Joseph T. Pearson Jr.

Joseph Pearson was born in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1897 to 1900, studying under William Merritt Chase and J. Alden Weir. He became an instructor at the Academy in 1909 and enjoyed a twenty-five-year tenure.  He resigned in the 1930s because he believed the Academy was veering too far into modernism and sacrificing the fundamentals of its program.

Pearson and his wife, Emily Fetter, lived in Germantown and had seven children. Pearson’s two full-length portraits of Emily are in Woodmere’s collection. After his wife’s death, Pearson  married fellow artist Alice Kent Stoddard in 1948; through Stoddard, he became involved at Woodmere, serving on its exhibition committee.