Robert A. Gilbert

Robert Alexander Gilbert (c. 1870 – January 7, 1942) was an African-American nature photographer and museum assistant. For more than two decades he worked as field assistant and photographic collaborator to the ornithologist William Brewster, and afterward was employed at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University until his death. Although his photographic contributions were largely uncredited during his lifetime, subsequent scholarship — in particular John Hanson Mitchell's biography Looking for Mr. Gilbert — has identified him as among the earliest known African-American landscape and nature photographers. In 1886, at the age of sixteen, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he would live for the remainder of his life.

Gilbert's responsibilities were unusually varied. Glover M. Allen, Curator of Mammals at the MCZ, later described him as Brewster's "trusted assistant, looking after innumerable details at his museum or his camp, doing everything from photographic work to preparing and serving meals." Brewster's journals and diaries document Gilbert undertaking field observation, bird identification, specimen preparation, work at Brewster's cabin in Concord, Massachusetts, and pest inspection of museum collections.

Later career at the Museum of Comparative Zoology Brewster arranged for the MCZ to employ Gilbert after his own death in 1919, and Gilbert continued working at the museum until 1942. The Ernst Mayr Library has also undertaken digitization and transcription of Brewster's journals and diaries in part to clarify the scope of Gilbert's photographic and scientific contributions.