Artist, professor, architectural historian and first Director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, Charles Herbert Moore was born on April 10, 1840 to Charles and Jane Maria Moore. He grew up in New York City, where he attended public schools. Moore never attended college. He began a career as a landscape painter in the 1850s, having studied at the Thirteenth Street School in New York and in private lessons with painter Benjamin H. Coe. Beginning in 1859, Moore spent summers painting in the Catskill Mountains, where he moved permanently in 1862. Moore helped found the American Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group which proclaimed itself the "Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art." Moore married Mary Jane Tomlinson in 1865 and exhibited his paintings frequently throughout the 1860s.
In 1871 Moore moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach freehand drawing and watercolor at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. He was recommended for this position by friend and mentor Charles Eliot Norton, and in 1874 Norton selected Moore as an instructor in drawing and the principles of design in Harvard College's emerging Fine Arts program. In 1876 Moore began a two-year leave of absence in Europe, where he studied under John Ruskin and further prepared himself for his teaching responsibilities. He returned to Harvard in 1878 and began teaching a course called "Principles of Design in Painting, Sculpture and Architecture," offered as Fine Arts 1, in addition to courses in drawing and art history. Moore's wife passed away in 1880 and he remarried, to Elizabeth Fisk Hewins, the following year.
Harvard awarded Moore an honorary A.M. degree and promoted him to Assistant Professor of Fine Arts in 1891. In 1895 he was named curator of the new Fogg Museum. The following year he became a full professor and was selected as the museum's first director, a position he held until his retirement in 1909. During his tenure at the Fogg, Moore focused on building the partnership between the Fogg Museum and the Harvard Fine Arts department that continues to the present; he also encouraged close and direct observation of objects as integral to the study of art and art history. Although the Fogg Museum's early collections largely consisted of plaster casts and photographs of original works, Moore encouraged the development of a collection of original works, including so-called masterpieces, at the Fogg. He also encouraged gifts and loans of original works of art to the museum. The transfer of the Francis Calley Gray and the John Witt Randall collections of prints and engravings to the Fogg in the 1890s provided a stepping stone for the expansion and refinement of the collections that would come under subsequent directors.
In addition to his teaching and museum work, Moore wrote and published several books. His first book, Facsimiles or Examples in Delineation Selected from the Masters for the Use of the Student in Drawing, was published in 1882. The Development and Character of Gothic Architecture, his most renowned book, was first published in 1890, and Moore published another volume of architectural history, The Character of Renaissance Architecture, in 1905. After his retirement from the Fogg, Moore moved to Hartley Wintney in Hampshire, England, where he finished The Medieval Church Architecture of England, published in 1912.
Moore lived in Hartley Wintney until his death on February 15, 1930.
