Worcester's pioneering paintings shows - Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by David R. Brigham

An exhibition entitled American Impressionism: Paintings of Promise, which celebrates the early history of the Worcester Art Museum, is on view there until January 4, 1998. It comprises some forty-nine works by thirteen artists. A number of the paintings were included in the annual paintings exhibitions discussed in this article.

1 This information was gleaned from the exhibition files in the archives of the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. These files contain catalogues for each exhibition. some annotated with prices and the placement of the paintings in the display. Loan forms are on file for each object listing the address of the artist or lender, the title of the work, and its value. Each file also includes correspondence with many of the artists, owners, and dealers.

2 May 28, 1903.

3 Quoted in Charles H. Caffin, "The Art of Edmund C. Tarbell," Harper's Monthly Magazine, vol. 117, no. 697 (June 1908), p. 72.

4 March 23, 1909. A typed copy is in the Worcester Art Museum archives.

5 March 24, 1909 (Worcester Art Museum archives).

6 November 25, 1909 (Worcester Art Museum archives). Helen Bigelow Merriman was a painter as well as a member of the board of directors and of two important committees at the museum, including one charged with overseeing collecting and exhibiting works of art. She was the wife of the Reverend Daniel Merriman, who was the first president of the museum's board of trustees.

7 Reviewing the show, a critic in the New York City Evening Mail and Express wrote on January 6, 1910, that Prelude was "not only a harmonious landscape, but it is an abstract representation of the earliest note of the baby spring." I would like to thank Brace W. Chambers, the director of the Willard L. Metcalf catalogue raisonne, for sharing this review with me.

8 Unidentified newspaper clipping of 1910 in scrapbooks at the Worcester Art Museum.

9 Worceste Sunday Telegram, June 5, 1910.

10 The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston preceded Worcester in acquiring paintings by Monet, but these were gifts, not purchases.

11 November 21, 1909. I would like to thank Miriam Lowenstamm, an intern for American arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, for supplying this and other reviews from the Chicago. Tribune as well as catalogue entries and other information about the institutes early exhibitions. Marisa Keller, the archivist at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Jennifer Kersting the decorative and fine arts assistant at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, provided the same sort of information from their respective institutions.

12 Letter of November 23, 1909, addressed to "Director, Museum of Fine Arts, Worcester" [Philip Gentner] (Worcester Art Museum archives). According to the loan form, the exhibition was on view in 1910 at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin and the Royal Arts Society in Munich.

13 Mrs. Buffington was a charter member of the museum and a trustee from 1904 until her death in 1935. She served with Helen Merriman on the Committee on Instruction and the Committee on the Museum. In the latter capacity she urged the purchase of Winslow Homer's watercolor Old Friends (1894), the first work by the artist to enter Worcester's collection. Mrs. Buffington later bequeathed seventeeen French and American paintings and watercolors to the museum, along with other fine and decorative arts objects.