Documenting Art Collections in Gilded Age New York

French paintings of the Barbizon School were favorites of many Gilded Age collectors.

Gilded Age collectors also supported the American artists in their midst.

In 1918, the New York Times reported on the large sums of money spent on American art at the George A. Hearn auction.

A description of Landscape by American artist Ralph Albert Blakelock from the George A. Hearn auction catalogue. This piece sold for $17,500 to Bernet, according to a New York Times article dated February 28, 1918 (see previous slide). Annotations found in the copy held at the Frick Art Reference Library.

List of works featuring George Inness's Summer—Sunshine and Shadow in the Frederick Seymour Gibbs collection catalogue. Gibbs often collected work by American artists as well as foreign ones.

Hearn was one of the first to believe in the importance of collecting work by American artists. This catalogue includes three paintings by George Inness. The one listed here sold for much less than his Wood Gatherers, as is demonstrated in the news clipping a few slides before.

With a market glut resulting from hard times in Europe, newly wealthy Americans responded enthusiastically. Rich Americans were often portrayed as indiscriminate raiders in a race for status, but catalogues demonstrate a more nuanced milieu. Collectors were not only buying European masterworks but also works by distinguished and up-and-coming artists from America.

As a civic endeavor, many collectors opened their home galleries to the public or bequeathed their collections to museums.

Henry Clay Frick worked his way from a rural Mennonite community in Pennsylvania to become the prosperous co-owner of a coke business in Pittsburgh, where he lived with his wife, Adelaide. In 1905, he moved to New York, where he established himself among the preeminent art collectors of his age. In 1913, he began to build an impressive mansion on Fifth Avenue, largely to house his increasingly celebrated holdings. The Frick home and collection were opened to the public upon his wife's death.

Financier, real estate developer, soldier, author, inventor, and art collector, John Jacob Astor IV was one of the richest men of his day. He built the Astoria section of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the St. Regis Hotel. He drowned in the sinking of the Titanic.

Rita Lydig was a stylish New York socialite. She personally decorated her small Renaissance style home, designed by architect Stanford White, with Gothic objects, paintings, and sculpture. Botticelli's Venus was among the most magnificent paintings in her collection, which included works by Tintoretto, Mazo, and Andrea della Robbia.

Trained as an international banker, J.P. Morgan traveled back and forth to Europe often. In the early years of his career he began buying manuscripts and books. His vast collection grew as he constantly crossed the Atlantic. Upon his father's death and inheritance, his literary collecting took a grandiose turn: he spent roughly $60 million on art during the last two decades of his life.

W. H. Vanderbilt began collecting art at the age of 33. He made many sojourns abroad and was known to buy directly from artists, often generously giving more than the asking price.

Josef Stransky, a Czech conductor and composer, conducted the New York Philharmonic from 1911–23, replacing Gustav Mahler. He gave up conducting shortly after leaving the Philharmonic to become an art dealer and collector.

James Wells Champney was an artist; a master of pastels and reproductions. He studied in Paris and made a name for himself back in the U.S., in Boston and New York. He was a member of many New York art clubs, the Century Club, the Players' Club, and the National Arts Club among them. Several of his works were exhibited at Knoedler's Gallery on Fifth Avenue.

William Merritt Chase was an artist in the Impressionist school, a teacher, and an art collector. He opened the Chase School of Art in New York, 1896, today known as Parsons the New School for Design. The auction catalogue for his collection documents his holdings of European and American artists, masters and amateurs alike.

J. Townsend Lansing’s collection of paintings was catalogued by the Albany Institute and Historical and Art Society in 1924. He owned paintings by both American and European artists.

Besides being an art collector, George A. Hearn was also a New York dry goods merchant. He collected paintings by contemporary American artists such as Sargent and Inness, as well as Chinese porcelain and decorative art. He donated most of his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A former map maker in New York, Inness studied drawing at an early age. Longing for color, he took up painting in his early twenties. Thomas B. Clarke and George I. Seney are just two of many collectors who owned his work, or hoped to.

A financier and railroad man, Bacon was not well known as an art collector, though he possessed more than two hundred works, which hung from every inch of his New York apartment. Many of these objects were acquired from art collector T.J. Blakeslee.

Unlike other collectors who often dedicated a single room or wing to their art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe's holdings were displayed throughout her home in Madison Square. Shinn's account of his visit describes this unique display and lauds Wolfe as an advanced collector.

A list of works in Wolfe's collection in the Art Treasures of America.

A list of T. A. Havemeyer's art collection in the Art Treasures of America.

The Yerkes mansion at Fifth Avenue; two blocks south of Henry Clay Frick's future home at East 70th Street and Fifth Avenue.

Edward Brandus's enthusiastic response to Frick about the Hals Portrait of a Woman, calling it the finest painting of a Dutch woman outside of a Rembrandt.

This illustration shows the high-relief Madonna Adoring the Child, with an Angel, hung over the mantel.

The description page for the high-relief from the Rita Lydig auction catalogue. The provenance information is clearly stated in the last paragraph and sentence.

Portrait of a Noblewoman (the Girl in Red), in the drawing room, from Lydig's private collection catalogue.

Painting description in the Rita Lydig auction catalogue. Provenance information is stated at the end of the description. Annotations from the copy held at the Frick Art Reference Library.