Papers of Edward Waldo Forbes and the Forbes family

Edward Waldo Forbes (1873-1969) was director of the Fogg Art Museum and lecturer in Fine Arts at Harvard University, an accomplished artist, and a world traveler.

Forbes was born into a prominent family on Naushon Island in Massachusetts. His parents were William Hathaway Forbes and Edith Emerson Forbes; his maternal grandfather was Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1907, Forbes married Margaret Laighton, a notable watercolorist and gardener; they had five children.

Forbes’s long association with Harvard and the arts began when he earned his Harvard A.B. in 1895, having studied with the art historian Charles Eliot Norton. He continued his studies at Oxford and traveled in Europe, returning to Massachusetts n 1902 to establish the Harvard Riverside Associates, an organization dedicated to preserving the landscape adjacent to Harvard. Forbes was appointed a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1903 and served in that capacity for 63 years. In 1909, he became the second director of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. During his 35 years as Director, Forbes and his assistant director Paul Sachs oversaw the impressive growth of the Museum’s collections, staff, property, and reputation. Throughout his life Forbes acquired art, with a particular interest in Italian paintings; gifts and loans from his personal collection contributed significantly to the Fogg Museum’s rise to international prominence.

In addition to his directorship of the Fogg Art Museum, Forbes also served as a lecturer in Fine Arts at Harvard from 1909 to 1935. In 1935, he was named the Martin A. Ryerson Lecturer on Fine Arts, a position he held until 1941. From 1945 to 1957, Forbes was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.