The John Wilmerding collection: a scholar's gift to the National Gallery of Art

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2004 by Nancy K. Anderson

Over the years Haseltine's painting style had changed under the influence of French impressionism. In place of the intensely focused studies of dramatic rock formations from the 1850s, the artist produced lyrical landscapes, delicate in color and often sprinkled with softly filtered light. Two of the finest of these, both watercolor views of Northeast Harbor, Mount Desert (see Pl. XI), are included in the Wilmerding Collection. The gift of these works adds a welcome American component to the gallery's Haseltine holdings, which include several drawings of European subjects, some given by the artist's daughter, and two oil paintings also of European subjects: Marina Piccola, Capri (c. 1858) and Natural Arch at Capri (1871).

Two of Wilmerding's most recent acquisitions are especially important additions to the gallery's holdings of American art. The first, Mount Tom (Pl. XII) by Thomas Charles Farrer, is only the second painting by a founder of the American Pre-Raphaelite movement to join the gallery's collection.

Farrer, a native of Britain, absorbed Pre-Raphaelite precepts during the 1850s while studying drawing under John Ruskin (1819-1900) in London. He came to the United States about 1858 and, after a brief return to England, settled in the United States in 1861. In 1863 he and a group of like-minded men founded the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art. Dedicated to recording the beauty of the natural world with painstaking fidelity, the artists in the group produced exquisite landscape studies with near-microscopic detail. In 2003 the gallery acquired its first painting by a member of this group--a closely focused forest interior by William Trost Richards (1833-1905) entitled October (1863).

Though born of the same aesthetic, Mount Tom offers a distinctly different way of looking at the landscape. In place of minutely rendered rocks and foliage, Farrer offers an equally precise but expansive view of a well-known mountain in the Connecticut River valley. On a still summer day, a lone fisherman tends his line at the edge of a river so transcendently still that Mount Tom's mirrored image appears undisturbed by even the slightest ripple.

Another of Wilmerding's recent acquisitions, Thomas Eakins's late portrait of Dr. William Thomson (Pl. XIII), is a transforming work of art for the gallery. As a young professor, Wilmerding had admired Eakins's portrait of John Joseph Borie III (1869-1926), entitled The Architect, in the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth. Over the years, as his interest in Eakins grew, Wilmerding purchased several bust-length portraits, which he eventually hung as a group in his dining room. They were, however, so dour that some guests complained of indigestion. Believing that his home would not accommodate large-scale works, Wilmerding had not considered a full-length portrait by Eakins. Looking back, he admits that he probably walked past the painting that eventually met his expectations several times on visits to Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York City. When he later "discovered" a large expanse of wall space in his stair hall, he reconsidered the Eakins portrait of Dr. Thomson. Although the conditions for viewing the painting were not ideal, the larger space allowed Wilmerding to add to his collection a truly great painting by one of the artists he most admired. Reflecting on his decision later, he noted: "It was just what I had wanted all along, a sympathetic portrait of the greatest humanity and beauty."