Born on March 17, 1878, in Manchester, New Hampshire, Helen Gardner grew up there and, from about 1891, in Chicago. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Latin and Greek in 1901 and became a teacher at the Brooks Classical School; from 1905 to 1910 she was assistant principal of the school. In 1915 she enrolled in the graduate school of the University of Chicago to study art history. She received a master╒s degree in 1917, held a fellowship in the art history department in 1917╨1918, and continued to take courses in the field until 1922. About 1919 she was named to head the photograph and lantern slide department of the Ryerson Library of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1920 she began lecturing on art at the Institute, and in 1922 she resigned her library post to devote full time to teaching and to developing an art history curriculum at the Institute school.
The lack of a broad, comprehensive, single-volume textbook on art history prompted Gardner to write one herself, and the resulting Art Through the Ages, 1926, was very well received by other teachers and by the public. In readability, breadth of coverage, and wealth of illustration, her book far surpassed other available works, and it remained a widely used text for decades. In 1932 she published Understanding the Arts, aimed at a wide general audience. She had been named an assistant professor in the Art Institute school in 1929, and in 1933 she became professor and head of the department of art history. A second edition of Art Through the Ages, greatly expanded, appeared in 1936; between them the first two editions sold over 260,000 copies. Gardner retired from the Art Institute school in 1943. Despite declining health she managed to complete work on the manuscript of a third edition of Art Through the Ages (published in 1948) before her death in Chicago on June 4, 1946.
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