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

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Carrie Rebora Barratt

CARRIE REBORA BARRATT is an associate curator in the American paintings and sculpture department and manager of the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

(1.) "In Memoriam: George Arnold Hearn, A Trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1903-1913," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 9 (January 1914), p.2.

(2.) Hearn's entry in The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 16 (James T. White and Company, New York, 1918), p.316.

(3.) New York Herald, December 2,1913.

(4.) In 1860 George A. Hearn had married Laura Frances Hoppock, the daughter of Howell Hoppock, New York city's leading wholesale grocer. They had one son, Arthur, and three daughters, Mary Hoppock, Caroline Lancaster, and Alice, who in due course married, respectively, Herbert S. Greims, Clarkson Cowl, and George E. Schanck.

(5.) Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 2 (Columbia University Press for the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1946), p. 137.

(6.) Hearn to the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum, January 11, 1906 (Metropolitan Museum of Art archives); transcribed in Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 1 (June 1906), p. 103.

(7.) Ibid. See also "Mr. George A Hearn's Gift to the Museum, and to the Cause of American Art," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 1 (February 1906), pp. 33-37.

(8.) "Mr. George A. Hearn's Gift to the Museum, and to the cause of American Art," p.34. By 1910 Hearn had donated so many works to the museum that he himself had the collection divided, splitting off the American works from the European.

(9.) Hearn to the museum's trustees, December 30, 1905 (Metropolitan Museum of Art archives).

(10.) See "Gift of Mr. George A. Hearn," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol.6 (July 1911), pp. 145-156.

(11.) The Hearn file in the archives of the American paintings and sculpture department contains many obituaries of him.

(12.) Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1970), p.296.

(13.) "What the Metropolitan Museum Does for Contemporary Artists," typescript of address delivered May 19. 1939, to the American Federation of Arts (Metropolitan Museum archives).

(14.) I am grateful to Lois Stainman for conducting the research on George A. Hearn and his collection that became the very armature of this essay.