Joshua C. Taylor (1917-1981) was a professor of art history at the University of Chicago from 1960 to 1974 and was named the William Rainey Harper chair of art history in 1963. He was director of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution from 1970 to 1981. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1956 with a dissertation on the 19th-century American artist William Page. His best known book is Learning to Look: a Handbook for the Visual Arts, which has become a standard text for art history, humanities, and museum courses. Among other books, he was also the author of The Fine Arts in America, the editor of Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art and a co-editor of Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics.