Obituary in the New York Times: <http://worldconnect.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=woodrow_wilson&id=I0011>
Eleanor Sayre, 85, Curator and Goya Expert.
Eleanor Axson Sayre, an authority on the prints of Francisco Goya and one of the first female curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, died Saturday. She was 85 and lived in Cambridge, Mass.
A granddaughter of Woodrow Wilson, Ms. Sayre was born in Philadelphia in 1916. She earned a B.A. in art history from Bryn Mawr College in 1938 and completed two years of graduate study at Harvard. Her early employment included curatorial and educational positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Lyman Allen Museum in New London, Conn., and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art in Providence. She joined the staff of the Boston museum in 1945 as assistant curator of prints and drawings, becoming curator in 1967. She retired in 1984 and was named curator emeritus. Until her health prevented it, she worked every day in her office at the museum on a manuscript about "Los Caprichos," Goya's politically charged suite of etchings.
In addition to her work on Goya, Ms. Sayre organized exhibitions on the prints of Rembrandt and Durer. In 1977, she brought to the Boston museum a large exhibition of the drawings and book illustrations of Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, and in collaboration with the Boston park system embellished the show with a small zoo in the museum's courtyard. In 1975, she was also responsible for an innovative curatorial exchange whereby she and Hugh MacAndrew of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University exchanged positions and houses for a year.
Ms. Sayre is survived by two brothers, the Very Rev. Francis B. Sayre and Woodrow Wilson Sayre, of Vineyard Haven, Mass.