Founding friends - of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by John K. Howat

On April 13, 1870, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art was legally established Under a grant of incorporation voted by the New York State legislature, it had no collection. It did, however, have an influential hoard of trustees of twenty-seven gentlemen, among whom were major collectors of contemporary American pictures and a number of noted New York painters, including the landscapists Frederic Edwin Church and John Frederick Kensett. These and other artists had been involved intimately in discussions, meetings, and events that had resulted in the museum's incorporation. [1]

The need for an art museum had been felt in New York City for many years. It was brought into focus by the great success OF the art exhibition at the center of the 1864 Metropolitan Fair which was organized to raise Rinds for the medical care of Union troops during the Civil War (see P1. III). The exhibition of a large number of American and European paintings was arranged under Kensett's direction and housed in a temporary building on Union Square at Fourteenth Street. [2] Three years later, this event was remembered in the introduction to Book of the Artists: American Artist Life... by Henry T. Tuckerman (1813-1871):

The surprise delight exhibited by the thousands of oil degrees, who visited the Picture Gallery of the Metropolitan Fair, has suggested to many, for the first time, and renewed in other minds more emphatically, the need, desirableness, and practicability of a permanent and free Gallery of Art in our cities. The third metropolise of the civilized world [after London and Paris] should not longer he without such a benign provision for and promoler of high civilization. [3]

Also in 1867 the idea of such a museum was given serious review by the art committee of New York City's Union League Club. Kensett was on the committee, as was the landscape painter Thomas Worthington Whittredge. According to the latter, the committee came up with a proposed list of founding trustees, which

modestly left our names oat, and the matter took such a worldly turn that it was a long time before we were mentioned as ever having bad anything at all to do with the inception of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [4]

Whittredge's friend and fellow landscapist Sanford Robinson Gifford, a Civil War veteran, was another of the artist-organizers whose diffidence and modesty kept his name off the list of original trustees.

All of those behind the concept of the museum shared the feelings of New York's elderly sage, the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), who in 1869 delivered a long speech at the Union League Club calling for an institution that would display art from around the world:

We require an extensive public gallery to contain the greater works of our painters and sculptors. The American soil prolific of artists....Bat there are beginners among us who hare not the means of resorting to d that countries for that instruction in art which is derived from carefully studying works of acknowledged excellence. For these a gallery is needed at home.

Bryant went on to comment that the great majority of American painters sold pictures almost solely to private collectors:

Producing works for private dwellings, our painters are for the most part obliged to confine themselves to cabinet pictures, and hare little opportunity for that larger treatment of important subjects which a greater breadth of canvas would allow them and by which the higher and nobler triumphs of their art have been achieved. [5]

This argument may fall a bit into the category of special pleading, for Church especially, and Gifford, Kensett, and Whittredge had all painted large canvases for display in public places such as the National Academy of Design in New York City commercial galleries, and large private picture galleries that were opened to the public from time to time, such as those owned by William H. Aspinwall (1807-1875) and William T. Blodgett, both founding trustees of the museum.

Church, Gifford, Kensett, and Whittredge were close friends, and all were central to New York City's art world. Each bore the coveted title of National Academician; all were members of the Century Association; and Gifford, Kensett, and Whittredge were members of the Union League Club. At Kensett's funeral in 1872 Gifford and Whittredge were among the twelve pallbearers, most of them also artists. Many years afterward Whittredge wrote this warm praise of Kensett:

Aside from being an excellent landscape painter and highly successful in the sale of his works, a matter for which John Kensett never seemed to have a thought, his social accomplishments, his buoyant disposition, his goodness of heart, together with his public spirit, made him a leader whether he would or no. No artist of that period exerted a more healthful influence upon the body at large and upon the art of our country than did John Kensett. [6]

Such a comment helps describe the supportive mood surrounding the birth of the museum.

The longstanding friendship of Kensett, Gifford, and Whittredge had been enhanced by their travels together in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming during the summer of 1870 following their cooperative efforts on behalf of the fledgling Metropolitan Museum. The sketches they made on this trip and the finished canvases by Whittredge (none, sadly, owned by the museum) are distinguished depictions of scenery that was then only a distant curiosity to most Americans. New Yorkers were probably more aware than their fellow citizens of the beauties of the Rocky Mountains because of the exhibitions at the National Academy of Design and commercial galleries that displayed the work of the city's exploratory painters, such as the trio named above.