Howard McParlin Davis

Who was Howard McParlin Davis?

Howard McParlin Davis was a longtime professor of Art History at Columbia University. "His classes in Italian Renaissance painting and on Northern European painting were among the most popular undergraduate courses at Columbia," and thanks to him, "[g]enerations of Columbia College students graduated with an especially deep appreciation of the art of Giotto and of Jan van Eyck."

Born in Baltimore, Davis graduated from Princeton in 1936. Thanks to a Carnegie Fellowship, he studied at the Institut d'Art et d'Archèologie in the summer of 1937. A Belgian-American Educational Foundation Fellowship enabled him to study in Brussels in 1938. In 1939 he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in art history, again from Princeton. With a Fulbright Senior Research Grant he spent 1950-51 in Italy researching Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Before the end of his graduate studies, he had found employment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, first in medieval art and then in prints. His teaching career began in 1942 at Hunter College; he moved to Columbia in 1944 and stayed there until he hit its mandatory retirement age of 70.