ARTHUR FAIRBANKS '86
Greek Scholar and Art Director Had Notable Life
FEW OF DARTMOUTH'S ALUMNI have their lives so intimately and extensively woven into the fabric of the College as has been the life of Arthur Fairbanks, of the Class of 1886, who died on the 13th of January, 1944. The son of a professor and trustee, who was also a graduate of the College and of a mother whose father was a teacher and alumnus, born in Hanover, though his parents shortly afterwards moved elsewhere, himself a graduate of Dartmouth, as was his brother, Robert N. Fairbanks '88, on three different occasions a teacher at this institution, to which he came for his last years of professorship, and living in Hanover for much of the time following his retirement, Arthur Fairbanks was very much a son of Dartmouth in tradition and in personal experience.
It is interesting, as well, to see what family background he brought with him as he entered the College in 1882. His father was Henry Fairbanks, of the Class of 1853, his mother was the daughter of Professor Daniel J. Noyes, of the Class of 1832, who was for thirty-seven years Professor of Theology and Intellectual Philosophy and Political Economy. At the time of Arthur's birth, November 13, 1864, Henry Fairbanks was Professor of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth, living in a house, later known at the Hiram Hitchcock House, standing ivhere now is Russell Sage Hall. When the son was one year old the father beame Professor of Natural History, but three years later he moved his family to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, becoming a trustee in 1870 for thirty-five years.
The move to Vermont was a decided change for the father, a graduate of Andover Theological Seminary and professor at Dartmouth College, for he joined the family business, the E. and T. Fairbanks and Company manufacturing concern, established by his father, Thaddeus Fairbanks, associated with two brothers, to manufacture the Fairbanks scales, the first compound lever platform scales, which Thaddeus invented in 1831, and which become a household convenience throughout this country and abroad.
Entering Dartmouth College in 1882 the young Fairbanks thus returned to his native town where he made several strong and lifelong friends. Among them were the two "Frost boys," sons of Dr. Carlton P. Frost of the Class of 1852, Gilman D. Frost, for forty years to be a member of the faculty of Dartmouth Medical School and perhaps its most outstanding teacher, and Edwin B. Frost, well-known astronomer, later Director of Yerkes Observatory. Another close friend was George D. Lord, of the Class of 1884, who was for forty-six years a member of Dartmouth's Department of Greek, and who still lives in Hanover as Professor Emeritus. Four years later with the Class of 1886 Fairbanks was graduated with Phi Beta Kappa and valedictory honors. He remained as Tutor of Greek for the ensuing year, then studied for the next two years at Union Theological Seminary and at Yale Divinity School.
Back again in 1889 to marry Miss Elizabeth Leland Moody, granddaughter of President Nathan Lord of the College, he then took his bride to Germany for a year, acquiring the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg. Again he returned to Hanover, this time as a married man with a family—for their only child, Mary Lord Fairbanks, was born to the young couple in Heidelberg not long before their return to the United Statesto take up his duties as Instructor in Greek for the year, 1890-1, and as Assistant Professor of German and Instructor in Logic for the following year.
With this preliminary training and experience it was no wonder that Dr. Fairbanks soon received offers to teach at several universities in rather rapid succession. Leaving Dartmouth he was Lecturer in Social Science and Philosophy of Religion and Instructor in Comparative Religion at Yale University for six. years, following which he was a fellow of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, probably a decisive year in his early training with results for many years to come. Then came a year as Acting Assistant Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cornell University and another change that made him Professor of Greek Literature and Archaeology at the University of lowa, a term that lasted from 1900 until '1906. Again a transition to the University of Michigan where he remained but one year as Professor of Greek and Greek Archaeology. As the result of work begun in Athens it was arranged by the University to publish, in its University of Michigan Studies, Fairbanks' exhaustive study of Athenian White Lekythoi for he was becoming the recognized authority on these beautiful ancient Greek vases. Before the first of the two volumes was published and possibly as a result of the work that preceded its publication Dr. Fairbanks was appointed Director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston, where he was to remain from 1907 for the next eighteen years. He resigned from the Museum in 1925 at the age of sixty-one. In this building, beside those of earlier directors, hangs today his portrait, painted by Julius D. Katzieff, several of whose portraits have added much to the art treasures of Hanover. As one looks at its reproduction in this MAGAZINE there will be noted on the table near the subject a portrait of one of Dr. Fairbanks' precious lekythoi.
