Journal of the History of Collections Advance Access originally published online on September 12, 2006
Journal of the History of Collections 2006 18(2):267-284; doi:10.1093/jhc/fhl021
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Personal collecting meets institutional vision
The origins of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum
In 1891, Harvard University was the recipient of an unexpected bequest from Mrs William Hayes Fogg, who gave her collection and a substantial gift to build a museum named for her deceased husband. The Foggs had no known association with Harvard, and University officials were reportedly embarrassed and perplexed by the ‘problem’ that this gift created, since the Fogg collection was of varied quality and included the work of artists who had fallen out of fashion. Further, it was unclear what function a teaching museum would serve in a community that already boasted Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The beginnings of the Fogg Art Museum, one of the country's most distinguished university museums, represent a point of intersection where issues of personal collecting in late nineteenth-century America meet with the problems of institutional collecting for university museums through the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first.
1 ‘Last Will and Testament of Elizabeth Fogg’, 2 July 1888, p. 5, Harvard University Art Museum (hereafter HUAM) Archives.
2 ‘The Inflation Calculator’, http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi; ‘William Hayes Fogg’, HUAM Archives, n.p.; ‘Mrs. W.H. Fogg's Will’, New York Daily Tribune, 9 January 1891, p. 1; ‘To fight Mrs Fogg's Will’, New York Daily Tribune, 10 January 1891, p. 1.
3 ‘To Fight Mrs Fogg's Will’, op. cit. (note 2), p. 1; ‘Mrs W.H. Fogg's Will’, op. cit. (note 2), p. 1.
4 ‘To Fight Mrs Fogg's Will’, op. cit. (note 2), p. 1; ‘Elizabeth P. Fogg, Will’, New York Times, 11 January 1891, p. 10.
5 ‘Obituary: William Hayes Fogg’, New York Times, 25 March 1884, p. 5; ‘Funeral address of Revd Dr Roswell D. Hitchcock’, quoted in Phyllis O. Whitten, Samuel Fogg 1628–1672: His Ancestors and Descendants (Annandale, VA, 1976), entry 745, n.p.; A Short Genealogical Account of a few of the Families of the early Settlers in Eliot and of a Branch of the Moody Family (Saco, 1851), pp. 3–10; George Wilson, Portrait Gallery of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York (New York, 1890), pp. 64–5; Berwick Academy Archives, n.p.; ‘Elizabeth P. Fogg, Will’, op. cit. (note 4), p. 1.
6 A Short Genealogical Account, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 3–10; ‘Various letters of Mr Fogg’, quoted in Whitten, op. cit. (note 5), entry 745, n.p.
7 William Hayes Fogg, a Sketch of his Life, Address at his Funeral by R.D. Hitchcock, and Memorials (1895), pp. 5, 18; Wilson, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 65–6; William Hayes Fogg Lamont to Miss [Louise] Lucas, Columbia, SC, 17 April (year not noted), HUAM Archives. The writer was the son of a friend of Mr Fogg's who was named in his honour, but he does not indicate how well they were acquainted.
8 Wilson, op. cit. (note 5), p. 65. In a further testament to his sense of honour, the New York Times reported that Fogg paid the defunct firm's debts when he became wealthy many years later. See ‘Elizabeth P. Fogg, Will’, op. cit. (note 4), p. 1; Berwick Academy Archives, op. cit. (note 5); Wilson, op. cit. (note 5), p. 54; Whitten, op. cit. (note 5), entry 745, n.p.
9 ‘Various letters of Mr Fogg’, quoted in Whitten, op. cit. (note 5), entry 745, n.p.
10 Wilson, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 5, 65; ‘Emerson-Hitchcock: a notable assemblage of clergyman at a fashionable wedding’, New York Times, 29 December 1881, p. 5.
11 ‘William Hayes Fogg’, n.p.; Undated memorandum, excerpt from a paper on William Hayes Fogg by George Osgood of Kensington, N.H. for a reunion of the Fogg Family Association held at Fogg Museum in 1910, HUAM Archives; ‘To fight Mrs. Fogg's Will’, op. cit. (note 2), p. 1; Phoebe Peebles to Mary Rose Bolton and Peter Nisbet, 31 October 1989, HUAM Archives.
