Stuart Cary Welch, 80, Islamic and Indian art scholar

STUART CARY WELCH

Writing about a 200-year-old hookah base that is among the five items he chose for his last exhibition at Harvard Art Museum, Stuart Cary Welch invited visitors to respond with more than just their eyes to the ancient smoking pipe from India.

"Indian works of art often evoke music," he wrote for notes that hang on the wall next to the hookah base. "We not only see but also hear the silver inlaid blossoms and stems of the hookah base on display."

The artist "invites us to hear his design," Mr. Welch wrote, and also "urges us to inhale its bouquet."

Though largely self-taught in a field that had long gone ignored, he helped bring the study and appreciation of Islamic and Indian art to the United States through his lifelong enthusiasm for those traditions. Mr. Welch died of a heart attack on Aug. 13 after running to catch a train in Hakodate, Japan. He was 80 and in retirement had divided his time between Cambridge and a farmhouse outside Concord, N.H.

Curator emeritus of Islamic and later Indian art at the Harvard Art Museum, Mr. Welch had previously served as special consultant in charge of the Islamic art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"Cary was an amazing person, he was an inspiration to all of us," said Mary McWilliams, the Norma Jean Calderwood curator of Islamic and later Indian art at Harvard Art Museum. "It is astonishing what he accomplished, really a lot by force of personality. He basically created the department out of almost nothing, and created a world-class department that will forever bear his stamp."

Mr. Welch elevated the museum, and the art that was his passion, as much through his writing as with his exceptional eye for art that was important and lasting.

In words more poetic than academic, he conveyed his enthusiasm to viewers who came to exhibitions he curated.

"In my writing, I try to bring the art, which is about life, to life," he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1986. "I want to give the reader/viewer a sense of the human beings for whom and by whom the things were made. . . . These works may be stylistically strange to many viewers, but their intrinsic beauty is obvious and irresistible."

The beauty of Islamic and Indian art is something Mr. Welch did not try to resist, even as a child in Buffalo when he made his first forays into museums.

His father was an architect and his mother's family had owned the Buffalo Times, selling it just before the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. Because his family was financially secure, Mr. Welch could travel and visit museums even as a child.

"He was someone who found a calling quite early in life," said his son Thomas of Somerville. "He started collecting Indian miniature paintings, and had a real spiritual connection with art, particularly with Asia."

Mr. Welch graduated in 1946 from St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., and studied fine arts at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1950.

He stayed on to pursue graduate studies in classical art, but decided not to complete a doctorate.

"He confessed to many folks over the years that if he had to finish the PhD and learn all the Middle Eastern languages, he would have given up - he didn't have the stamina," his son said, adding with a chuckle, "My father was very artful at doing what he wanted to do and avoiding what he didn't want to do."

What Mr. Welch wanted was to study art that at the time had caught the attention of few Western scholars.

"When we were freshmen in college, he was already collecting Indian and Persian art, which went for a song in those days," said Michael D. Coe, professor emeritus of anthropology and curator emeritus at Yale University's Peabody Museum. The two met at St. Paul's and were roommates at Harvard.

"He was a talented artist and an extraordinary draftsman, even coming from boarding school," Coe said. "We all recognized what a talent he had."

While Mr. Welch had talent and already was drawing attention with his eye for collecting, he did not have a course of study to follow. Though he became a groundbreaking lecturer, as a student he followed his own instincts.

"I've never taken a single course," he told the Globe in 1999. "I'm a complete autodidact."

Traveling frequently through the Middle East and South Asia, he became fluent in the region's art and amassed one of the most significant private collections, doing so when important pieces could be had for a pittance.

"One of my favorite drawings, a Turkish drawing of a dragon, turned up in a sleazy-looking frame in a sale in London at Sotheby's in 1960," he told the Globe in 1999. "I was afraid the British Museum would want to buy it, or the Metropolitan. But I bought it for literally 11 guineas."

In 1956, Mr. Welch became honorary assistant keeper of Islamic Art at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, beginning a four-decade association with the university's art institutions.

He lectured at Harvard for more than 20 years. Mr. Welch was curator of Islamic and later Indian art at the Harvard Art Museum from 1976-1995, when he retired, and worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from 1979 to 1987.

In 1954, Mr. Welch married Adrienne Edith Iselin Gilbert, whom he met while he was studying at Harvard and she was a student at Radcliffe.

As a curator, Mr. Welch created major exhibitions in Boston and New York, including some that were the first to display centuries-old art from long ago empires in India.

In 1999, he donated 306 works from his collection to the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard.

His last exhibition, "Tree of Life: Five Indian Variations on a Theme," opened at the museum earlier this year, a few days after he turned 80, and will run through Oct. 26. The show launched the museum's perspectives series, which will feature the views of different scholars.

The hookah with silver inlay was among five pieces Mr. Welch chose for the show, and his description that hangs on the wall next to the piece speaks with an enthusiasm that had not dimmed.

"The riotous ornamental pattern of lotus blossoms and stems wiggles smokily and gurglingly, visually 'echoing' the sounds of smoke sucked through cooling scented liquid," he wrote. "Onomatopoetically, the British called these quaint contraptions 'hubbly-bubblies.' "

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Welch leaves two daughters, Adrienne and Lucia; another son, Samuel; two granddaughters; and two grandsons.

A service will be announced.