Adapted from Michael S. Rosenwald’s remembrance published in The New York Times on June 14, 2024 (updated June 18, 2024) and The Boston Globe on June 17, 2024. See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/arts/john-wilmerding-dead.html for the complete fully illustrated version with references.
Credit...John Blazejewski/Princeton University
John C. Wilmerding Jr., a towering figure in American art whose eclectic career as a scholar, museum curator and collector was instrumental in elevating the cultural significance and market value of painters such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Fitz Henry Lane, died on June 6, 2024, in Manhattan. He was 86. His brother, James Wilmerding, said the cause of death, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, was complications of congestive heart failure.
John Currie Wilmerding Jr. was born on April 28, 1938, in Boston and grew up in Old Westbury, NY, on Long Island. His father was a banker and yachtsman. His mother was Lila (Webb) Wilmerding. In addition to his brother, survivors include his sister, Lila Wilmerding Kirkland; and three nieces and three nephews. He lived in Manhattan and had another home in Maine.
John had art in his DNA. His great-grandparents, Henry Osborne Havemeyer, a sugar magnate, and Louisine Waldron Havemeyer, were prominent collectors and donated their extensive collection of European and Asian artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, who was an American folk-art collector, founded the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.
Growing up, John was only vaguely aware of his family’s importance in the art world. “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,” he told the journal American Art in 2005.
After preparing at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, John attended Harvard College, where he initially planned to study American literature. On a friend’s recommendation during his freshman year, he took an introductory art history class held in the basement of the campus art museum. Students called it “Darkness at Noon.” “When the lights went out,” John recalled, “there was this world of visual images that struck a nerve with me instantly, and the realization early on that you could look at facades or a ground plan — it didn’t matter from where or when — and suddenly a whole culture came to life. That was the experience that set me on the track.”
He changed his major to art history and was soon consumed by American art, especially paintings of the sea, which reminded him of sailing with his father. He wrote his thesis on Fitz Henry Lane, a marine painter, and bought one of his paintings — “Stage Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor” (1857) — for $3,500 (the equivalent of about $38,000 today) at a Boston art gallery. Two more acquisitions soon followed: “Mississippi Boatman” (1850) by George Caleb Bingham, and “Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes (1871/1875) by Martin Johnson Heade. “After that,” John told The New York Times, “there was no stopping me.”
John graduated with an A.B. cum laude degree from Harvard, where he was a member of Lowell House, in 1960. He earned an A.M. degree in 1961 and a Ph. D in 1965, both also from Harvard.
When John began teaching in the 1960s, American art was underappreciated, if not totally unknown. There were virtually no university survey courses in the subject, textbooks or major exhibitions. “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,” said Justin Wolff, chairman of the art history department at the University of Maine and a former student of Professor Wilmerding’s. “It was behind culturally. It didn’t really have an identity.” John helped give it one.
John taught at Dartmouth College from 1966 to 1977, when he left to join the National Gallery of Art as a curator. There, he curated some of the most important exhibitions of American art over the last 50 years, including “American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875,” at the National Gallery of Art in 1980. The event featured landscape paintings, watercolors, photographs and drawings by Fitz Henry Lane and other 19th-century American artists, including Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church. The art critic, Paul Richard, writing in The Washington Post, called the exhibition “the best American painting show ever offered to the public by the National Gallery of Art.” “It is beautiful and useful,” he added. “Its pictures portray light, light that fills the air, light that, glowing everywhere, calls the mind to stillness.” John’s ultimate accomplishment, Mr. Richard wrote, was having “shown the public something we had not seen before.”
When John joined the curatorial staff of the National Gallery of Art in 1977, its collection of American paintings and drawings was, he said, ''rather spotty.'' By 1988, when he left Washington to teach art history at Princeton University, the National Gallery's collection of American art ranked among the best in the country, with virtually every important figure represented by signature works. (From 1983 to 1988, John was the deputy director of the National Gallery of Art.)
What is less well known is that in his tenure at the gallery, John was acquiring his own collection of 19th-century American art. Unlike the gallery, which sought watershed pictures, John bought small but high-quality examples of an artist's work. In this way, he built a collection of 51 paintings and drawings by masters like Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Martin Johnson Heade and George Caleb Bingham. “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 in 2004. (By then, paintings by Fitz Henry Lane were selling for $3 million to $5 million.) “The field was wide open, so you could make your own tracks.” (John continued collecting throughout his career, and in later years focused on Pop Art.)
In 2004, nearing retirement (he retired in 2007), John decided to donate his collection to the National Gallery, where the paintings are now on display in ''American Masters From Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection.'' Earl A. Powell III, the National Gallery's director, called it one of the most significant single donations of American art the gallery has ever received. ''Because John has been characteristically modest about his activities as a collector, relatively few people, other than friends and family, have had the pleasure of seeing these works at his home in Princeton,'' Mr. Powell said. ''That he has now generously agreed to let the collection be seen and enjoyed by a wider public through this exhibition, and forever in our permanent collection, is cause for celebration.'' “John was absolutely the standard-bearer,” Earl A, Powell III, the National Gallery’s director from 1992 to 2019, said in an interview. “He brought American art to the forefront.”
When Alice Walton, the daughter of Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton, envisioned the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., where Walmart has its headquarters, she turned, in 2005, to John as a kind of consigliere to help her acquire works.
During his time at the National Gallery, John’s office looked out toward the Washington Monument. From his window, and in the American painters he championed, he could envision the national character. “There is a sense of self-reliance, of our natural resilience and of our undercurrents of optimism,” he told The Times. “These are beliefs and attributes that have always stood us well. You see them over and over again, whether in Winslow Homer or Gilbert Stuart. There’s something optimistic about them.”
