Time to Retire

As director of New York's Metropolitan Museum, Francis Henry Taylor seemed to have the most prized job in the world of art collecting. In a single year, he dispensed almost $3,000,000 in operational funds, had as much as $1,000,000 to spend for new acquisitions, and earned more than any other museum director in the land. During his 15 years at the Met, he doubled the museum's endowment (more than $62 million in 1954), doubled the annual attendance (a record 2,602,086 through Dec. 5) and almost tripled the membership (12,263). Taylor was a phenomenal success; yet at 51 he felt tired and dissatisfied.

Last week he startled his fellow trustees on the Met's board with the announcement that as of June 30 he will retire from the Met to go back to the directorship of the Worcester (Mass.) Art Museum, the job he held before coming to Manhattan. "I have decided," he told the board, "to ease the heavy administrative burdens which . . . have so taxed my nervous and physical energies." In contrast to the Met, the job in Worcester offers "opportunities of time and leisure for travel abroad, research and the pursuit of my literary interest in congenial and familiar surroundings, amongst old friends," he added, "and I will thus be able to devote the balance of my career to the scholarship and connoisseurship which originally attracted me to the profession."

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