The African collection at the Hood Museum of Art

African Arts, Summer, 2004 by Barbara Thompson

(6.) Except for a brief period of reunion with the ethnographic collection from 1840 to 1870, the painting collection remained separate from the museum collection and fell under the aegis of Dartmouth College Library. In 1962, the portrait collection and other sections of the fine art collection were moved to the Hopkins Center Art Galleries, where they remained until their final move to the new facility of the Hood Museum of Art (Bass 1985:18).

(7.) The reliefs were acquired by the museum in 1856.

(8.) John Wentworth was governor of the Royal Province of New Hampshire and provided the land upon which Dartmouth would be built.

(9.) Orozco painted this famous mural in Baker Reserve Library from 1932 to 1934 while in residence at Dartmouth College.

(10.) In 1913, Picasso gave Guitar on a Table (1912) to Gertrude Stein. The painting was later acquired Nelson A. Rockefeller, who donated it to Dartmouth College.

(11.) The ethnographic collection made up about 54% of the College Museum's holdings in 1985, numbering about 20,000 objects, including about 1,300 examples from Africa.

(12.) Today, the museum's ethnographic collection comprises a little over half of the museum's holdings, with the African collection representing about 3% of the entire Hood Museum collection.

(13.) Between 1815 and 1820 the Dartmouth College Case--a bitter fight to remain a private college rather than become a state university--drained the College of its financial resources. During this time and in the ensuing years of recovery, the development of the museum collections took a direct hit, with its collections of art and artifacts shifting from one discipline to another in response to diverse teaching and display needs.

(14.) In 1798 a fire broke out in Dartmouth Hall, the location of the museum at that time, which damaged some of its contents. Then in 1811, some students protested the location of the museum in Dartmouth I tall by blowing down the walls of the museum with a canon, nearly wrecking the whole building (Bass 1985:13).

References cited

Bass, Jacquelynn. 1985. "A History of the Dartmouth College Museum Collections," in Treasures of the Hood Museum of Art. New York: Hudson Hills Press.

Bowen, W. Wedgewood. 1958. A Pioneer Museum in the Wilderness. Hanover, N.H.: The Dartmouth College Museum.

Hunter, John. 1968. Inventory of Ethnological Collections in Museums of the United States and Canada. 2d ed. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Museum.

Oliver, Andrew, Jr. 1979. Beyond the Shores of Tripoli: American Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean 1789-1879. Washington, D.C.: Washington Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Richardson, Leon Burr. 1932. History of Dartmouth College. 2 vols. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications.