American gallerist and curator Chick Austin was BOTD in 1900. Born Arthur Everett Austin Jr. in Brookline, Massachusetts to a prominent family, he grew up in Boston and was educated at private schools, entering Harvard University in 1922. He interrupted his studies to work on a year-long archaeological dig in Egypt and the Sudan, led by Harvard and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, returning to Boston to complete his degree. In 1926, aged 26, he was appointed director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, while concurrently teaching and establishing the fine arts department at Trinity College, Hartford. As director of the Atheneum, he produced the first American retrospective of artist Pablo Picasso and the first exhibition of Surrealist art, introducing Salvador Dalí to the American public. In 1928, he opened the Avery Theatre in the Atheneum, where he staged the American premiere of the experimental opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein, music by Virgil Thomson and choreography by Frederick Ashton. He also established The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, staging premieres and early performances of the works of Modernist composers Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie and Charles Ives. In 1933, at the request of close friend Lincoln Kirstein, Austin sponsored choreographer George Balanchine’s immigration to the United States, to help establish the School of American Ballet in Hartford. Austin married the heiress and socialite Helen Goodwin in 1929, with whom he had two children. Inspired by their honeymoon in Venice, Italy, Austin designed and built a Palladian villa in Hartford’s West End, where he and Helen entertained guests including Kirstein, Dalí, Stein, Thomson, Balanchine, Le Corbusier, Cecil Beaton, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille and Aaron Copland. Goodwin knew and appears to have been accepting of Austin’s bisexuality, tolerating his affairs with Tommy Hughes, Jim Hellyar and others. By 1947, his infidelities had become common knowledge, and with Goodwin’s agreement, he and Hellyar moved to Sarasota, Florida, where he became director of the newly-opened John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. He lived with Hellyar for the rest of his life, remaining married to and on friendly terms with Goodwin. He died of lung cancer in 1957, aged 56. His Palladian villa, now renamed The Austin House, forms part of the Wadsworth Museum complex, and is a National Historic Landmark.