Allan Marquand


Allan Marquand was an art historian at Princeton University and a curator of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Early life

Marquand was born on December 10, 1853 in New York City. He was a son of Elizabeth Love Marquand and Henry Gurdon Marquand, a prominent philanthropist and art collector who served as the second president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
After graduating from Princeton in 1874, Allan obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University in 1880. His thesis, supervised by Charles Sanders Peirce, was on the logic of Philodemus.

Career

After obtaining his Ph.D., he returned to Princeton in 1881 to teach Latin and logic.
During the 1881-1882 academic year, Marquand built a mechanical logical machine that is still extant; he was inspired by related efforts of William S. Jevons in the UK. In 1887, following a suggestion of Peirce's, he outlined a machine to do logic using electric circuits. This necessitated his development of Marquand diagrams.
McCosh, the President of Princeton, deemed Marquand's relatively mathematical approach to teaching logic "unorthodox and uncalvinistic", an approach he had learned at Peirce's feet. Hence in 1883, Marquand was offered a position teaching art history, a position he held until his death and at which he excelled. He was elected chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology in 1905. He also served as the first director of the Princeton University Art Museum, a position he held until his 1922 retirement.

Personal life

On June 18, 1896, he married Eleanor Cross in the Church of the Holy Communion in South Orange, New Jersey. Eleanor, a daughter of English born railroad official and banker Richard James Cross and Matilda Cross, was a niece of Goold H. Redmond and Frances Redmond Livingston. Her brothers, John Walter and Eliot Buchanan Cross, were prominent architects. Together, Eleanor and Allan were the parents of four children:
Marquand died at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York on September 24, 1924 and was buried at Princeton Cemetery. His widow, an authority on the representation and symbolism of flowers and trees in art, died in February 1950.