Benjamin Ives Gilman

Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852–1933) was the Secretary of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1893 to 1925.

Benjamin Ives Gilman was born in New York in 1852, the son of Winthrop Sargent Gilman and the former Abia Swift Lippincott. He attended Williams College (class of 1872) but did not graduate on account of health problems. He then joined his family’s banking business. In 1880 he received a Masters from Williams and the next year he entered the Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University as a philosophy student, focusing on mathematics and logic. He studied with Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founders of modern mathematical logic. As "B.I. Gilman" he authored a paper published in Peirce's 1883 Studies in Logic.

Gilman left Johns Hopkins after one year to study in Germany, and did not return, citing health reasons. He became a student of William James at the Philosophy Department of Harvard University, enrolling there 1883-1885, and specializing in aesthetics, and especially the aesthetics of music. Between 1890 and 1892, he taught courses in the psychology of music at Colorado College, Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. He undertook experimental research on expressiveness in music and studied "primitive music," making some of the first recordings and analyses of recordings of Native American music. He also wrote on Chinese music, visiting New York's Chinatown to make recordings. His recordings of music from Fijian, Samoan, Uvean, Javanese, Turkish and other performers at the Columbian Exposition are at the Library of Congress. In 1892 Gilman became an instructor in psychology at Clark University. There he taught a course on the Psychology of Pain and Pleasure.

In 1893 Gilman was hired as Curator and Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he would work for his entire career. He held a variety of titles, including curator (1893-1894?); Librarian (1893-1904); Assistant Director, 1901-1903); and Temporary Director (1907); but for almost the entire time he had the title Secretary (1894-1925), with responsibility for publications and advising the Director and the Board. In his remarks to the board and in his publications he would urge art museums to display masterpieces of art, not reproductions, and make it easy for the visitor to engage with them; to consider the visitor's comfort (he coined the term "museum fatigue"); and to focus on aesthetics, not on art history. He also introduced docents to the museum, coining that word. His major publication Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method (1918) is an extended argument for this idea of the museum.

He was the author of:

as well as many other articles on a wide range of philosophical, mathematical, political, and museological topics.