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Bowdoin College Bowdoin Digital Commons Museum of Art Miscellaneous Publications Museum of Art 1991 Personal Recollections of the Museum of Art and the Department of Art at Bowdoin College Bowdoin College. Museum of Art Philip C. Beam Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/art-museum-miscellaneous- publications Part of the American Art and Architecture Commons, and the Oral History Commons Recommended Citation Bowdoin College. Museum of Art and Beam, Philip C., "Personal Recollections of the Museum of Art and the Department of Art at Bowdoin College" (1991). Museum of Art Miscellaneous Publications. 8. https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/art-museum-miscellaneous-publications/8 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Museum of Art at Bowdoin Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Museum of Art Miscellaneous Publications by an authorized administrator of Bowdoin Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS of the Museum ofArt and the Department ofArt at Bowdoin College PHILIP a BEAM Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/personalrecollecOObowd PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS Professor Beam painting a portrait of Will Hennessey about 1938. Mr. Hennessey worked as janitor, maintenance man, carpenter, preparator, and art handler at the museum well into his nineties. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS of the Museum ofArt and the Department ofArt at Bowdoin College PHILIP C. BEAM Henryfohnson Professor ofArt and Archaeology Emeritus Bowdoin College Museum ofArt 1991 This book is published with the assistance of the John Sloan Memorial Foundation. Photographs in this book are from the collections of Philip C. Beam, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Office of Public Relations and Publications at Bowdoin College, Bowdoin Magazine, and Special Collections, Hawthorne-Longfellow Library. Designed by Michael Mahan Graphics, Bath, Maine. Printed by The J. S. McCarthy Co., Augusta, Maine Cover: The Walker Art Building in snow. Photograph by Philip C. Beam. All rights reserved Copyright © President and Trustees of Bowdoin College, 1991. FOREWORD One of the many assets of the small liberal arts continues to yield new endowments and trust college, such as Bowdoin, is the capacity to arrangements to benefit the Museum of Art. preserve memory and to nourish and protect Each of Philip C. Beam's successors as museum tradition. Time does not stand still, and events are director has had a distinct approach to the posi- carefully recorded in part because change is so tion, but one thing has been constant for us all. rapid; students, faculty, and administration can Phil Beam has been unwavering in his support of have the confidence that at least for one period in our work and a loyal witness to all that has been their lives they have been documented and remain good in the museum's development. Having part of an ever-developing and shifting history of a brought modern museum practices to Bowdoin's place. art collections and fought long and successfully for Members of the staff of the College's Museum of the improvement of art facilities, he passed his Art have an important goal: the gathering of authority to others, knowing that they would information, oral and written, about the institution choose new directions, set different priorities, even and its collections—objects, artists, donors, mu- disagree with his own policies as the museum seum employees—and about the teaching of art in world changed dramatically. His love for art, the curriculum. Much of that information has profound understanding of human nature, enor- been disseminated through catalogues of the mous patience, and ability to laugh have been a permanent collection, temporary exhibition source of strength to the directors who have catalogues, brochures, checklists, and the newslet- followed him. ter, all part of a publications program for which Helen Farr Sloan, the widow ofJohn Sloan, the museum is known nationally, even internation- whose art is brilliantly represented in the Bowdoin ally, by scholars, museum professionals, and the collections, has long been a friend of Professor general public. Beam's. One wintry evening in a New York restau- The most recent effort in this capturing of time rant three years ago, she and I concurred that passing is Professor Philip C. Beam's Personal there was a need to record Philip C. Beam's Recollections of the Museum ofArt and the Department of recollections. Part of our discussion was her Art at Bowdoin College. I hope these memoirs wdll be generous offer to help fund such an endeavor the first in a series of similar reminiscences by through the John Sloan Memorial Foundation. individuals important to the life of art at the Stimulated by Mrs. Sloan's interest. Professor College. Beam quickly set to work in response to my invita- Professor Beam, a distinguished scholar of tion. His text, edited by Susan