Career

Abbott earned his undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College , founded in 1794, is an elite private liberal arts college located in the coastal Maine town of Brunswick, Maine. As of 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranks Bowdoin 6th among liberal arts colleges in the United States. At times, it was ranked as high as 4th in the country. It is...

 before he studied physics at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

, along with the museum's first director, Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr.. He then taught at Bowdoin from 1921 to 1922 before he studied art history classes at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

. After having helped establish a department of fine arts at Wesleyan University

Wesleyan University

Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...

 in 1929, he helped establish the museum in New York. He became the associate director of the museum at the time of its founding in 1929 and retained that position until 1932 when he became the director of the Smith College

Smith College

Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...

 Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts

Northampton, Massachusetts

The city of Northampton is the county seat of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population of Northampton's central neighborhoods, was 28,549...

. He remained at Smith, both as the museum's director and as an art history teacher, until he retired in 1946.

External links

• http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E3DE1539F931A15754C0A964948260
• http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/abbottj.htm
• http://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/mss/japg.shtml