Name Florence Montgomery | ||
Books Textiles in America, 1650-1870, Printed Textiles: English and American Cottons and Linens, 1700-1850 | ||
Florence Mellowes Montgomery (1914–1998) was an American museologist and art historian, specializing in textiles.
Born Florence Elizabeth Mellowes in Fort Wayne, Indiana, she earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, followed by a Radcliffe College M.F.A. Montgomery worked in the library of the Art Institute of Chicago prior to her graduate study. She later was an assistant to the director of the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art. She then moved to New York to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Joseph Downs, curator of the American Wing.
In 1946, she married Charles F. Montgomery, with whom she had two children: William Phelps, who went on to become a digital fine artist, and Agnes Nisbet, who died at the age of five. Charles's career spurred two moves, one in 1949 to Delaware and one in 1970 to Connecticut, but did not cut short Montgomery's. When Yale published a posthumous tribute to Charles's career (originally intended to celebrate his retirement), the volume's bibliography and very title acknowledged the professional contributions of his wife and collaborator.
At the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, Montgomery pioneered the training of museum guides. She also taught art history in the influential Program in Early American Culture. For ten years, she served as the assistant curator of textiles.
Montgomery continued to write, teach, volunteer, and work as a museum consultant until her death. The publication of her historical dictionary of fabrics, Textiles in America, 1650-1870 (1984), was an "event much anticipated" by scholars That volume and her earlier book, Printed Textiles: English and American Cottons and Linens, 1700-1850 (1970), continue to appear on syllabi for courses in material culture and the decorative arts.