+ The Walker Sisters and Collecting in Victorian Banister Hall, in memory of his mother. Sophia THE WALKER SISTERS Boston celebrates the renovation and expansion Wheeler Walker. This room was the College's AND COLLECTING in of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art's Walker first formal art gallery. Walker, however, found Art Building by honoring the vision and patron- the cramped second-floor space unsatisfactory VICTORIAN BOSTON age of the building's original benefactors. Maiy for the exhibition of paintings. Bowdoin officials Sophia Walker (1839-1904) and Harriet Sarah observed that Walker, during visits to the cam- Walker (1844—1898) (figures 1 and 2) commis- pus, formed an "unfavorable opinion" about the LAURA FECYCH SPRACUE sioned the Walker Art Building (figure 3) in care and exhibition of the pictures.- Walker Consulting Curator of Decorative Arts memory of their uncle, Theophilus Wheeler spoke of "providing a permanent home for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art Walker (1813—1890). He had held a deep, life- works of Art " but died in April 1890 before any long interest in the Old Master paintings, prints, plans were made.^ Within a year of his death, and drawings collected during the eighteenth however, Mary Sophia and Harriet Sarah Walker, century by James Bowdoin 111. the College's his heirs, announced they would fulfdl their founding patron. ' Walker first became involved uncle's intentions to build a new picture gallery. with the art collection in 1850 when his close The Walker sisters commissioned one of friend and cousin, the Beverend Leonard Woods, America's finest architects. Charles Follen Jr., college president from 18^9 to 1866, sought McKim of the New York firm McKim, Mead, and funds for the construction of a new chapel, White, for the design of a building "entirely On the cover and figure i designed by Bichard Upjohn in the German devoted to objects of art.""' Surviving correspon- Robert Gordon Hardie. Harriet Sarah Walker, oil on canvas. Bomanesque revival style. When Walker con- dence reveals patrons with a remarkable vision 1900. Bequest of Miss Mary Sophia Walker. 1904.4. tributed $1,000, the Board of Trustees recog- and an architect who could realize it. Bejecting nized his generosity by naming a picture gallery, the High Victorian Gothic used for Boston's 1876 located on the second floor of the Chapel's Museum of Fine Arts building at Copley Square, a figii re 2 Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, Mary ?>of'hm Walker, oil on canvas. 1895. Bequest of Miss Mary Sophia Walker, 1904.8. the Walkers sought a building whose "color [was] to be light. For his first museum, McKim offered a "balanced and symmetrical design [McKim's emphasis]" based on Italian Renaissance models. ' During his dedicatory address in June 1894, Martin Brimmer, presi- dent of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, hailed the new structure that "stands here to affirm, conspicuously, and deliberately, that Art is a great instrument in man's education, that it rounds and completes a training which would be imperfect without it. " ''Two spacious sky-lighted rectangular galleries, flanking the rotunda, held James Bowdoin Ill's historic collection and other works that had come to the College through the Boyd and Knox families. The Walkers' generous donations filled the oval Sophia WheelerWalker Gallery, located on axis with the original entrance (figure 4). The building and collection inspired other donors to follow the Walker sisters" exam- pie with subsequent gifts of art and funding. From this auspicious beginning the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. one of the first college art museums in the United States, has grown to become one of the nation's finest. The Walkers' choice of a classical "temple of art " may have stemmed from their residence in and reverence for Gore Place in Waltham. figure 3 Massachusetts, one of Americas most significant The Walker Art Building, designed by McKira, Mead neoclassical houses. Built in 1806 bv Rebecca and White. 1894. Bowdoin College Museum of Art. and Christopher Gore and designed with the assistance of Jacques -Guillaume Legrand, a highly regarded French architect, the estate was an American model of aferme omee. where aes- thetics of architecture and landscape design were united with agricultural reform (figure 5)."