Creating a Collection: A Tour Through the Smith College Museum of Art

Building a new collection

Starting in 1879, just four years after the first matriculating class at the college, Smith College President Laurenus Clark Seelye oversaw the first purchases of art for the school’s collection. [1] The earliest collection primarily included work from artists contemporary to the turn of the century, including paintings by Winslow Homer and Louis C. Tiffany, and the first artworks by Thomas Eakins and George Inness to enter a museum collection.[2] By June of 1879, the museum had acquired twenty-seven works of art, as chronicled in detail by the Springfield Republican.[3] 


Not until 1920, though, under the leadership of Alfred Vance Churchill, the SCMA’s first director, did the museum develop a formal collecting policy.[4] Churchill’s “concentration plan” began to redirect the collection’s focus, emphasizing the acquisition of modern art, “defined as beginning with the French Revolution,” and looking heavily towards trends in Europe.[5] Jere Abbott’s succession of Churchill in 1932 coincided with larger shifts in cultural tastes across American art institutions, which had in part been suppressed until then, according to Sabine Eckmann.[6]

 
[1] “History,” Smith College Museum of Art, accessed November 29, 2015, http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/Collections/History.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Springfield Republican, “The Smith College Paintings,” June 17, 1879.
[4] “History,” Smith College Museum of Art, accessed November 29, 2015, http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/Collections/History.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Sabine Eckmann, “Exilic Vision: H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University,” in Sabine Eckmann, H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis: Washington University Gallery of Art, 2002), 7.

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