Mutual passions a public museum and private collectors

each great museum has formed significant relationships with private collectors that far down influence its character. Malcolm Roger director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, discusses by what mode such relationships have enriched his museum above the past eighty years and explains that they are nurtur today for many more reasons than simply the gifts that might result

That greatest in quantity extraordinary of birds, the flamingo, takes the signature pink colouring of its plumage not from its DNA, on the other hand from its diet--one rich in alpha- and beta-carotene. Museums also take their particular colour from their diet--the collections and individual existences that they absorb-and, just as there are several species of flamingo, each with its different dietary habits and colouring, no sum of two units museums are exactly alike.

In the late 1860 the Boston artist and art historian Charles Callahan Perkins (1823-86) was asked by dint of the American Social Science Association to prepare a report upon the 'feasibility of establishing a regular Museum of Art at a moderate expense' In this report Perkins wrote: 'In regard to the class of external realitys with which we should present to stock the proposed Museum original works of art being on the outside of our reach on account of their rarity and excessive costliness we are limited to the acquisition of reproductions in plaster and other analogous materials and of photographs of drawings by dint of the old masters, which are nearly as completed as the originals ... and quite as useful for our purposes'

However, in the face of Perkins' assessment, when the trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were incorporated through an act of the Massachusetts Legislature in 1870 it was with a mandate for 'the preservation and exhibition of works of art' and 'of making, maintaining, and establishing collections of of that kind works'. And from that day collecting has been central to the activities of the museum.

by dint of 1925--the year of the founding of APOLLO--the collections already numbered more [i]or[/i] less 173,000 items. They included the great print collection of fresh Yorker Henry F. Sewall, containing more [i]or[/i] less 23,000 impressions, purchased with a bequest of $100000 from Boston hotelier Peter Parker. Edward Perry Warren, scion of a wealthy Boston paper-manufacturing family, and the man who commissioned Rodin's The Kiss (Tate), had laid the foundations of our great collection of hellenic and Roman art, sometimes with an organ of vision to piquing Bostonian prudishness (Fig. 1) Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Fenellosa and William Sturgis Bigelow had given the ten of thousands of Japanese thing perceiveds that still give the museum primacy in this area.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Our equally outstanding collection of Egyptian art--especially of the aged Kingdom period--came to us as a be the effect of the Harvard University/Museum of Fine Arts Expedition of 1905 which continued into the 1940 and which was l by means of George Reisner (Fig. 3). More than fifty works by dint of Millet, together with important renaissance plastic arts were added by copper magnate Quincy Adams Shaw. The Harvard scholar and aesthete Denman Waldo Ros between 1883 and his death in 1935 gave the museum a certain quantity of 11,000 works, and, though best known for his donations of textiles and Asian facts he has the distinction of having given to each single department of the museum. Appropriately, the museum now recognises its donors of gifts of art and capitals for the purchase of art, not alone in its roll of benefactors, on the other hand also with membership of its Denman Waldo Ros Society (found in 2001) Membership of the society helps make secure that donors of art remain associateed with the museum, and are involved in all that is going on

What was genuine of the museum's formative years is also real of its maturity: it takes its colour from the collections that have been given in the way that unstintingly. Each collection is of course coloured by means of the taste of, and resources and opportunities available to, the collector. It may also be coloured through his or her prejudices. William H Lane's collection of American modernist paintings, which came to the museum in 1990 throw backs not only his discriminating organ of vision and his passion for jazz, Elvis and Arthur Dove, on the contrary also his requirement that each acquisition fit in the back of his Ford station wagon.

And, of course, collectors also colour the actual nature of their gifts. When the brothers John T and William s Spaulding donated their collection of more [i]or[/i] less 6,000 Japanese prints in 1921 they did in the way that with the stipulation that they at no time be lent or publicly exhibited, and were to be available for investigation only. This no doubt goe a certain number of way to explaining their exceptional state of preservation. The Spauldings' rubric has been rigorously observ on the contrary adds special point to our ability today to make digital images of great accuracy available to the general public and scholars around the world by the agency of means of the museum's collections database, available upon our website: mfa.org. Interestingly, a real recent gift, the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of a certain number of 25,000 Japanese postcards, a actually extraordinary archive of designs, came to us with the funding not solitary to catalogue, conserve, exhibit and publish the collection, on the other hand also to make digital photography. The MFA is not alone among American museums in increasingly looking to donors of collections to provide additional resources for the ongoing care, cataloguing and publishing of the collections they themselves cherished, for long-term viability and accessibility are key