|
|
|
|||||
|
Bookplate Index by Library or Collector |
Montclair Art Association In 1909 William T.
Evans, a railroad financier, offered twenty-six paintings by American
artists to his hometown Montclair, New Jersey, with the stipulation that a
fire-proof building be provided to house them. A 1910 town referendum
rejected this offer and later that year a private organization, the
Montclair Art Association, was created to carry out plans for the
establishment of a museum, later to be called The Montclair Art Museum. To
fulfill Evans's original stipulation for a fire-proof building (but
contingent that "definite and adequate arrangements" be made for
continuing maintenance) Florence Osgood Rand (Mrs. Henry) Lang responded
by providing $50,000 for construction of such a building, and eventually
The Montclair Art Museum received (before and after her 1943 death) a
total of about $1,500,000 from Mr. and Mrs. Henry Lang. The initial
fifteen-member board of trustees (which included local residents
industrialist Henry Lang, sculptor William Couper, painter Frederick
Waugh, coffee broker and music enthusiast James Jarvie and architect
Michel M. LeBrun) with William T. Evans as president engaged New York
architect Albert B. Ross to design the fire-proof building. Mr. Evans and
Mrs. Lang laid the cornerstone in October 1912 and Michel LeBrun, as
museum trustee, oversaw the construction of the building. This privately
endowed Montclair Art Museum (New Jersey's first museum to be open to
the public) was inaugurated on 15 January 1914. Organized first as the
Montclair Art Association, in 1962 it legally adopted The Montclair Art
Museum as its corporate name. In the eighty-six
years since its opening exhibition, The Montclair Art Museum has had as
trustees (in addition to Couper and Waugh named above) the eminent
American painters Charles Warren Eaton, Grant Tyson Reynard, and Frederick
Ballard Williams, and has exhibited the widely-known New Jersey artists:
Thomas Ball, Charles Parsons, George Inness, Lawrence Earle, Harry Fenn,
Thomas Manley, George Inness Jr., Jonathan Scott Hartley, John Marin,
Asher B. Durand, Ben and Bernarda Bryson Shahn, Raphael, Isaac and Moses
Soyer, Chaim Gross, William Gropper, Joseph Domjian, Luigi Rist, Adolf
Konrad, Michael Graves, Vaclav Vytlacil, and Morgan Russell, as well as
artists Josef Albers, Walter Darby Bannard, Lois Dodd, Betty Parsons,
Hedda Sterne, Alan Houser, Robert Kushner and Dan Namingha. The museum's
directors have been Helen Kent Taylor, Katherine Innes, Marion Haviland,
Mary Cooke Swarthwout, Kathryn E. Gamble, Robert J. Koenig and Ellen
Schwartz Harris. Significant recent catalogues include Down Garden
Paths, 1983; Song of the Loom, 1987; Three Hundred Years of
American Painting, 1989; "The Crayon" and the American
Landscape, 1993; George Inness, 1994; and Precisionism in
America, 1994. The Evans gift to
the museum eventually totaled fifty-four paintings and two sculptures, one
of which was Herman Atkins MacNeil's The Sun Vow (life-sized
bronze figures of an elderly Indian and an Indian boy), which stands on a
grassy knoll surrounded by the circular drive leading to the museum.
According to the sculptor's widow Cecilia MacNeil, "The Sun Vow portrays
two Indians, elder and younger, chief and future brave, grandfather and
grandson . . . squinting into the sun . . . The grandchild holds an
arrowless bow, symbolizing the celebration of coming of age . . . For,
when the young brave is able to shoot an arrow into the sun, far enough
away so that its descent to earth passes unseen, then he has attained
manhood."1 Continuing William
T. Evans's interest in American art, unusual in his time, The Montclair
Art Museum has restricted its collection to American fine art and Native
American art. The permanent collection now includes nearly 20,000 works of
American painting, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, costumes,
bookplates, and 4,000 Native American art objects and artifacts. Among the
museum's significant acquisitions are the Moses and Ida Soyer Bequest
(117 art works); the George Raimes Beach gift (about 250 Currier and Ives
prints); and the Morgan Russell Archive (more than 1,900 items). In 1913 the museum
received a bequest from the estate of Michel LeBrun for the construction
of a library and 40 volumes from his library for the LeBrun Library which
opened in 1916, overseen by Michel's widow Maria Olivia LeBrun. In 1917,
Michel's brother Pierre LeBrun, also an architect, donated an additional
100 volumes. Since the Montclair Art Museum's collection is limited to
American fine arts and Native American art, the LeBrun Library's
research materials are similarly restricted, for the most part, to these
same fields. The LeBrun Library has been and still is the foremost art
reference source in this limited field in the State of New Jersey. The
library's holdings for its 84-year existence have increased more than
one-hundred fold to some 14,000 books, plus some 5000 volumes of bound
periodicals, 136 drawers of vertical file material on American artists, a
collection of 20,000 slides, and nearly 8000 bookplates. This library
collection has been maintained since 1916 by seven librarians: Mary Paine,
Julia Smith Berrall (international flower-arranging and garden authority),
Laura Jacobus Mueschenheim, Elizabeth Ilsley Bonta, Edith Anderson Rights,
Mary Chatfield, and Susanna Sabolcsi. The museum from its
inception collected bookplates which are under the care of the librarian.
Over the decades thirteen bookplate exhibitions have been held, three
focused on individual American bookplate artists (Julius J. Lankes, 1941;
Arthur Nelson Macdonald, 1986; and David McNeely Stauffer, 1990) and 10 on
various aspects of the museum's bookplate collection (1959, 1967–1968,
and 1993). At the time of the
library's founding Charles Bull (librarian of the General Theological
Seminary in New York City), president of the museum's board of trustees,
commissioned as a gift for the library a bookplate by the engineer,
artist, botanist and author Herbert Waldron Faulkner (1860–1940), who in
1915 had at the museum an exhibition of paintings and lithographs of
American gardens and European scenes. Faulkner had spent nearly twenty
years (1890–1909) mainly in Italy and France where he worked and
exhibited regularly, according to reviews in International Studio. The principal image
of the Faulkner bookplate is the Herman Atkins MacNeil sculpture, The
Sun Vow. The frame of the bookplate is ornamented with portraits of
classical artists and with decorated vertical side panels. This bookplate
was used until replaced by a second bookplate, by Lynd Kendall Ward
(1905–1985) and William Elberty (dates unknown), which is still in use.
Early in 1954, the Montclair Art Museum presented an exhibition of
woodcuts, lithographs, and watercolors by Lynd Ward, a New Jersey artist
and author.2 Between
1954 and 1957, he created for the museum a letterhead which showed the
museum entrance façade with an American elm tree (since dead and replaced
by an Atlas cedar) and the same MacNeil The Sun Vow that was the
main image of the Faulkner bookplate. This letterhead design was adapted
as a bookplate by William Elberty, another New Jersey artist. Edith
Anderson Rights, Upper Montclair, N.J. Notes 1. See American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers. Yearbook, 1987. 2.
See Libraries and Culture 30:4 (Fall 1995). [Originally published in Libraries & Culture, vol. 34, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 278-281.] |
|||||
