Sylvester Rosa Koehler (11 February 1837

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

- 15 September 1900

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) was a German-born American author and museum

curator A curator (from la, cura, meaning "to take care") is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the parti ...

. He was the first curator of prints at the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

Biography

His grandfather was a musician and composer of note, and his father an artist. Koehler emigrated to the

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in 1849 after he had received the rudiments of a classical education. He moved to the Boston area in 1868, residing for a time in

Roxbury, Massachusetts Roxbury () is a Neighborhoods in Boston, neighborhood within the City of Boston, Massachusetts. Roxbury is a Municipal annexation in the United States, dissolved municipality and one of 23 official neighborhoods of Boston used by the city for n ...

, and became a technical manager at L. Prang & Company for 10 years. He edited the ''American Art Review'' while it existed (1879–81). He commissioned original etchings for it. He made many contributions on art to periodicals in the

and

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. He published translations of von Betzold's ''Theory of Color'', edited by Prof.

Edward C. Pickering Edward Charles Pickering (July 19, 1846 – February 3, 1919) was an American astronomer and physicist and the older brother of William Henry Pickering. Along with Hermann Carl Vogel, Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary ...

(Boston, 1876), Lalanne's ''Treatise on Etching'', with notes (1880), and was the author of ''Art Education and Art Patronage in the United States'' (1882), and ''Etching, an Outline of its Technical Processes and its History, with Some Remarks on Collections and Collecting'' (New York, 1885). Koehler wrote the text for ''Original Etchings by American Artists'' (1883), ''Twenty Original American Etchings'' (1884) and ''American Art'' (in press, 1887). He also edited the ''United States Art Directory and Year Book'' for 1882 and 1884. In 1887, he was engaged in writing a history of color painting. Through his work on the ''American Art Review'', his writings, and exhibitions he organized, he helped foster a revival of etching in the

in the 1880s. He became acting curator for the prints department at the MFA, Boston, in 1885 and regular curator in 1887. He was curator of graphic arts at the Smithsonian in

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, from 1886 to 1900. He gave a series of eight lectures on "Engraving" for the

Lowell Institute The Lowell Institute is a United States educational foundation located in Boston, Massachusetts, providing both free public lectures, and also advanced lectures. It was endowed by a bequest of $250,000 left by John Lowell Jr., who died in 1836. ...

's 1893–94 season.Harriet Knight Smith
''The history of the Lowell Institute''
Boston: Lamson, Wolffe and Co., 1898. He bequeathed his considerable library and print collection to the MFA.

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External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Koehler, Sylvester Rosa 1837 births 1900 deaths Writers from Boston American art curators American male writers German emigrants to the United States Cultural history of Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Smithsonian Institution people