Francos Hotham Dowley, Longtime University Of Chicago Art History Professor, 87
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Mr. Dowley, a retired art history professor at the University of
Chicago, died of natural causes Friday, December 5, 2003, at the
University of Chicago [Illinois] Hospitals, at the age of 87.
Francis Hotham Dowley's austere persona and vast knowledge of French
sculpture intimidated and intrigued his students at the University of
Chicago. His intellectual generosity impressed his colleagues. As a
result, Mr. Dowley influenced a generation of art historians by
developing an original approach to studying 17th and 18th Century
French art.
"He got people to think about the entire two-century period as a
living tapestry of extremely exciting material that needed to be
looked at again in terms of art history being intertwined with social
history," said Barbara Stafford, a University of Chicago art history
professor and one of his former students.
Mr. Dowley was born in New York City, New York, in 1915. He graduated
from Princeton University in 1936 and received a master's degree in
philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1941. During World War
II, he served as an ensign in the U.S. Navy.
His career in art history began in 1946 on a fellowship at the
Institute of Fine Arts in New York. He then spent two years in Paris
researching 18th Century French portraiture on a fellowship from the
American Council of Learned Societies.
In 1949 he was hired to teach at the University of Chicago, where he
received a doctorate in art history in 1955. Three years later Mr.
Dowley earned tenure and in 1974 a full professorship.
He wrote articles that explained his approach to French art as, in his
own words, "one founded in the examination of the visual work of art
as an end in itself, not the visual manifestation of aesthetic
history."
Mr. Dowley's doctoral dissertation focused on a project intended to
reinvigorate sculptural art at a time when the French academy was
feared to have become frivolous. His essay was to be the start of a
multivolume series on 18th Century sculpture--one he never wrote,
Stafford said. Instead he fed his ideas to students, who throughout
their own careers developed pieces of his encyclopedia.
Mr. Dowley, who often donned a black suit, white shirt and dark tie,
addressed his students as ladies and gentlemen, and he challenged them
to master an era they had never thought of before his class.
Students began to see French architecture, painting, sculpture and
landscape gardening as a complex amalgam in which Louis XIV forged a
social and political style that was in the service of the state.
A lifelong bachelor, Mr. Dowley spent many years living at the
university's faculty club. He ate meals there often, always ordering a
hamburger.
"He was a dear, lovely idiosyncratic person in an age of vast
conformism," Stafford said. "He belonged to an epoch when the body
didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was the realm of ideas."
H.