All Scholars

George Fisk Comfort was not a classicist: He was a professor of German and the first professor in the country of aesthetics. His great contribution to the classical world is that he and he alone was the founding organizer of the APA. 

Comfort was the son of an eminent Methodist Episcopalian minister, Abolitionist, and writer. After graduating from he Cazenovia (NY) Seminary, he spent for years of independent study of art, French and German languages, and the natural sciences. He majored in classics at Wesleyan, and taught drawing and painting as well as the natural sciences in the Amenia and Fort Plain (NY) seminaries. His knowledge and deep love of art and architecture had come mainly through books and Comfort longed to witness storied works of art in person. In 1860 he set off for five years of study in Europe, visiting museums, sites,  and schools of art. He studied at the University of Berlin for two years, both at the University, the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Künste) and the Royal Library (Königliche Bibliothek).  He claimed to have walked across Europe, where he  made the acquaintance of numerous celebrities of the art world, Cornelius, Kaulbach, Lepsius, Waagen, Von Ranke, and others who showed him how art appreciation, art history, and art techniques were being taught in Germany.  

He returned to the newly re-United States filled with twin desires: to enhance the study of American philology, particularly German philology and second, to teach Americans to study art in their own great museums as seriously and as professionally as the new crop of German philologists and scientists were studying their subjects. A nearly perfect opportunity arose for him in Northwestern Pennsylvania at Allegheny College where he was offered a position as professor of modern languages and as the first professor of aesthetics in this country, setting up the first teaching museum of art history in the country which would offer the first degree-granting course in fine arts. But in 1866 the Pennsylvania oil boom collapsed, and along with it any opportunity for the development of the museum.

In 1868 he took a position as lecturer on Christian architecture at the Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey, while he took up residence in New York. There he supported himself by the publication of a small series of German learning texts based on his teaching at Allegheny. Interaction with the sophisticated and well-to-do society of New York and the interest they showed in art and the classics led to the remarkable year of 1869.

America had nothing like the network of philological associations that Comfort had witnessed in Germany. Our first learned organization was The American Philosophical Society founded in 1743. The only philological group was the American Oriental Society, essentially a Yale operation, founded in 1842.

Comfort circulated a letter inviting “all professors of language of respectable standing in our colleges, universities, theological seminaries and other schools of high education” to attend a meeting on November 13, 1868, at which it was decided that there would be a full and formal meeting in Poughkeepsie on July 29, 1869, called “A Convention of American Philologists.” It was the first such association in the country and Comfort laid out a list of 7 areas of interest that covered the broad range of philology. The non-classical aspects of these fields would be gradually peeled away over the years as other learned societies sprang up: 1) the science of language and the history of philology, an area was subsequently overtaken by the Linguistic Society of America in 1924, 2) Oriental languages and literatures, already the province of the American Oriental Society; 3) Classical Languages and Literature; 4) Modern European languages and literature, subsequently the provenance of the Modern Language Association founded in 1884); 5 English Language and Literature which also came under the MLA; 6) Aboriginal American languages, taken over by the American Anthropological Association in 1902) and 7) linguistic pedagogy, basically handed over to the American Classical League in 1905. At that first meeting it was decided that the name of the group should be the American Philological Association. Its first president was William Dwight Whitney (1827-94), the great Yale Sanskritist and former president of the American Oriental Society. Comfort was secretary of the fledgling APA until 1873.

American knowledge of art history was rare in the post-Civil War period and Comfort’s experience of museums and his relationship with their leaders made him the best qualified person in America to speak on establishing a new museum.  Within six months of the founding meeting of the APA in July 1869 meeting Comfort addressed the Union League Club in New York in November 1869 on the need for a great art museum. A committee led by the publisher George Palmer Putnam (1814-72) was formed and the Metropolitan Museum of Art was begun with Comfort as principal founder, but that is another story.

Comfort was promised the Directorship of College of the Arts at the newly founded Syracuse University in 1872, but the Panic of 1873 led to reduced ambitions but at least a steady paycheck until he decamped to Texas at the promise of a Southern Arts College outside Houston. That project failed as well. He returned to Syracuse, declared bankruptcy in 1894 and in 1896 founded the Syracuse Museum of Art.

Comfort's wife Anna, who was the first female graduate of the New York Medical School, promoter of Women's suffrage, and a prominent gynecologist, who, with her husband wrote a book on the relation of education and health in women.