The Reverend E. L. Magoon and the American drawings collection

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Kevin J. Avery, Claire A. Conway

The opening of the new American Wing in 1980 and the inauguration of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art in 1988 led to the transfer, in 1990, of more than fifteen hundred American drawings from the museum's drawings department (now the department of drawings and prints) to the department of American paintings and sculpture. Thanks to the Luce Center, benefits of the transfer have included many special exhibitions of American drawings by, among others, Mary Cassatt, Arthur Bowen Davies, Thomas Eakins, John La Farge, John Singer Sargent, the American tonalists, and artists of the Hudson River school.

During the last twenty years there has been a concerted effort to enhance the American drawings collection, with notable gains in watercolors by American Pre-Raphaelites (see Pl. II) and drawings by William Trost Richards (see P1. VIII). These developments recall the very beginning of the American drawings collection at the museum, In 1880, when the museum was only a decade old, the Reverend Elms Lyman Magoon (Fig. 1), an aging Baptist minister, donated eighty-five gouache and watercolor works by Richards (see Pls. I, III, IV, and VII). [1]

Magoon was never a man of great means, but he was surely one of the most remarkable art patrons in the United States in the nineteenth century. [2] He was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and began his working life as a bricklayer. Eventually he studied at Waterville (now Colby) College in Waterville, Maine, and at the Newton Theological Institution (now Andover Newton Theological School) in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, where he was ordained a Baptist minister in 1839. On a tour of Europe in 1844 he studied religious art and architecture and soon thereafter was swept up in the general enthusiasm for John Ruskin's tract Modem Painters (5 volumes, London, 1843-1860).

During his only New York City ministry, at the Oliver Street church from 1849 to 1857, Magoon began to collect art. On a second trip abroad in 1854 he bought mainly drewings of church architecture by British and French artists and several watercolors by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851). Landscape became his passion, and by 1852 he had contributed an essay entitled "Scenery and Mind" to The Home Book of the Picturesque, a popular gift book of engravings published in New York City. By 1856 Magoon had begun to include works by American artists in his collection, and in that year he actually commissioned ten American landscape painters, including Richards, to make small oil paintings of subjects that he designated. [3]

In 1857 Magoon moved to Albany where his collection of more than four hundred works attracted the interest of the Poughkeepsie, New York, brewer and philanthropist Matthew Vassar (1792-1868). In 1864 Vassar bought Magoon's collection for the art gallery of the women's college that Vassar had founded in Poughkeepsie in 1861. Although Magoon had sometimes borrowed money to buy pictures, and he always chose carefully his motive for selling his collection was not just pecuniary. Twice his pictures had almost been destroyed by fire and water, and he felt it no less than providential that he had been solicited by Vassar, who provided a special gallery for his pictures, which would then benefit the student body of the college. [4]

In 1867 Magcon undertook his last pastorate, in Philadelphia. [5] Three years later he met (or renewed acquaintance) with Richards, who was sketching in nearby Atlantic City, New Jersey. He immediately bought several watercolors, beginning a patronage that extended for well over a decade and included trips with Richards to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Newport, Rhode Island. The preacher commissioned numerous small pictures of these sites. Several watercolors of New Hampshire subjects in the Magoon gift (see Pls. I, IV) probably reflect a trip that he and Richards and their wives made together to the White Mountains in June of 1872. [6] The watercolor in Plate IV shows a small gray-haired man dressed in black who reads a book--perhaps a portrait of Magoon.

By the end of the 1870s Magoon had come to regard Richards as an American Turner and had amassed at least eighty-five of his watercolors of mountains, woodlands, and rural and coastal sites throughout the northeastern United States and even in Europe. [7] On Thursday afternoons he opened his Philadelphia house so that the public might view his watercolors, and in 1877 he offered to loan forty works to the annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts along with his services as a lecturer on Sundays. However, when he learned that the academy would not be open for his lectures on Sunday afternoons, he withdrew his offer of the loan. [8]

The death of Magoon's son and only surviving heir in 1879 was one factor in his gift to the Metropolitan Museum. But surely he must have been attracted by the museum's professed ideal that "the educational characteristic must be a leading feature" of the institution. [9] Moreover, the fresh beginning represented by the museum's new building in Central Park (Fig. 2) must have engaged him in the same way as Matthew Vassar's plans for a college art gallery had done years earlier.