By: Serena Li
John Wilmerding was one of the most prominent figures in American art. He died on June 6, 2024 at 86 years in Manhattan as a result of congestive heart failure. A renowned scholar, museum curator, and collector, Mr. Wilmerding helped to showcase the cultural importance and art works of many painters including Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer.
Professor Wilmerding born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended St. Paul’s School before earning his undergraduate (1960) and graduate degrees (1961, 1965) at Harvard. He taught at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth before going to Princeton in 1988 as the Christopher Binyon Sarofi ‘86 Professor in American Art. He was the curator of American art at the National Gallery of Art from 1977 to 1982, and then the deputy director from 1983 to 1988 while he taught courses at the University of Maryland and the University of Delaware. His great-grandparents were also collectors and donated their large collection of European and Asian artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, founded the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.
In the 1960s, there were very few universities offering courses in art, let alone textbooks or major exhibitions. When he began his teaching career, Professor Wilmerding’s work influenced the impassioned appreciation and study of American art. He helped give American art an identity by publishing more than twenty books on the topic, including “American Masters from Bingham to Eakins.” He also donated many works made by 19th- and 20th-century American painters including “Mississippi Boatman”, “Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes”, and “Still Life with Crab Apples and Grapes”
Christopher Lyon, the publisher of Lyon Artbooks, said “…in Professor Wilmerding’s writings, his collecting, his organizing of exhibitions, he aimed to tell a story of the rise of American art, the rise of American art as an expression of American identity, and that this has been an overarching project of a kind in your career.”
Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/arts/john-wilmerding-dead.html