment that lent it its nickname the “Egg and Plaster Course.” Forbes was not a trained lecturer, and the evolution of the course’s name in reflects his constant efforts to improve. The graduate-level course was originally titled Fine Arts 20b: Florentine Painting in the Fifteenth Century, circa 1909-1913. The course evolved into the mixed undergraduate and graduate course Fine Arts 5g: Methods and Processes of Italian Painting in 1914 and kept this name until the 1924-25 academic year. In its final iteration, the course was called Fine Arts 15b: Methods and Processes of Painting through 1934, and was primarily for graduate-level students.

Longtime faculty member, and later director of the Fogg Museum, Arthur Pope taught an array of graduate- and undergraduate-level courses into the 1940s. The classes represented in this collection are the undergraduate courses Fine Arts 1a: Principles of Drawing and Painting and Theory of Design, Fine Arts 2c: Drawing and Painting; Design and Representation, Fine Arts 2d: Drawing and Painting, Fine Arts 8a: Theory of Design, and Fine Arts 8d: Theory of Design (advanced course), and the graduate course Fine Arts II: General Theory of Representation and Design.

Denman W. Ross was a student of Norton who went on to become an influential art historian, collector, and painter in his own right. As a faculty member in the Harvard School of Architecture, his design courses in the Division of Fine Arts greatly enriched the department. The courses were originally listed in the 1908-09 Harvard University course catalog as Architecture 7: On Designing as Applied in the Arts, and described as “lectures, with exercises in Designing.” In 1909 and until 1935, Ross was appointed to the Division of Fine Arts. He taught the mixed undergraduate/graduate course Fine Arts 8b: On Drawing and Painting: Theory and Practice in 1912 and 1915, but was primarily focused on graduate-level students, teaching Fine Arts 20c: Advanced Practice in Drawing and Painting from 1911 to 1933 and instructing students in advanced study.