Full Name: King, Edward Stauffer
Other Names:
- Ed King
- Edward S. King
Gender: male
Date Born: 27 January 1900
Date Died: 08 March 1995
Place Born: Princeton, Merce, NJ, USA
Place Died: Baltimore, Baltimore Independent City, MD, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): museums (institutions)
Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors
Institution(s): The Walters Art Museum
Overview
Curator, Walters Art Gallery 1931-66; authority on European painting and Asianist. Edward S. King, born in Baltimore, MD, was the son of Henry Stauffer King (1849-1943), president of Baltimore Trust Company, and Ella Wynn King (1858-1935). At eight, Edward attended a reception with his father, where he first met Henry Walters (1848-1931), founder of the Walters Art Gallery. King was educated at the Boys’ Latin School, where he befriended Alfred H. Barr Jr., the future founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. He graduated in 1918 and, at Barr’s urging, transferred from Johns Hopkins to Princeton, where he studied under Charles Rufus Morey. King earned his B.A. in art and archaeology in 1922 and an M.A. in fine art in 1927. He was awarded the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Fellowship in 1928 and the Marquand Fellowship in 1929 at Princeton. He went to Harvard University to study Far Eastern art. Soon after, King taught for a year at Princeton and another four and a half years at Bryn Mawr College. In 1932, Edward married Russian Princess Tatiana Lvovna Galitzine (1909-1993), but ended in divorce in 1961. In 1934, Edward went back to Baltimore and became an associate curator at the Walters Art Gallery (now the Walters Art Museum). He was the first curator of paintings and Far Eastern art there. He was named administrator of the Gallery in 1945 and promoted to director from 1951 to his retirement in 1966. He collaborated with Marvin C. Ross on a book Catalogue of the American Works of Art: including French Medals made for America [in] the Walters Art Gallery, which was published in 1956. After retiring, he continued to work as a research associate, cataloger, and Sunday painter. At his ninety-fifth, he died of complications at Union Memorial Hospital.
During his thirty-four-year tenure at the Gallery, King prinicipally authored journal articles on the museum’s collections. He exhibited broad expertise in painting, spanning from European masters like Ingres and Delacroix to Rubens and Honthorst, as well as Asian art. Living in that era, King never earned a Ph.D.. King used his strong connoisseurship skills to make respected attributions to the Walters’ collection (Pope-Hennessy). According to William R. Johnson from Walters, King “was responsible for cataloging all of the pre-19th century European paintings and the Asian art.” His extensive knowledge of the Walters Art Gallery’s collections enabled him to substantiate B. Nicolson’s reattribution of a painting in Walters from Honthorst to Stomer (1953).
Selected Bibliography
- “The Carolingian Frescoes of the Abbey of Saint Germain d’Auxerre.” The Art Bulletin 11, no. 4 (1929): 359–75.
- “Delacroix’s Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery.” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 1 (1938): 84–112.
- “Ingres as Classicist.” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 5 (1942): 68–113.
- “A Newly Discovered Stomer.” The Burlington Magazine 95, no. 602 (1953): 169–168.
- [Review of Rubens and the Classical Tradition, by W. Stechow]. American Journal of Archaeology 73, no. 4 (1969): 490–91.
- and Ross, C. Marvin. Catalogue of the American works of art: including French medals made for America [in] the Walters Art Gallery. Baltimore: Trustees of the Gallery, 1956.
Sources
- [obiturary]: Rasmussen, Fred. “Edward King, director of Walters from ’51-’66.” Sun, The (Baltimore, MD), March 11, 1995: 4B.
- “Henry S King.” In 1910 United States Federal Census [Baltimore Ward 11, Baltimore (Independent City), Maryland], 10b (roll T624_556). National Archives and Records Administration. 1910. https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/10328751:7884.
- “Edward S. King ’22.” Princeton Alumni Weekly. January 21, 2016. https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/edward-s-king-%E2%80%9922.
- Pope-Hennessy, John. “Recent Research” The Burlington Magazine 88, no. 524 (November, 1946): 281.
Contributors: Yuhuan Zhang