Stuart Cary Welch Jr. was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 scholar and curator

Curator

A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...

 of Indian

Indian art

Indian Art is the visual art produced on the Indian subcontinent from about the 3rd millennium BC to modern times. To viewers schooled in the Western tradition, Indian art may seem overly ornate and sensuous; appreciation of its refinement comes only gradually, as a rule. Voluptuous feeling is...

 and Islamic art

Islamic art

Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...

.

Life and career

Welch was born to a prominent family in Buffalo, New York

Buffalo, New York

Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...

. He began collecting drawings by Indian artists as a boy. He earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from 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...

 in 1950, then did graduate work there in classical art. Because they offered no Indian or Islamic art courses at the time, he became an autodidact.

His first paid position at Harvard was in 1956, as honorary assistant keeper of Islamic Art at the Fogg Museum. He later developed one of the first curricula for Islamic and Indian art. He was curator of Islamic and Later Indian art at the Harvard Art Museum, and from 1979 to 1987, he was also special consultant for the department of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

. Welch taught at Harvard until his retirement in 1995, and he donated much of his collection to the school. A resident of New Hampshire

New Hampshire

New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...

, Welch died of a heart attack while traveling in Hokkaido, Japan.

Selected publications

• Royal Persian Manuscripts, Thames & Hudson, 1976, ISBN 0500270740
• Room for Wonder: Indian Painting During the British Period, 1760-1880. American Federation of Arts, 1978
• Imperial Mughal Painting. Braziller, 1978
• The Houghton Shahnameh (with Martin Bernard Dickson). Harvard University, 1981