By: Sophie Li
John Wilmerding, the collector, curator, and scholar who transformed the American art scene, died of complications from congestive heart failure on June 6 at the age of 86.
Before John Wilmerding, American art was close to irrelevant.
“American art just didn’t hold the same sort of attention and respect that European art did, and certainly the art of the Renaissance or the old masters,” Justin Wolff, chairman of the art history department at the University of Maine said to the New York Times. “It was behind culturally. It didn’t really have an identity.”
But Mr. Wilmerding changed that. “He brought American art to the forefront”, said Earl A. Powell III, former director of the National Gallery of Art.
Mr. Wilmerding was the curator of many important exhibitions, including “American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875”, which was described as “the best American painting show ever offered to the public by the National Gallery of Art” by critic Paul Richard.
“It is beautiful and useful,” Richard continued in the Washington Post. “Its pictures portray light, light that fills the air, light that, glowing everywhere, calls the mind to stillness.”
Mr. Wilmerding was born on April 29, 1938, in Boston. His father was a banker and yachtsman.
”John is genetically hard-wired as a collector,” said Powell to the New York Times.
His great-grandparents were high-profile collectors of European art who donated their collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb was a collector who founded the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.
“The great irony is, with all of my family’s collecting history, for all of my proximity to New York, I never was taken to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Wilmerding told the journal American Art in 2005.
Mr. Wilmerding attended Harvard, at first as a literature major. He later switched to art history, receiving his A.B. in 1960, master’s in 1961, and doctorate four years later. In his senior year at Harvard, Wilmerding notably purchased “Stage Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor” (1857) by Fitz Hugh Lane.
”I paid $3,500 for it at a gallery in Boston, which was expensive at the time, but I knew it was something worth having,” Mr. Wilmerding said.
He followed the purchase up with “Mississippi Boatman” (1850) by George Caleb Bingham, and “Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes” (1871/1875) by Martin Johnson Heade.
In 1977, after eleven years teaching at Dartmouth College, Mr. Wilmerding joined the National Gallery as a curator.
In 2004, Mr. Wilmerding gifted his entire collection to the National Gallery. Many of the works had previously not been seen by the public and filled many gaps in the gallery’s collection.
In these later years ”[he’s] gone into quite another direction,” Mr. Wilmerding said to the New York Times. ”Small-scale Pop Art sculpture by artists in their later careers: Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Wesselman. It’s something I love and something completely different.”
His appreciation for the unexplored world of art was apparent.
“For me, the satisfaction of buying these pictures came from collecting in an area that the art market hadn’t discovered,” he told The Times. “The field was wide open, so you could make your own tracks.”