Fogg Museum

The Breakfast Table, 1883-1884, John Singer Sargent, Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum. More

Although Harvard University has been collecting American art since the 17th century, the Department of American Art at the Harvard Art Museum was founded only in 2002. Its holdings of more than 3,000 objects include paintings, sculpture, silver, furniture, miniatures, and stained glass ranging in date from the colonial period to the mid-20th century. This includes the more than 1,200 works in the Harvard University Portrait Collection, many installed in approximately 110 locations across the Harvard campus. Students and faculty often study, take meals, or attend meetings under the eyes of these portraits, which offer a special insight into the university's past. In addition, the museum's Department of Drawings houses more than 6,000 American works on paper, with special strengths in artist's sketchbooks, and in 20th-century American modernism.

These holdings have been largely shaped by specific donations from Harvard alumni and friends of the university. Two important Hudson River school landscapes, Albert Bierstadt's Rocky Mountains, "Lander's Peak" (1863) and Sanford R. Gifford's Leander's Tower on the Bosporus (1876), came as part of the museum's founding bequest of Mrs. William Hayes Fogg in 1891 (even though neither she nor her husband had any connections to Harvard). Grenville L. Winthrop (Harvard class of 1886) left the Fogg Museum his astonishing collection of Asian, European, and American art upon his death. As a result, the museum is able to present a rich survey of works by Winslow Homer, John La Farge, John Singer Sargent, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, among many others, along with key paintings by Charles Bird King, William Harnett, and Charles Willson Peale. Paul J. Sachs (class of 1900), associate director of the museum from 1923 to 1945, donated examples from his extensive collection of American drawings by artists such as George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley, strengthening the museum's holdings of American modernism. Former Harvard students continue to support the museum's program of teaching and exhibitions even today: for example, Daniel A. Pollack (class of 1960 and Harvard Law School) has funded the acquisition of American still-life paintings, enabling the department to fill gaps in the collection with such works as Sarah Miriam Peale's Still Life with Watermelon of 1822.

The collection of American art at the Harvard Art Museum provides a strong visual narrative of the artistic and social life of the country from the time of its founding to the present day. Major strengths include colonial and federal period painting, late 19th-century painting and sculpture, 20th-century art, and drawings and watercolors of all periods.

Highlights of the American Collection

— Colonial and federal periods: paintings by Washington Allston, John Singleton Copley, and Gilbert Stuart, along with important examples by most of the other masters of the period including John James Audubon, Robert Feke, Charles Bird King, Charles Willson Peale, John Smibert, and John Trumbull

— Mid-19th century: paintings and plein air oil sketches from the Hudson River school

— Late 19th-century: many works by John Singer Sargent and J.A.M. Whistler, along with important works by Thomas Eakins, William M. Harnett, and Winslow Homer, among others

— Sculpture: neoclassical works by Hiram Powers, Randolph Rogers, and Edmonia Lewis, as well as later 19th- and early 20th-century works by Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens

— Silver: works by colonial masters such as John Coney and Jeremiah Dummer of Boston and Myer Myers of New York; important neoclassical and Arts and Crafts silver

— Furniture: a rare 17th-century Essex county chair; a slant-top desk inscribed with the names of a Harvard student and his son; and a magnificent mid-18th-century carved bombé secretary desk.

In addition, the department works closely with the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art to build the museum's collection of 20th-century American art. Recent acquisitions include works by Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, and Jacob Lawrence.

Harvard University Portrait Collection

Harvard acquired its first portrait in 1680 when it paid Captain Thomas Smith £4.4 for a likeness of the Puritan theologian William Ames (1576-1633), and thereby began to form the earliest collegiate art collection in America, predating the opening of the Fogg Art Museum in 1895 by more than 200 years. This original collection was completely destroyed in 1764 when a fire swept through Harvard Hall, burning the library, scientific instruments, and paintings.

The importance of the portraits to the struggling college is revealed by President Edward Holyoke's almost immediate decision to commission the greatest native-born artist of the century, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), to replace the lost portrait of English benefactor Thomas Hollis (1659-1731) by Joseph Highmore, and to commission a new portrait of Thomas Hancock (1702-1764), founder of the first professorship in America. From this new beginning, the Portrait Collection evolved to include 14 paintings by Copley, as well as masterworks by Robert Feke, Gilbert Stuart, Joseph Blackburn, John Trumbull, and others. These works, in conjunction with holdings in the Department of American Art, constitute a unique resource for teaching and research of colonial period art and culture.

Today the Portrait Collection numbers more than 1,200 mostly American paintings, drawings, and sculptures, many displayed throughout the campus. They depict individuals associated with Harvard's history — eminent faculty, officers of the university, donors, and students. Many portraits are the gifts of alumni and friends, intended to honor a particular individual, while others — primarily those of presidents and faculty — are commissioned works. The Winthrop family collection of portraits, given in 1964, constitutes a continuous family history beginning with John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The group of portraits in Memorial Hall, most given by family members, is a poignant reminder of the sacrifices made by Harvard students during the Civil War. Other strengths include 19th-century sculpture, with outstanding examples by Edmonia Lewis, Hiram Powers, Horatio Greenough, and Daniel Chester French. Some portraits are valued for their portrayal of a famous individual, others because of the artist's skill, while those combining the two are among the collection's greatest works: French's sculpture of John Harvard, Copley's portraits of Mrs. Thomas Boylston and John Adams, Feke's painting of Benjamin Franklin, Lewis's bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Singer Sargent's portrait of Henry Lee Higginson.

While a few portraits of women were traditionally displayed in campus buildings (for example, Amy Lowell, Lady Susannah Holworthy, Mary Winthrop, Caroline Gilman, and Mrs. Jared Sparks), they primarily depicted the wives of donors and presidents, Harvard having been a male institution for most of its history. The collection was greatly enriched with portraits of women when Radcliffe College merged with Harvard in 1999, and in 2003 the Harvard Foundation inaugurated an initiative to diversify the Portrait Collection by commissioning portraits of minority faculty and officers. Women artists have always been represented in the collection with notable examples including painters Sarah Wyman Whitman, Anna Lea Merritt, Lilla Cabot Perry, Ellen Emmet Rand, and Polly Thayer Starr, and sculptors Edmonia Lewis, Malvina Hoffman, and Anne Whitney.

For almost 150 years responsibility for Harvard's portraits was assigned to the Harvard College librarian, whose periodic inventories are preserved in the university archives. In 1909 President A. Lawrence Lowell appointed the director of the Fogg Museum to this role, and in 1960 a curatorship was established for oversight of the collection. Since 2003 the Portrait Collection has been a part of the Harvard Art Museum's Department of American Art.

Department of American Art

Theodore E. Stebbins, curator of American art
Virginia Anderson, Diane and Michael Maher Assistant Curator of American Art
Melissa Renn, research associate
Tara Cerretani, staff assistant