James Parker (art historian)

James Parker (1924-2001) was an American art historian. He served for nearly three decades as a curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

James Parker was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 22, 1924 to Elizabeth Gray of Boston and Cortlandt Parker of Newark, New Jersey. His father, Cortlandt Parker, was a major general in the United States Army and his paternal grandfather, James Parker, served as a general as well. Both had distinguished, decorated careers in the military. His maternal grandfather, Morris Gray, had served as president of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1914 to 1924. Due to his father's military career, his formative years were spent in many places, including Vermont, England, Hawaii, and Massachusetts. He enrolled at Harvard University to study modern European history in 1942, leaving in 1943 to serve with the 38th Division of Army Field Artillery in the Pacific theater of World War II. He was honorably discharged in 1945 after twenty-two months of service, returning to Harvard in 1946. He graduated with a degree in modern European history in 1948.

Parker began his career as a specialist in European decorative arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1951, was appointed assistant curator in 1954, associate curator in 1962 and curator in 1968. He was appointed Curator Emeritus in 1993, upon his retirement. Over the course of his career he developed a specialization in French and English furniture. He was once described by a colleague as a “curator’s curator,” who quietly inspired his associates as his duties developed and expanded over the course of his four-decade career. Heeding the advice of the Metropolitan’s director, Francis Henry Taylor, Parker traveled abroad in 1948 to gain experience by working as an apprentice in museums across Europe. He divided the next two years interning at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, The Louvre, Paris, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 1950, he briefly assisted at Wiesbaden Collecting Point, one of the World War II restitution archival depots for recovered art objects established in Germany by the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program. During his time abroad, he studied under such luminaries as Pierre Verlet and Sir John Pope-Hennessy, art historians and curators at the Louvre and the Victoria and Albert Museum, respectively.

Upon his return to the United States in 1951, Parker joined the Department of Renaissance and Modern Art (as the decorative arts contingent of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was then called) as a curatorial assistant. He was appointed assistant curator in 1954, and associate curator in 1962. In 1968, Parker was elected curator, a position he held until his retirement in 1993, when he was elected Curator Emeritus. The name and scope of the department continued to evolve, ultimately adopting its current nomenclature European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Parker’s specialization in French furnishings and interiors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, earned him a guiding role in the installation of the Wrightsman Galleries, an extensive ensemble of period rooms. These spaces, including both rooms taken from historic buildings and recreations intended to show related works of decorative art in an authentic setting, reflect the encyclopedic collection of French decorative arts of two of the Museum’s most significant contempoarary patrons, Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. This project occupied Parker for nearly three decades, as various rooms were installed, refurbished and reinstalled. In 2007, the galleries’ technical infrastructure was modernized, the lighting revamped, and the objects rearranged; yet Parker’s meticulous research and work is still evident, and the galleries are among the Museum’s most renowned installations.

In addition to the French period rooms, Parker supervised the installation of a number of permanent spaces devoted to English and German objects. Parker wrote scores of articles on subjects ranging from Rococo furniture to gilt-bronze ornaments, as well as assisting in the research and writing for several publications devoted to the Kress, Sheafer and Wrightsman collections. He lectured and served as an adjunct professor at New York University. Parker felt that the decorative arts were, in a sense, an undiscovered realm, and his meticulous research efforts and concern for historic interiors and objects led to several important findings. It was Parker, for example, who discovered that windows in the Metropolitan's Sagredo bedroom had originally been located on the opposite wall, but were interchanged during installation and relocation to allow for natural and then electric light. He considered the importance of adaptation and original intention with regards to Museum installations, and he attempted to impart that knowledge whenever possible.

Parker died on June 20, 2001 and was survived by nieces Elizabeth K. Parker and Nancy Gray Parker Wilson, and nephews, Cortlandt Jr. and Stephen Ward; as well as fourteen grandnieces and nephews.