George A. Hearn: "Good American pictures can hold their own." - Metropolitan Museum of Art benefactor

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Carrie Rebora Barratt

Hearn's death in 1913, just six days shy of his seventy-eighth birthday, was a blow to the museum, the city, and the world of American art. Full-page obituaries appeared in all the city's newspapers, and he was eulogized by his business competitors, fellow museum trustees, and artists. [11] In the days following, reporters speculated on the extent of his wealth--the high estimate was thirty million dollars--and on the disposition of his art collection. A rumor flew that he had left the entire collection to the Metropolitan Museum, but in fact he left everything to his wife, with cash inheritances for his children. At her death in 1917, Laura Hoppock Hearn bequeathed the collections of watches and laces to the museum, but the hundreds of paintings left in the estate were sold.

Without Hearn to advise them and give gifts directly, the museum's trustees could hardly keep up his pace of American paintings acquisitions, although they did use the Hearn funds to purchase paintings at the rate of two or more a year between 1914 and 1918 and then at least one a year through the 1930s. Among the important acquisitions they made were Albert Pinkham Ryder's Toilers of the Sea (P1. XI), John Singer Sargent's Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), and Thomas Eakins's Pushing for Rail (P1. VIII). Also purchased were recent works by Bryson Burroughs, Charles Melville Hawthorne, Walter Launt Palmer, Chauncey Ryder, Robert Vonnoh, and Willard Leroy Metcalf. In 1925 and 1927, respectively, Hassam's Church at Gloucester of 1918 and Benson's Two Boys of 1926 were added to the collection. Perhaps it was the fairly conservative nature of these works, or the comparison between the museum's acquisitiveness before and after Hearn's death, that led to speculation that the museum had lost interest in contempora ry American painting. Investigative reporters discovered a surplus of unspent interest accrued to the Hearn funds, and in 1927 the architect Charles Lay Downing (1877-1956) summed up the sentiment among artists for the New York Herald Tribune: "So far as one can judge from the Hearn collection, American art might have ceased in l913. [12]

There is no doubt that the museum's early relationship with contemporary artists was fraught with issues. In 1939 the curator of paintings Harry B. Wehle (1887-1969) announced in an address before the American Federation of Arts in New York City that "among the positive and valuable things we do at the Metropolitan is to afford the Contemporary Artist a scapegoat and salubrious safety valve." [13] But in terms of acquisitions from the Hearn funds, part of the problem lay in the fact that in the aftermath of Hearn's death, the trustees decided to reinterpret Hearn's stipulation that his funds be used to acquire works by "living artists" to mean artists living at the time he was himself alive. By the 1940s the trustees reinstated the program of purchasing works by artists then alive, as Hear had no doubt intended.

In the ensuing years, a steady stream of paintings by living American artists has entered the collection under Hearn's name or in memory of his son, including works by Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Reginald Marsh, Philip Evergood, Marsden Hartley, Mark Tobey, John Marin, Stuart Davis, and many others. Occasionally important works by artists from Hearn's own day are also acquired, such as Maurice Brazil Prendergast's Central Park (P1. X). Taken together, they indeed prove Hearn's contention that American paintings can hold their own. [14]