ART PATRON

stuart cary welch
a man for all seasons

Stuart Cary Welch's A King's Book of Kings opens in a style typical of the man: "It is a heavy book, almost too big to handle, intended for special occasions, portentous but entertaining." The book was written to accompany the 1972 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the breathtaking, monumental manuscript of the Shahnameh, made for Shah Tahmasp in the second quarter of the 16th century. It is a manuscript now famous and revered as one of the greatest works of art of any era or culture, but at that time it was just emerging from decades of obscurity, mostly through the groundbreaking scholarship and visionary curatorial efforts of Welch, then already established as one of leading experts in the field. The exhibition was a landmark event in terms of Persian art history and mounted to coincide with the 2500th anniversary of the foundation of the Persian Empire at Persepolis.

The language and spirit of this short descriptive sentence is typical of Welch's ability to speak evocatively to the reader, both specialist and non-specialist, using simple but powerful language. As well as a pioneering art historian, curator and collector, he was a great communicator, visually, verbally and in written form, and the success and popularity of his numerous exhibitions on Indo-Persian art, as well as his magnetic prowess as a lecturer at Harvard University and the popularity of his publications, are testament to this aspect of his polymathic talents. These skills were combined with an extraordinary energy and dynamism, allowing him to work simultaneously on multiple exhibitions and publications while continuing his museum work and university teaching, a workload that he sustained for years on end.

Welch was born in 1928 in Buffalo, New York. His father was an architect and his mother's family owned the Buffalo Times newspaper. He was a child prodigy in terms of his relationship with art, becoming a talented draughtsman and caricaturist and he began collecting as a child. At the tender age of 10, he acquired some Old Master prints and proceeded to drawings when a teenager. His interest in the art...