12 Kevin Moore, draft entry for Fogg Art Museum American collection catalogue.
13 ‘Funeral address of Revd Dr Roswell D. Hitchcock’, quoted in Whitten, op. cit. (note 5), entry 745, n.p.
14 Linda Henefield Skalet, ‘The Market for American Painting in New York: 1870–1915’, PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 128–9.
15 Annette Blaugrund, New York, to James Cuno, Cambridge, MA, 20 February 1998, HUAM Archives.
16 Maria Naylor, The National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1861–1900 (New York, 1973), pp. 786–7.
17 Will Irwin, Earl Chapin May and Joseph Hotchkiss, A History of the Union League Club, New York City (New York, 1952), p. 11; William Hayes Fogg, New York, to Lester Conant, 24 January 1861, Berwick Academy Archives.
18 Union League Club of New York: Report of the Executive Committee, pp. 40–4; Inauguration of the New Union League Club House (New York, 1868), n.p.; Catalogue of Paintings, Exhibited at the Reception, Union League Club (New York, 1871), n.p.; Catalogue of Paintings, Exhibited at the Ladies' Reception, Union League Club (New York, 1877), n.p.; Catalogue of Water-Color Paintings, Exhibited at the May Meeting of the Union League Club (New York, 1877), n.p.; Catalogue of Works of Art Exhibited at the March – 1879 – Meeting of the Union League Club (New York, 1879), n.p.; Catalogue of Works of Art Exhibited at the June – 1879 – Meeting of the Union League Club (New York, 1879), n.p.; Catalogue of Works of Art Exhibited at the November – 1879 – Meeting of the Union League Club (New York, 1879), n.p.; Catalogue of Works of Art Exhibited at the December – 1879 – Meeting of the Union League Club (New York, 1879), n.p., Union League Club Archives.
19 Kevin J. Avery and Franklin Kelly (eds.), Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2003), p. 79; ‘A ramble among the studios’, New York Herald Daily Tribune, 25 November 1876, p. 2.
20 Evdokia Savidou-Terrono, ‘For "The boys in blue": The Art Galleries of the Sanitary Fairs’, PhD dissertation, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (New York, 2002), p. 635.
21 Melissa Geisler Trafton, ‘Critics, Collectors, and the Nineteenth-Century Taste for the Paintings of John Frederick Kensett’, PhD dissertation, University of California (Berkeley, 2003), p. 144. Trafton believes that the Fogg's Mountain and Lake was sold at the 1872 sale as Lake George. See Melissa Geisler Trafton to Kevin Moore, 9 April 2003, HUAM object files, 1895.708.
22 Smithsonian Institution Research Information System, Pre-1877 Art Exhibitions Index, www.siris.si.edu.
23 Catalogue of Works of Art exhibited at the January – 1880 – Meeting of the Union League Club (New York, 1880), n.p., Union League Club Archives; Edgar Peters Bowron, ‘Academic collectors and generous benefactors,’ in European Paintings before 1900 in the Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, 1990), p. 12; Whitten, op. cit. (note 5), entry 745, n.p.
24 Lewis I. Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward, Dean of American Sculpture (Newark, 1985), pp. 247–8.
25 Jeanie M. James, Archivist, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to Kimberly Orcutt, Cambridge, MA, 6 January 2003, HUAM Archives; Robert Gordon, New York, to L. P. di Cesnola, 14 January 1879, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives.
26 ‘To Fight Mrs. Fogg's Will’, op. cit. (note 2), p. 1. The only Fogg who attended Harvard during this period was a distant relation, John Samuel Hill Fogg of Eliot, Maine, who graduated in 1850 from the Medical School and had a successful career in Boston. See Harvard University Archives.
27 Memorials of the Class of 1833 of Harvard College (Cambridge, 1858), p. 67, Harvard University Archives; Obituary, William M. Prichard, Republican (Springfield, MA), 21 October 1897, n.p.; Edward W. Forbes, ‘The beginnings of the Art Department and of the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard’, reprint from Cambridge Historical Society 27 (1941), p. 1. As of 2003, 288 works have been purchased for the Fogg Art Museum with the Prichard Fund.
28 Henry L. Shattuck, Harvard Treasurer, to Paul J. Sachs, Cambridge, 15 July 1932, HUAM Archives; Typescript of Corporation records, 7 March 1893; E. W. Hooper to Charles Eliot Norton, Cambridge, 6 March 1893, HUAM Archives.