* The Gores' innovative house stood within a property of 140 acres with fields under cultivation, exten- sive orchards and fine horticultural specimens. The Waltham estate was the Gore family's sum- figure 4 mer home-, in the winter they lived on Boston's The Sophia Wheeler Walker Gallery as it appeared in Beacon Hill next door to Bowdoin 111. Like 1905 with the Walker collection. Bowdoin College James Museum of Art. James Bowdoin II. Gore was a Massachusetts statesman who also served as governor in i8og. Walker in 1904. Intensely private individuals, the The Gores later retired to Waltham, residing Walkers eschewed any desire for public notice. there until 1832 when Christopher Gore's failing Although much about them has been gleaned health required them to spend winters in Boston. from public records, few primary materials sur- In 1845 Nathaniel Walker, Theophilus's brother vive to shed light on their personal lives. Probate and business partner, married the Gores" grand- inventories do not detail their collection and no niece. Susan White Seaver Grant. '° Theophilus photographs are known that document their fur- purchased Gore Place in 1856. His nieces joined nished interior." Rather than imagining their him there in 1869. moving from Groton. Mass- Gore Place interior, this installation celebrates achusetts, after their mother died. At Gore Place, the Walkers' tastes and interests within the con- the Walkers furnished their two -story oval parlor text of their Boston society. The Walkers' collec- figures with European and American paintings and tion included works from the French Barbizon Gore Place. Waltham. Massachusetts, sculpture, furniture, and Asian works of art. School and its American counterparts, ancient ca. 1895. photograph by Halliday Historic Photograph Harriet Walker avidly collected miniatures and art and classicism, Japanese art. and works of Company. Courtesy of Historic New England. European textiles. contemporary artists, such as Winslow Homer The Walker Sisters and Collecting in Victorian and John La Farge. Noteworthy objects given Boston brings art and decorative arts in the classi- since 1894 by other Bowdoin College Museum cal and the colonial revival styles together with of Art donors as well as generous loans from the objects representing the Aesthetic Movement, a Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Portland third artistic style popular in America after the Museum of Art; and the Wichita Art Museum Civil War. Most of the objects exhibited here were round out the exhibition to vividly illuminate purchased by the Walkers expressly for the the range of Bostonian tastes during the late Bowdoin museum or were bequeathed by Mary nineteenth century. 5 Theophilus's successful textile factories in establishment of an art gallery in 1837, promot- Maine and Massachusetts provided his heirs with ing American artists as well as European works. generous means for art collecting. The Walker The Walker sisters" membership there coincided sisters" interest coincided with a rise of art with their purchase of a winter residence at near- patronage in Boston, a city whose literary giants by 58 Beacon Street in 1890. enriched American letters. Among leading WTiile honoring the memory of Theophilus, authors in the Boston area were Ralph Waldo the Walkers also collected specifically to address Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel the needs of college art education. The eclectic Hawthorne, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, nature of their interests is mirrored by other col- the latter two of whom were Bowdoin College lections established to educate and refine public graduates of the Class of 1855. Boston circles taste as well as train artists working in American it was considered a civic duty to support the arts, industries, especially textiles, ceramics, and a responsibility the Walker sisters embraced by glass. Many of the objects the Boston Athenaeum making great world art available in Maine and collected, for example, were intended to address establishing a high standard for art education at these issues. ' 'Cultural leaders and museum Bowdoin College.'^ The 1870s and 1880s saw dra- advocates believed that educating and inspiring matic additions to Boston s cultural landscape artisans and designers would elevate the aesthet- with new buildings for the Museum of Fine Arts ics and production standards of the entire and its Museum School and the Boston Art Club, nation. At the time, textile mills in Massa- fueling the city's leadership in American cultural chusetts sent their woven fabrics to England to life. The Boston Athenaeum, founded in 1807 as a be decorated. Training local talent for the design library, began regular art exhibitions with the of these goods in America would cut costs. 6 improve competitiveness, and increase produc- public art to utilitarian household furnishings. tivity. These are among the reasons why the The Walker Art Building s classical elements — Commonweakh of Massachusetts mandated art Greek plan, dome, rotunda, loggia, Palladian education in the pubhc schools beginning in arch, and sculpture — were drawn from fifteenth- 1870.'+ The Walkers" vision differed markedly century Florentine architecture, notably the Pazzi from that of collectors such as Isabella Stewart Chapel by Brunelleschi and the Loggia dei Lanzi, Gardner, who built a Venetian palace to house her site of the lion statues that served as models for world-class art. Gardner acquired Renaissance the Bowdoin museum"s noted examples."' Ancient sculpture at the Boston Old Master paintings with the scholarly advice of Athenaeum may figure 6 Charles Eliot Norton, Harvard University's great have inspired decoration of the Walker Art Elihu Vedder, Rome, oil on canvas, 1894.. Gift of the Misses Harriet Sarah and Mary Sophia Walker, iSgS.Sy.