A. Hyatt Mayor

Who was A. Hyatt Mayor?

A. Hyatt Mayor was an American art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a leading figure in the study of prints, both old master prints and popular prints.

A. Hyatt Mayor's father was marine biologist Alfred Goldsborough Mayor and his mother was sculptor Harriet Hyatt Mayor. Mayor came from an artistic family; his mother's sister was the well-known sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, and her husband was art patron Archer Milton Huntington, founder of the Hispanic Society of America in 1904.

Mayor received his B.A. from Princeton University and then received a Rhodes scholarship, which he used to earn his second bachelor's degree at Christ Church College at Oxford in 1926. The next few years he spent in Florence, Italy and at the American School of Classical Studies. Upon returning to the United States he embarked on a literary career, working on Hound & Horn.

He married Virginia Sluder in 1932 and then joined the Department of Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, becoming curator of the department in 1946. He had to follow the massive figure of William Ivins, Jr., whose curatorship had lasted 30 years. His tenure was marked by significant acquisitions of engravings, woodcuts, and other printed material, some by then-unknown artists who proved later to be eminently collectible. Many European collections became available after World War II, and there were notable acquisitions, especially from the collection of the Prince of Lichtenstein. He also expanded the concept of collectible prints to include wine labels and cigarette cards. In 1952 he published Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures, which has remained continuously in print.