Name Allan Marquand | Role Art curator | |
Parents Elizabeth Allen Marquand, Henry Gurdon Marquand Books Robbia heraldry, Benedetto and Santi Buglioni, A text‑book of the history of, The Madonnas of Luca D, Greek Architecture | ||
Allan Marquand
Allan Marquand (1853–1924) was an art historian at Princeton University and a curator of the Princeton University Art Museum.
Marquand was the son of Henry Gurdon Marquand, a prominent philanthropist and art collector. After graduating from Princeton in 1874, Allan obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1880, at the Johns Hopkins University. His thesis, supervised by Charles Sanders Peirce, was on the logic of Philodemus. In June 1896, he married Eleanor Cross Marquand, daughter of Richard J. Cross and Matilda Redmond Cross. 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.