John Calvin Ferguson

[1] In 1889, Ferguson used the living room of his house in Nanjing for classes; these grew into Huiwen Shuyuan, which in turn evolved into the University of Nanking.

In 1897 he was offered a position by Sheng Xuanhuai, a pioneering industrialist and well-connected entrepreneur whom he had met by chance a few years earlier when they were both on a Yangtze river boat.

The fellow feeling of fallibility might have expected to produce in an experienced translator some hesitation in calling attention to the faults of others, as long as he could spend his time profitably in revising his own work and correcting his mistakes.

John Fairbank, who was a student in Beijing in the 1930s, recalls Ferguson as "patriarch of Peking's American community," and a "big man with impressive white hair and mustache."

He had a "big house full of servants, with several courtyards and a library plus a curator-teacher," and would supply letters of introduction and firm advice to newcomers.

[1] In 1912, the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum in New York requested Ferguson to secure "representative specimens" of Chinese art and supplied him with $25,000.

[2] The trustees were eager to match or surpass the Asian collection at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which had been largely assembled by Ernest Fenollosa.

Fenollosa, like Ferguson in China, had risen to a position of influence in Japan, but his tastes in Chinese art had been formed by Japanese critics.

When the first group of Ferguson's paintings arrived in New York, the trustees turned to a friend of Fenollosa's, who found them "rather disappointing" and challenged the authenticity or dating of some.

These volumes were unsystematic in the works they had access to and haphazard in their organization, but they made it possible to know the range and nature of Chinese art at a time when most of the important pieces were emerging from imperial or private collections which had not been available to the public or scholars.

[1] Thomas Lawton, Senior Research Scholar at the Freer Gallery, concludes that Ferguson made errors which in light of later scholarship seem "naive and inexplicable," but "more significant than his mistakes are his remarkable contributions" and that "anyone who studies Chinese art and culture today quickly becomes aware of a profound debt" owed to him.

[2] The historian Warren Cohen concludes that Freer and Ferguson were primarily responsible for the "golden age" of East Asian art collecting.