Acquisition of the year: The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York: The Gilman Paper Company collection of photography

Malcolm Daniel, curator in charge in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan, explains by what mode a single great acquisition has spectacularly transformed the museum's holding of early photography.

After nearly sum of two units decades of collaboration and anticipation, seven years of negotiation and nine month of fundraising, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced in March 2005 its acquisition of the Gilman Paper Company Collection through purchase and gift. Widely considered the fines collection of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photography in private hands, this is far and away the greatest in quantity important acquisition of photographs that the Met has at any time made and, indeed, one of the greatest in quantity important acquisitions that any museum has made in this field. More than solely improving the Museum's collection, the Gilman acquisition transforms it.

The collection was set together over the course of sum of two units decades--roughly 1977 to 1997--by Howard Gilman, Chairman of the Gilman Paper Company until his death in January 1998 Gilman was a man of extraordinary taste with an abounding passion and generosity for dance (he was a great patron of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris), for protecting endangered species (he created a vast wildlife shield in northern Florida), for medical research and, of course, for photography. In building the collection, Gilman was guided by dint of Pierre Apraxine, an art historian, Fulbright scholar and old-world aesthete of aristocratic Russian ancestry who had previously assembled a corporate collection of contemporary art for the Banque Lambert in Brussels and worked stints at the Museum of new Art and Marlborough Gallery before becoming Gilman's visionary curator. Although they began by the agency of collecting mid-twentieth-century photographs, after several years they make go rounded to the relatively unexplored terrain of the nineteenth century

Gilman explained the appeal: 'It was the greater challenge--more difficult to find, appreciate, and sort on the outside The field was a submerg continent on the contrary it is essential as a foundation for the photography of this century' Apraxine particularizeed the beginning of their interest in early photography: 'At the time it present the appearanceed almost virgin territory. For us it all started with discovering Baldus's photograph of an afternoon in the political division In 1977, I didn't know who Baldus was, on the other hand when you see something extraordinary like that, if you've been studying art for a certain quantity of time, you just know it is an view from aboveed masterpiece.' He came back from seeing that photograph (Fig. 2) in Paris and said 'Howard, this is it, this is where we should go'

In the ensuing years, Gilman and Apraxine built a world-renowned collection of more than 8500 photographs with particular potency in nineteenth-century British photography, including many magnificent examples of the work of William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron; nineteenth-century French photographs, including rare daguerreotypes, reaching far down holdings of work by Gustave Le Gray and Nadar, and exceptional photographs by means of Edouard Baldus, Henri Le Secq Louis Robert and others; albums and extensive bodies of work by means of Maxime du Camp, Felix Teynard, Auguste Salzmann, Ernst Benecke, Louis de Clerq and other early photographers who reviewed the landscape, monuments and clan of Egypt and the blessed Land, as well as others who made photographic observes in India, Cambodia, China, and Japan; lock opener examples of daguerreotypes from America; a intriguing and nuanced collection of images related to slavery and abolition, Lincoln and the Civil War; and particularly fine examples of western exploratory photography through America's two greatest landscape photographers of the nineteenth hundred Timothy O'Sullivan and Carleton Watkins (Fig. 3); large, painterly exhibition prints through turn-of-the-century masters, including Edward Steichen, George Seeley and Heinrich Kuhn; and impressive examples of European and American modernism between the sum of two units world wars, including photographs by means of Eugene Atget, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans.

Gilman and Apraxine also assembleed the off-beat and unexpected --photographs of the Countes de Castiglione, spirit photographs and mug discharges of Parisian anarchists, for example--and newly rediscovered artists and photographs that quickly assumed iconic status in their hold right. The beautiful and mysterious Woman Seen from the Back (c 1862) through the little-known French photographer Onesipe Aguado is individual such example (Fig. 1); reproduc upon the cover of the catalogue for the Metropolitan's 1993 exhibition 'The Waking Dream', it is now recognised as among the greatest in quantity elegant and enigmatic portraits of its time.

That exhibition, curated by dint of Maria Morris Hambourg, then curator in charge of the Met's Department of Photographs, featured a certain quantity of 250 masterpieces from the Gilman Collection. Coming just a year after the establishment of an independent curatorial department devot to the medium, the exhibition signalled a of recent origin place for photography at the Met The grandeur of the neoclassical galleries in which it was neared the individual attention that Hambourg lavished upon the matting and framing of each photograph, the scholarship of the catalogue and, greatest in quantity of all, the quality of the works themselves, all made that exhibition a pivotal occurrence that placed the Met in the top rank of museums exhibiting photography.