L. Ransom of the Winslow Homer, served Bowdoin as teacher of art Office of College Relations, and designed by history and studio art and as curator and director Michael Mahan Graphics, provides critical infor- of the Museum of Art. His career at the College mation not only about art at the College and about spanned six decades; in 1964, Professor Beam art education in this country, but also about the resigned from the museum's directorship in order people whose lives are interwoven with that art. to devote his energies full-time to teaching art Most of all, there is enjoyment in the text, reflec- history, from which he retired in 1982. The tive of Professor Beam's delight in art and his following year, he also retired from his curatorship commitment to its extraordinary role in the lives of of the Winslow Homer Collection. He continues generations of Bowdoin students. to be a major authority for the study of Homer and a source of encouragement for the staff members of the talks museum. He gives gallery and teaches Katharine J. Watson docents; his guided tours of Winslow Homer's Director Prout's Neck are famous. His life's example Bowdoin College Museum of Art f 3 The First Collection of Its Kind Bowdoin College owned a collection of original works of art almost from the begin- ning of its history. In 1811, only seven years after it opened its doors as an educational institution, the Honorable James Bowdoin III, its first benefactor, bequeathed to the College the important group of Colonial and Federal portraits he had inherited from his family, and the collection he had founded on his own, including 141 old master drawings, the first collection of its kind assembled by an Ameri- can. Among its treasures was a landscape of Waltensburg drawn with pen by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, now considered to be almost priceless. With each passing decade other friends of the College added to the collections. When the entire College was contained in its original home, Massa- chusetts Hall, a situation which continued for some decades, preserving and displaying the collection was a major problem. Under the leadership of President Woods, the first important alleviation of this condition oc- curred in 1855, when the Chapel, designed by Richard Upjohn, was opened for services. Provi- sion was made within it for a library and a gallery The exhibition spaces in the Chapel were crammed with for the display of the art collections; funds for the pictures and plaster casts of classical European statues. gallery were donated by Theophilus Wheeler Walker, who was a cousin of President Woods's, and the gallery was named for his mother, Sophia Walker Art Building in memory of their uncle, who Walker. Photographs taken at the time show an had died some months before. It was the first impressive, though crowded, array of pictures and independent home the collections had and is still other works of art. The crowded status continued the center of their display. through the succeeding four decades as Bowdoin's The Walker sisters provided generously for this collections were enlarged by gifts, especially those landmark event. They also engaged Charles FoUen in 1852 from Colonel Boyd '10. As a result, the McKim, of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, to race between treasures and housing again reached design the building. McKim, Mead & Wliite were a critical point. the leading architects of the nineties, and McKim The next important expansion of housing was was enjoying national recognition as the chief one of the most significant in the history of the architect for the World's Columbian Exposition, collections. It came in 1891, when Theophilus which was held at Chicago in 1893. He, in turn, Wheeler Walker's nieces and heirs, Harriet and engaged John La Farge, Elihu Vedder, Kenyon Sophia, donated funds for the construction of the Cox, and Abbott Thayer to paint four murals for 4 the rotunda. These furnished a cross-section of the relief portrait of Theophilus Wheeler Walker as finest mural decorations created at that time in the centerpiece of the Walker Gallery. this country. In keeping with these auspicious developments. The Walker Art Building was opened by Presi- Professor Henry Johnson, Curator of the Collec- dent William DeWitt Hyde in 1894 with a memo- tions, Longfellow Professor of Modern Languages, rable dedicatory address by Martin Brimmer, and Chairman of the Department of Romance founder and first president of the Museum of Fine Languages, compiled the first serious catalogue of Arts, Boston. It was then considered one of the the old master drawings and circulated it to finest American buildings in the Renaissance- scholars and museums in this country and in Classical tradition, and like McKim's kindred Europe. He was named Director of the Museum of Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, has held its Fine Arts, as it was then called, in 1914, the same own in that regard to the present day.

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