HANOVER, NH — J. Richard Judson of Hanover NH and Nantucket MA died on Monday June 29, one week shy of his 95th birthday. Judson or “Jud” as he was known to family and friends, was an art historian who taught at Smith College from 1956-1974 and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as W. R. Kenan Jr Professor from 1974-1991. Born 5 July 1925 in Far Rockaway New York, Judson grew up in Manhattan, attended PS 87 and graduated from the Horace Mann School.
After serving in the Navy on the Pacific front during the Second World War, he worked on a cargo ship delivering medical supplies and livestock from the Dominican Republic to Greece. Judson received his BA from Oberlin College in 1948 where he majored in history, earned an MA degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1953, and a PhD from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1956. The author of several monographs on Dutch and Flemish art, Judson was an acknowledged expert on Gerrit van Honthorst, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Peter Paul Rubens.
During his career he won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, Guggenheim, the American Academy of Rome, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Wassenaar in the Netherlands. In 1977 the City of Antwerp awarded him its Rubens medal. Judson traveled extensively with his family, including a memorable trip in 1970 driving from Amsterdam to Istanbul and back in a bright red VW bus. An avid sailor, Judson and his wife encountered and survived the harrowing “Perfect Storm” of 1991 in a 40- foot sailboat while en route to the Caribbean. He was a member of the New England Catboat Association, the Nantucket Yacht Club, and the Nantucket Wharf Rat Club.
Judson is survived by his wife of 67 years Carolyn French Judson, a brother Judge Stewart A. Judson of Berkeley CA, four children, and five grandchildren.