Manual of the Jarves Collection of Early American Pictures in the Yale School of Fine Arts. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art was established in 1870, Sturgis was a trustee and a member of the executive committee until 1876, also serving as corresponding secretary from 1870 to 1873. He designed the First Baptist Church at Tarrytown, New York about 1875. During the Exposition Universelle of 1878, Sturgis spent some months in France, and upon his return accepted the chair of architecture and the arts of design at the College of the City of New York. He was the co-author, with Charles Eliot Norton, of a Catalogue of Ancient and Modern Engravings, Woodcuts and Illustrated Books, Parts of the Collections of C.E. Norton and R. Sturgis (1879). On account of ill health he left his professorship and retired from business in 1880 and went to Europe. Residing chiefly in Paris and Florence, he remained abroad until 1884. For a short time after his return he was secretary of the New York Municipal Civil Service Board, but resigned out of dislike for the political complications involved in the position. He trained architect Arthur Bates Jennings. On December 30, 1886, Sturgis and his eldest son, Appleton, represented the family at the funeral of his wife's uncle, Ashbel H. Barney, retired president (1869–70) of Wells Fargo & Company. Author and critic Sturgis was a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and of the National Academy of Design; an honorary fellow of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences; a fellow in perpetuity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; life member of the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society; honorary member of the National Society of Mural Painters; and a member of the Architectural League of New York (president in 1889-93), the Grolier Club, the Municipal Art Society, Archaeological Institute of America, National Sculpture Society, the Japan Society, the Fine Arts Federation of New York (first president, 1895–97); member of the University, Century and Players clubs of New York City; and a member of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies in London. He lectured on art at Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Peabody Institute of Baltimore and the Art Institute of Chicago; his Scammon Lectures of 1904-05 in Chicago were published under the title The Interdependence of the Arts of Design (1905). Sturgis received the honorary degrees