In 1926 Dr. Fairbanks was Visiting Lecturer in Fine Arts at Dartmouth in a department only recently splendidly housed in Carpenter Hall. The following year he returned once more to his earliest home to become Professor of Fine Arts in his alma mater, and this work he continued until he resigned from his last teaching position in 1932, living thereafter in retirement.
The varied and extensive nature of Fairbanks' background and experience is reflected in this partial list of his publications. Shortly after his Freiburg training there appeared in 1894 a translation of Riehl's Introduction to the Theory of Science and Metaphysics, in the last of the nineties came Introduction to Sociology, later reaching a third edition and translated into Japanese, First Philosophers ofGreece. A Study of the Greek Paean in. 1900, The Mythology of Greece and Rome in 1907, and Handbook of Greek Religion in 1910. The two volumes of AthenianWhite Lekythoi appeared in 1907 and 1914, in 1931, Philostratus Imagines—CallistratusDescriptiones, a Greek translation with comments." In 1933 he published GreekArt, the Basis of Later European Art.
He was a member of various societies and organizations, among them the American Philological Association, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, and he was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The preceding summary of the main facts of Dr. Fairbanks' life shows the tremendous activity of a man with an unusual family background, a wide and thorough training along several lines with emphasis on the classical, an extremely rapid advance and promotion to what was undoubtedly the climax of his work as Director of the Museum of Fine Arts. There his family knowledge of mechanics and things practical served him in good stead in many architectural problems in the Museum's alterations and enlargement, his knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, his authoritative acquaintance with the art of the ancient Greek vases, his experience as teacher and head of departments, his extensive experience in writing books and papers, all these, helped to qualify him for the position he occupied for eighteen years in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Accurate, painstaking, critical in his study, he never was guilty o£ extemporization or superficiality, but retaining all he saw or read, arranging and clarifying his material carefully, he never failed to bring forth a clear, comprehensive and judicial decision or opinion or thesis, upon which he was willing and able to take his stand. Those who might disagree with him may at times have called him obstinate, and they were well aware that his persistence and tenacity were not easily overcome. They would have to overwhelm him with evidence before he would submit to revision.
It was after Jeaving the Boston Museum when Dr. Fairbanks came to Hanover, acquiring the small house just at the top of Balch Hill, now owned by Professor Russell R. Larmon 'l9, for a summer home, and later buying the Nathan Lord House on College Street, formerly the childhood home of his wife and standing just north of the campus, that his life blossomed in a new way. Even after he had given up the house when returning to Hanover at the proper season—and I suspect he arranged his visit accordingly—he would steal up to the old place as if drawn by a magnet, and the former owner would show the new owner what priceless flowers were scattered about the damp low places of the meadow. I am sure Professor Larmon prized those pilgrimages of the aging teacher who managed to come nearly to the last even when the walk into the gentian field was difficult to manage.
Resigning from his last professorship Dr. Fairbanks spent his last winters in Cambridge where he had kept his residence since 1907, and his summers on the top of Balch Hill until his wife's death. After that he lived with his daughter in their Cambridge apartment, but he spent his last summers at St. Johnsbury, where with his sister and other friends he spent all the time he could and all the energy he had searching the country, as in the old days with Professor Henry G. Jesup about Hanover, looking for the flowers, which he tried to photograph in color, but which, in the writer's opinion, he simply wished to see again and again—much as he used to like to look at the line drawings on the Greek lekythoi of the fifth century before Christ.
Arthur Fairbanks died in Cambridge on January 13, 1944, following an attack of influenza, and his body was placed beside that of his wife in the Nathan Lord lot of the old Dartmouth Cemetery, where stands a simple marble shaft, hardly more enduring than the pines that tower above it.
PROF. ARTHUR FAIRBANKS '86, from a portrait painted by Julius Katzieff.