29 Forbes, op. cit. (note 27), p. 6.
30 Robert B. Newman, Hunt Hall: an Historical Review (Cambridge, 1973?), pp. 2–3.
31 Kathryn Brush, Vastly more than Brick and Mortar: Reinventing the Fogg Art Museum in the 1920s (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 19; Phoebe Peebles to Mary Rose Bolton and Peter Nisbet, 31 October 1989, HUAM Archives; Newman, op. cit. (note 30), pp. 2–3; Forbes, op. cit. (note 27), pp. 6–7.
32 Brush, op. cit. (note 31), p. 19; Newman, op. cit. (note 30), p. 2; Forbes, op. cit. (note 27), p. 8.
33 Untitled article, New York Times, 29 January 1895, n.p., Harvard University Archives; Forbes, op. cit. (note 27), p. 6; ‘Students criticize the architecture of the New Fogg Art Museum’, Boston Daily Advertiser, 25 September 1894, n.p., Harvard University Archives; ‘Prof. Norton says that Fogg Art Museum is beneath contempt’, undated clipping, possibly October 1911, Harvard University Archives; Newman, op. cit. (note 30), p. 1; ‘A bitter insult’, Boston Daily Advertiser, 18 March 1896, n.p., Harvard University Archives.
34 Forbes, op. cit. (note 27), p. 6; Newman, op. cit. (note 30), p. 2.
35 Hiram H. Fogg, Bangor, Maine, to Charles Herbert Moore, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 27 October 1896. Charles Herbert Moore papers, HUAM Archives.
36 Forbes, op. cit. (note 27), p. 11.
37 ‘Reopening of the Fogg Art Museum’, Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 11 February 1914, pp. 320–2, Harvard University Archives; Whitten, op. cit. (note 5), p. ii.
38 Susan B. Matheson, Art for Yale: A History of the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, 2001), pp. vi, 21, 41. Interestingly, Trumbull's bequest includes a caveat that if his works are ever lent or sold, the entire collection will revert to Harvard; James Mundy, ‘Refining the imagination: a promise delivered’, in Refining the Imagination: Tradition, Collecting, and the Vassar Education (Poughkeepsie, NY, 1999), p. 11; A Guide to the Collections: Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton, 1986), pp. 16–7; Betsy Rosasco, ‘The teaching of art and the museum tradition: Joseph Henry to Allan Marquand’, Record of The Art Museum of Princeton University 55 (1996), p. 36.
39 In the twentieth century the Williams College Museum experienced the difficulties of two ‘competing’ museums with the 1955 opening of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. The Clark quickly over shadowed its counterpart, which had no doubt grown accustomed to being the town's public museum. The writer observed with some anxiety that ‘It has taken time, but more and more visitors to the Clark are learning that Williamstown ... has two art museums.’ See S. Lane Faison Jr, Williams College Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collection (Williamstown, MA, 1979), pp. vii, ix.
40 Caroline A. Jones, Modern Art at Harvard (New York, 1985), p. 23; Charles H. Moore, ‘The Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University’, New England Magazine, August 1905, pp. 699–704.
41 Forbes, op. cit. (note 27), p. 1; Edward W. Forbes, ‘The relation of the art museum to a university’, reprint from the Proceedings of the American Association of Museums 5 (1911): pp. 48, 51, 55. As it happens, the museum now owns a number of drawings by Michelangelo and several paintings by Rembrandt.
42 Forbes, op. cit. (note 41), pp. 48, 54; Edward W. Forbes, ‘The art museum and the teaching of the fine arts’, Bulletin of the College Art Association of America 4 (September 1918), p. 124; Brush, op. cit. (note 31), p. 15. The original museum was renamed Hunt Hall and became an academic building. In 1973 it was demolished to make room for a student dormitory.
43 Stephan Wolohojian (ed.), A Private Passion: Nineteenth-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 2003), pp. vii, 46.
44 James Cuno, ‘Defining the Mission of the Academic Art Museum’, Occasional Papers, Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, 1994), p. 10.
Address for correspondence Kimberly A. Orcutt, Assistant Curator, Bruce Museum, One Museum Drive, Greenwich, CT 06830, USA. korcutt{at}brucemuseum.org