Mutual passions a public museum and private collectors

Apollo, June, 2005 by Malcolm Rogers

Every great museum has formed significant relationships with private collectors that deeply influence its character. Malcolm Rogers, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, discusses how such relationships have enriched his museum over the past eighty years and explains that they are nurtured today for many more reasons than simply the gifts that might result.

That most extraordinary of birds, the flamingo, takes the signature pink colouring of its plumage not from its DNA, but from its diet--one rich in alpha- and beta-carotene. Museums also take their particular colour from their diet--the collections and individual objects that they absorb-and, just as there are several species of flamingo, each with its different dietary habits and colouring, no two museums are exactly alike.

In the late 1860s the Boston artist and art historian Charles Callahan Perkins (1823-86) was asked by the American Social Science Association to prepare a report on the 'feasibility of establishing a regular Museum of Art at a moderate expense'. In this report Perkins wrote: 'In regard to the class of objects with which we should propose to stock the proposed Museum ... original works of art being out of our reach on account of their rarity and excessive costliness ... we are limited to the acquisition of reproductions in plaster and other analogous materials ... and of photographs of drawings by the old masters, which are nearly as perfect as the originals ... and quite as useful for our purposes'.

However, in the face of Perkins' assessment, when the trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were incorporated by an act of the Massachusetts Legislature in 1870 it was with a mandate for 'the preservation and exhibition of works of art' and 'of making, maintaining, and establishing collections of such works'. And from that day collecting has been central to the activities of the museum.

By 1925--the year of the founding of APOLLO--the collections already numbered some 173,000 items. They included the great print collection of New Yorker Henry F. Sewall, containing some 23,000 impressions, purchased with a bequest of $100,000 from Boston hotelier Peter Parker. Edward Perry Warren, scion of a wealthy Boston paper-manufacturing family, and the man who commissioned Rodin's The Kiss (Tate), had laid the foundations of our great collection of Greek and Roman art, sometimes with an eye to piquing Bostonian prudishness (Fig. 1). Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Fenellosa and William Sturgis Bigelow had given the tens of thousands of Japanese objects that still give the museum primacy in this area.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Our equally outstanding collection of Egyptian art--especially of the Old Kingdom period--came to us as a result of the Harvard University/Museum of Fine Arts Expedition of 1905, which continued into the 1940s, and which was led by George Reisner (Fig. 3). More than fifty works by Millet, together with important renaissance sculptures, were added by copper magnate Quincy Adams Shaw. The Harvard scholar and aesthete Denman Waldo Ross between 1883 and his death in 1935 gave the museum some 11,000 works, and, though best known for his donations of textiles and Asian objects, he has the distinction of having given to every single department of the museum. Appropriately, the museum now recognises its donors of gifts of art and funds for the purchase of art, not only in its roll of benefactors, but also with membership of its Denman Waldo Ross Society (founded in 2001). Membership of the society helps ensure that donors of art remain connected with the museum, and are involved in all that is going on.

What was true of the museum's formative years is also true of its maturity: it takes its colour from the collections that have been given so unstintingly. Each collection is of course coloured by the taste of, and resources and opportunities available to, the collector. It may also be coloured by his or her prejudices. William H. Lane's collection of American modernist paintings, which came to the museum in 1990, reflects not only his discriminating eye and his passion for jazz, Elvis and Arthur Dove, but also his requirement that every acquisition fit in the back of his Ford station wagon.

And, of course, collectors also colour the very nature of their gifts. When the brothers John T. and William S. Spaulding donated their collection of some 6,000 Japanese prints in 1921, they did so with the stipulation that they never be lent or publicly exhibited, and were to be available for study only. This no doubt goes some way to explaining their exceptional state of preservation. The Spauldings' rubric has been rigorously observed, but adds special point to our ability today to make digital images of great accuracy available to the general public and scholars around the world by means of the museum's collections database, available on our website: mfa.org. Interestingly, a very recent gift, the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of some 25,000 Japanese postcards, a truly extraordinary archive of designs, came to us with the funding not only to catalogue, conserve, exhibit and publish the collection, but also to make digital photography. The MFA is not alone among American museums in increasingly looking to donors of collections to provide additional resources for the ongoing care, cataloguing and publishing of the collections they themselves cherished, for long-term viability and accessibility are key.