Marian T. Mitchell; led museum board

Marian Taylor Mitchell, 91, former president of the board of the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent and widow of the prominent sculptor Henry Mitchell, died of lung cancer Friday, June 4, at the Watermark on Logan Square.

For 38 years, Mrs. Mitchell was married to Henry Mitchell, whose work included the Impala Fountain at the Philadelphia Zoo, the Winged Ox at Thomas Jefferson University, and the "Running Free" horse sculptures at Drexel University.

After her husband's death in 1980, Mrs. Mitchell joined the board of the Atwater Kent and was president from 1984 to 1992. An Inquirer reporter wrote that being board president "may have helped her get over her own loss, but it definitely proved a boon to the museum and its collection."

Mrs. Mitchell oversaw the opening of a gallery and the restoration of a garden, which was named in her honor, and told a reporter she recruited "young, active, interested people" to energize the museum.

According to the reporter, under Mrs. Mitchell's leadership the Atwater Kent "has literally shaken off the dust of a half-century of relative obscurity and moved toward becoming the lively showcase of local history."

Mrs. Mitchell served on the women's boards of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She was a former member of the Zoo Project Council, the Acorn Club, the Athenaeum, and the Cosmopolitan Club.

A native of Brazil, Ind., Mrs. Mitchell attended Indiana State University. She met her future husband in a little-theater group in Canton, Ohio. He was an executive of a motor company and she was working for a book company.

The couple married in 1942 and came to Philadelphia in 1948 when Henry Mitchell, who had a degree in economics from Princeton University, decided to switch careers and study art at Temple University's Tyler School of Art.

While he pursued a master's degree, she worked in sales for the Philadelphia Art Alliance and then was an administrator in the slide department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Mitchells lived in Italy from 1950 to 1952, where he studied sculpture on a Fulbright Fellowship.

They returned to Italy in the early 1960s, when he won the commission to create the Impala Fountain. For the rest of their married life, Mrs. Mitchell and her husband divided their time between homes in Milan, Italy, and Arcola, Montgomery County. They also had a weekend retreat in Switzerland.

Wherever she was living, she loved to entertain and had wonderful dinner parties, Mary Anne Justice said. Justice met Mrs. Mitchell when they both worked at the Art Museum and they became close friends. "She called me the daughter she never had," Justice said.

Mrs. Mitchell is survived by a cousin, Rebecca Hill.

A meeting of remembrance will be at 2 p.m. Thursday, July 22, in the library at the Watermark at Logan Square, 2 Franklintown Blvd.