Charles S. Moffett

Charles S. Moffett, a curator who reframed scholarly understanding of the Impressionists and their era in exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery and other major museums, died on Thursday December 10 2015 at his home on Fishers Island, N.Y. He was 70. Charles Simonton Moffett Jr. was born on Sept. 19, 1945, in Washington, into a Navy family. Moffett Federal Airfield in the Bay Area is named after his grandfather, Rear Adm. William A. Moffett, often called the father of naval aviation, and his father was a career officer. His mother was the former Faith Locke Phelps. After graduating from St. George’s School in Middletown, R.I., Mr. Moffett earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1967 from Middlebury College in Vermont. He nourished a deep interest in art dating from the days when his father would park him in the Louvre and other museums for an hour or two as he attended to official duties on visits around the world. He enrolled in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, earning a master’s degree in 1971, but left before completing his doctoral dissertation. After working as a Ford Foundation fellow at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, as an expert in 19th-century paintings at the Sotheby-Parke Bernet Galleries, and as the assistant director of H. Shickman Gallery in Manhattan, Mr. Moffett was hired by the Met as a researcher. At the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he was curator in charge of paintings, Mr. Moffett returned to the Impressionists with “The New Painting: Impressionism 1874-1886,” a didactic exhibition organized with the National Gallery of Art. Mr. Moffett’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Lucinda Herrick, he is survived by two children from his first marriage, Kate Moffett and Charles Locke Moffett, an expert on contemporary art at Sotheby’s; and three sisters, Diana Aziz, Faith Low Humann and Sheila Moffett Rubey.