Wallpaper Merchant/Art Collector
Centurion, 1868–1902
Born 6 November 1836 in Barryville, New York
Died 26 November 1902 in New York (Manhattan), New York
Buried Spring Forest Cemetery
, Binghamton, New York
Proposed by James W. Pinchot, Henry Peters Gray, and Lewis B. Woodruff
Elected 6 June 1868 at age thirty-one
Proposer of:
Century Memorial
William H. Fuller was a pioneer in the practice of securing trained and gifted artists to cooperate in what had long been almost wholly the unmitigated trade of the covering of walls with paper. A graduate of Yale in 1861, he entered early the business of the manufacture of wall paper, and in developing it employed for the first time in this country artists who had demonstrated their talent within the limits ordinarily fixed for their calling. It was in a sense the beginning of the evolution of decoration as an art in the United States. Mr. Fuller was all his life an ardent collector of paintings. He was especially attracted from its advent to the school known as the Impressionists[,] and disposed of a large number of their works in 1898, only immediately to begin the formation of another collection, which he left at the time of his death. He had many friends among the artists of The Century, to whom his home overlooking Bryant Park was a place of ever pleasant foregathering.
Edward Cary
1903 Century Association Yearbook
