William Pierson, Jr.

William Harvey Pierson, Jr. (June 4, 1911 – December 3, 2008) was an American painter and art historian. Teaching studio art and art history at Williams College for most of his career, Pierson was in large part responsible for the development of the cadre of Williams-educated museum curators and art historians now known as the Williams Art Mafia, including Earl A. Powell III of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, James N. Wood of the Art Institute of Chicago and the J. Paul Getty Trust and Thomas Krens of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, Pierson trained as a high-school student with landscape painter Charles Warren Eaton. After earning bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Yale in 1934, he became the first person whom the school awarded a master's degree in fine arts. In 1941 he received a second master's, this time in art history from New York University.

Pierson joined the United States Navy the day after Pearl Harbor, working for the secret radio program. When the war finished, Pierson decided to return to Yale to undertake a Ph.D. in art history. His dissertation studied the industrial architecture of New England, and his passion for this subject remained with him for the rest of his career. In the 1970s, he campaigned to save a former mill in Harrisville, New Hampshire. Due to his efforts, Harrisville is the only 19th-century mill town that has survived intact into the 21st century.

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