Couch, Herbert Newell (1899-1959)
Role: profesor of ClassicsDates: 1930-1959
Portrait Location: MacFarlane 305
Artist: Greenough, Dorothy (1904-1980)
Portrait Date: 1970
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 35
Framed Dimensions: 37
Brown Portrait Number: 305
Brown Historical Property Number: 0
Professor Herbert Couch, the chair of Brown's Classics Department, was known as much for his dedicated academic research as he was for his devotion to teaching. He instituted the annual Latin Christmas Carol at Brown in 1948. The Christmas story and seasonal music, including popular tunes, were rendered in Greek and Latin. Even the "No Smoking" signs were translated for the evening, as year after year the audience overflowed the 1400 seats in Pembroke Hall. In addition to his scholarship and his students, Professor Couch left a legacy of service to the University as the secretary of the committee on curriculum, and from 1951 to 1958 as Secretary of the Faculty.
Before coming to Brown in 1930 as an assistant professor of Classics, he was associate professor of classics and curator of the Classical Museum at the University of Illinois. He became associate professor at Brown in 1938, and full professor in 1945. In 1948 Herbert Couch was appointed the Chair of the Classics Department.
A Canadian by birth, Professor Couch became an American citizen during the 1930s. He was born in Laurel, Ontario on December 4, 1899. He was the son of Sarah Jane Richardson Couch and the Reverend Isaac Couch, a minister in the United Church of Canada.
In 1924 he graduated from Victoria College in Toronto, and went on to receive both his MA and PhD from John Hopkins University. He studied at the American Academy in Rome and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. It was while he was studying in Greece that he married classics scholar Eunice Burr Stebbins. They had one daughter.
In 1958, one year before he died at the age of 58, Professor Couch completed "Cierco on the art of growing old" ? a translation and running commentary on an essay by the great Roman orator. The work was written while he was on sabbatical leave at the British Museum. His other books include "Classical Civilization: Greece" published in 1940 and "Beauty and Parting: Translations from the Greek Poets" published in 1945. The latter work was illustrated by Professor Couch's own sketches.
Professor Couch was a member of the American Philological Association, the Archeological Institute of America, and the Classical Association of New England. He served as the New England editor for the Classical Journal.
Herbert Newell Couch had one daughter, Eunice Claftin. Professor Couch suffered a heart attack at his Providence home while preparing to go to his summer home in New Hampshire and died on June 6, 1959.
Couch's portrait was painted posthumously, copied from a photograph in 1970 by Providence artist Dorothy G. Greenough. Greenough was a noted portraitist and art historian who taught at both the Gordon School and the Rhode Island School of Design. Many of Rhode Island's prominent residents were featured in her portraits.
Greenough was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1904. She was the daughter of Professor Herbert W. and Clair F. Hammond Rand who moved to Providence in 1929. Greenough studied art and painting in Paris in 1921 and was a graduate of Smith College in the Class of 1926. She was a Carnegie Scholar at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1926-1927. In addition to her work at RISD and the Gordon School, Greenough spent seventeen years as a book reader for the Temple Beth El, recording taped books for the blind. She was a member of the Providence Art Club, the Providence Athenaeum, Hamilton House, and the Alliance Francais. She was a communicant of the Central Congregational Church. She was married to Dr. William Bates Greenough. They had one son, Dr. William B. Greenough, on the faculty at John Hopkins; and two daughters, Mrs. Anne F.G. Richards and Mrs. Harriet R.G. Luck. Dorothy Greenough had eleven grandchildren when she died at age 78 on May 30 in 1980 after a two month illness.