Brown, Alice Van Vechten (1862–1949)

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Brown, Alice Van Vechten (1862–1949)

American art educator. Born June 7, 1862, in Hanover, New Hampshire; died Oct 16, 1949, in Middleton, New Jersey; dau. of Samuel Gilman Brown (Congregational minister and later head of Hamilton College) and Sarah Van Vechten Brown; granddau. of Francis Brown (president of Dartmouth); studied at Art Students League, 1881–85, with William M. Chase and Abbott Thayer.

Appointed assistant director (1891), then director (1894), of Norwich Art School, CT, where her method of teaching art history attracted attention; reorganized art-teaching program at Wellesley College, MA (1897), which became the 1st college in the US to offer art history as a major (1900); served as head of art department at Wellesley for 33 years; also served as director of Wellesley's Farnsworth Museum; coauthored (with William Rankin) A Short History of Italian Painting (1914); retired (1930).

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