American drawings and watercolors

Magazine Antiques, March, 2005 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

This is the moment for university collections of works on paper by American artists. In the autumn of 2004 highlights from the American drawings and watercolors at the Princeton Art Museum in New Jersey formed a traveling exhibition and catalogue. That was followed by a show and catalogue of the American print collection of Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Later this month it is the turn of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. A selection of nearly 120 works are on view from March 29 to May 29 in a traveling exhibition entitled Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Drawings and Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art. It presents works executed between 1769 and 1969, many of which have never been on public view and some of which have only recently been donated to or purchased by the museum. The show marks the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the museum's new building.

The Hood Museum's collection originated in 1769 with the donation of a "few curious Elephants bones" from the Ohio River valley. The next, somewhat more conventional, gift was a monteith by the Boston silversmiths Daniel Henchman and Nathaniel Hurd, given to Dartmouth by the royal governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, in 1773. A recent acquisition, appropriately enough, is John Singleton Copley's exquisite pastel portrait of Wentworth. It is the earliest work in the museum's collection of American works on paper and is therefore the first item in the chronologically arranged catalogue to the exhibition.

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Today the museum houses more than sixty-five thousand objects that span numerous historical epochs and represent the artistic output of cultures throughout the world. The American collections were formed early, and, not surprisingly, many of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works were portraits of those affiliated in some way with the college--members of the board of trustees, administration, faculty, student body, and alumni. Objects made by American Indians (particularly those who lived around Dartmouth) were also accessioned early in keeping with the college's mission to educate members of local tribes.

Courses in the history of art--mostly on topics relevant to classical studies--were offered to Dartmouth students in the 1890s. As early as 1905, Henry L. Moore (class of 1877) established a fund for the acquisition of works of art. A watershed for the serious expansion of the collection was the gift made in 1935 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the mother of Nelson A. Rockefeller (class of 1930). The 119 works she donated include American paintings, folk art, a handful of European artworks, and seventy-five works on paper by living American artists. Through her involvement in the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia, Abby Rockefeller's legendary avant-garde taste for modern art and folk art is well known today, but her role at Dartmouth, while smaller and less well known, also made an enormous impact.

Dartmouth has also benefited from an active program that has brought artists of all sorts to the Hanover campus, including some of the pivotal figures in twentieth-century art, in part due to the largesse of Abby and John D. Rockefeller Jr. These include Joseph Albers, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Reginald Marsh, R. Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, and Lewis Mumford. This artists-in-residence program was formalized in the 1960s when artists were invited to the campus for a school term. Not only did they continue to work and were encouraged to exhibit their art, but they also made themselves available to students. Among the many who have availed themselves of this program are Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, George Rickey, Donald Judd, Varujan Boghosian, Walker Evans, and R. B. Kitaj.

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The comprehensive catalogue of the exhibition is written by Barbara J. MacAdam with others. It includes an essay by John Wilmerding and contributions by Mark D. Mitchell, Derrick R. Cartwright, Katherine W. Hart, and Barbara Thompson. The detailed catalogue entries are followed by an illustrated checklist of additional American watercolors, miniatures, and drawings in the collection. It may be obtained by telephoning the museum shop at 603-646-2808.