- Date Of Birth: July 30, 1931
- Date Of Death: October 17, 2019
- State: Colorado
Thomas Northrup Maytham, a resident of Denver for 45 years and former Director of the Denver Art Museum, passed away in his sleep October 17, 2019, at the Life Care Center of Aurora, where he had been receiving hospice care following a long illness.
Born in Buffalo, NY, he was the son of Thomas Edward Maytham and Margaret Northrup Maytham, longtime residents of that city. From the age of 7 until his teen years, Tom accompanied his parents as his father was transferred by his company, first to Boston, then New York City, eventually settling in southern Connecticut shortly before the end of the Second World War.
In 1946, Tom entered South Kent School, an elite private boy’s school in Connecticut, where he excelled as a student and athlete. He maintained high grades in the classroom, while playing on the varsity ice hockey team and rowing in the first boat in crew. For Tom, it was an easy transition to Williams College, where he majored in art history, skated on the freshman hockey team, and was a member of the Sigma Phi Fraternity. Upon graduation from Williams in 1954, Tom was persuaded by his professors to focus on a career in art history and museum management, and was recruited to attend the master’s degree program in that field at Yale University.
Armed with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale, in 1956 Tom accepted a prized position in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, one of the leading art museums in the United States and the world. Tom joined Director Perry Rathbone’s team that was revolutionizing art museum management, using striking new acquisitions (first Picasso oil), social events, and sales of publications to attract increasingly large and increasingly young art lovers, the general public, and financial donors to the Boston museum.
After showing promise as Assistant to the Curator of Paintings at the Boston Museum, Tom became head of the Department when the curator unexpectedly retired, remaining 11 years in that position.
