Benjamin Rowland

Benjamin Rowland

Professor of Fine Arts, 1950-1972

Professor Benjamin Rowland (December 2, 1904 -  October 3, 1972), served as Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard between 1950 - 1972. Rowland attended St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. The remainder of his degrees and teaching were exclusively at Harvard University. He earned his B.S. in 1928 and Ph.D. only two years later. His dissertation on the 15th-century Catalonian painter Jaume Huguet was written under Chandler R. Post and published in 1932.

From 1932-33 he was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies where he traveled to Kyoto, Tokyo, Beijing and New Delhi. In 1936-37 he traveled to India, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) researching a book on Buddhist wall painting. It was published in 1938 as The Wall-Paintings of India, Central Asia & Ceylon. It was while exploring the temple remains in Afghanistan and the Gandhara district of West Pakistan that he became fascinated with the influence of Greco-Roman art on Buddhist sculpture. This became the topic on which he built his reputation as a scholar.

He was appointed full professor in 1950, succeeding Langdon Warner in responsibility for the Asian collections of the Fogg Museum. In 1953 he published The Pelican History of Art volume on India. The following year, he wrote a textbook for a cross-cultural course at Harvard, Art in East and West. This book, like his Pelican volume, became a basic introduction for students of western art to the sensibilities of Asian art. In 1960 he was appointed Gleason Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard and in 1970 served UNESCO as the United States delegate to the Kushan Congress in Kabul. Although Rowland's work was principally in East Indian art, he taught a wide variety of courses, most notably in American art where his students included Barbara J. Novak, Jules Prown, Theodore Stebbins, Jr., John Wilmerding, William I. Homer, and William Gerdts.

He was a painter as well as an art critic and historian. His water‐colors are in the permanent collections of the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard (now Harvard Art Museums), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the City Art Museum of St. Louis. Rowland was also a collector of South Asian art, his collection now in the posession of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.