One woman’s vision and the 1949 bequest of her entire estate planted fruitful seeds in this western Pennsylvania town.
The far-seeing benefactor, Mary Marchand Woods, established the Woods Marchand Foundation with the mission of bringing art and education to the people of rural Westmoreland County and nearby Pittsburgh. Ten years later (and 50 years ago this month), Woods’ vision was realized when the Westmoreland Museum of American Art opened in new building on the grounds of her girlhood home. The inaugural exhibit was “250 Years of Art in Pennsylvania.”
A small museum with a focus on American and regional Pennsylvania art between 1750 and 1950, it quickly built a remarkably rich and diverse collection. The first painting to enter the collection was Rembrandt Peale’s “Portrait of George Washington” in 1958.
Later that year, works by Robert Henri, Theodore Robinson, David Gilmour Blythe and George Inness were added. Over the next 20 years, the museum acquired premier works by such masters as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Benjamin West, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley and Winslow Homer.
Other Pennsylvania artists whose work is represented in the collection include Robert Edge Pine, Robert Street, Thomas Hovenden, William Thompson Russell, Harriet Frishmuth, Austin C. Wooster, Severin Roesen, Edward Willis Redfield and William Michael Harnett. The collections also include highly desirable Pennsylvania furniture and accessories.
In celebration of its half century, the Westmoreland has launched “Fifty Years Into the Vision,” a yearlong gala of exhibits and events showcasing the collections.
It began last November with “Painters of the Scalp Level School Revisited,” which was dedicated to the founding director Paul A. Chew for whom those artists were of particular interest. That interest is shared by his successor, Judith H. O’Toole, who has also written and lectured on those artists. The exhibit explored the works of the Nineteenth Century plein air painters who depicted the romantic grandeur of the woodlands and streams of western Pennsylvania.
The Scalp Level School takes its name from the town near Johnstown in Cambria County where the artists went to paint in summer and, like the Barbizon, Hudson River and White Mountain schools, represented a movement away from encroaching industrialization. George M. Hetzel, born in Alsace, was considered the leader of the group that included other artists who had immigrated to the area. They were William Coventry Wall, who was born in England, David Gilmour Blythe, still life painter Alfred Francis King, Martin B. Leisser and John Wesley Beatty. Another was Joseph Woodwell, who studied under Hetzel and Blythe. The exhibition closed in January.
“The Gift of Art,” which ran from February through May, focused on 50 previously donated paintings, a host of newly bequeathed works and even several promised gifts to the Westmoreland. The acquisitions began with the Peale portrait of Washington in 1958 and range across the collection to the most recent: the acquisition of the Joy and R. David Brocklebank fraktur collection and the gift of William Coventry Wall’s “View along the Allegheny,” both in 2008. Visitors have the opportunity to aid in the purchase of six potential gifts on view by contributing to the museum’s acquisition fund. Those pieces include Roy Hilton’s “Pennsylvania Farm,” the 1894 “Strawberries Tumbling Out of a Basket” by Austin C. Wooster, “Still Life (Mixed Bouquet in Cup)” by Marguerite Zorach, “The Derelict” by Dale Nichols, Robert Gwathmey’s circa 1948 “The Flower Vendor” and “The Apprentice” by Thomas Lo Medico. (For information about contributing, call Barbara L. Jones at 724-837-1500, extension 20.)
“Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” opens June 14 and explores American abstract art of the mid-Twentieth Century. “Four Perspectives on Fifty Years,” which opens September 27, is collaborative, curated by an artist, a collector, a critic and a patron, and explores selected objects in the Westmoreland collection and their meaning.
The Westmoreland’s focus on the regional is also documented by the exhibit “Born of Fire,” an exhibit of the museum’s industrial landscapes, now on international tour. The museum holds a number of Impressionist works by the Lithuanian-born Aaron Henry Gordon, who was drawn to paint nocturnal scenes of industrial Pittsburgh.
Otto Kuhler came with his family from Germany, where they had operated an ironworks in the Ruhr Valley, and when he arrived in western Pennsylvania, he was attracted to the industrial aspect of the area. His “Steel Valley, Pittsburgh,” circa 1925, has much in common with Ernest Lawson’s circa 1930 “Pittsburgh Mills, Monongahela River.” Lawson, a member of The Eight, made his way to western Pennsylvania from his birthplace in Nova Scotia through New York, Colorado and Spain.
How a small, regional museum that some describe as “in the middle of nowhere,” even though it is only 35 miles from Pittsburgh, came to have such a remarkable collection is a story of the serendipitous combination of foresight, talented eyes and dedication. That the collection grew larger and wider than anyone anticipated is a tribute to the early organizers.
Founder Mary Marchand Woods bequeathed furnishings from her own home; Greensburg resident William A. Coulter, a founding member of the museum, established a fund that has enabled the purchased of many major pieces over the years, including the Peale. The Westmoreland Society was organized in 1986 to raise funds through member donations to purchase a work of art each year for the museum.
Founding director Chew defined the Westmoreland Museum’s mission as the collecting of American art, then Pennsylvania art and finally, the work of western Pennsylvania artists, on which he wrote extensively. Aside from the masterful patterns of acquisition, he left no documentation of his intent.
He served from 1957 to 1993 and was succeeded by O’Toole, who carries on the founders’ mission at the same time she has created a new long-range plan to carry the museum another 50 years forward. Both directors have adhered strictly to the founding philosophy. Community supporters and benefactors have done the rest over the course of the half century.
The museum holds a small but select collection of Pennsylvania decorative arts, such as a Soap Hollow cherry and tulip poplar chest of drawers in vivid red paint with elaborate stenciling and bird decoration. It is marked “KB” and dated 1867. It was made by Jeremiah Stahl of Soap Hollow in adjacent Somerset County and was given by the Westmoreland Society.
Westmoreland County was the center of the fraktur tradition for more than a century, and the Westmoreland Museum was already well recognized as the repository of the largest collection of historically important examples when it acquired the collection of more than 200 fraktur gathered by area residents Joy and David Brocklebank. The collection comprises examples from western Pennsylvania and was made with funds from a bequest by Greensburg architect and member of the Westmoreland Society William W. Jamison II.
A Chippendale tall case clock, circa 1802‱814, with a signed silvered dial was made right in Greensburg by Henry Wise, whose clock shop was at Main Street and Otterman Street. He was listed in the 1799 census as a silversmith. A slightly earlier (circa 1785) Chippendale walnut tea table with a birdcage support was also made by Wise for Abraham and Ann Jamieson Hendricks.
A Chippendale carved walnut slant lid desk, circa 1765, was made for the Biddle family in Philadelphia and came to the museum in 1990 as part of an anonymous gift by exchange. A Federal walnut chest of drawers with inlay, circa 1810, was made for the Jones family of Westmoreland County and entered the collection in 1963 through the William A. Coulter fund, as did a Federal cherry games table, circa 1800, that was probably made in nearby Fayette County.
An 1869 Victorian walnut side chair by George Hunzinger of Brooklyn, N.Y., was a gift of the estate of M. Diane Sippell Robertson. An architectural cherry corner cupboard on view was made for a local family around 1780.
The museum owns a Tiffany window commissioned from Tiffany Studios by Greensburg resident Thomas Lynch around 1901. The window is unusual in that it is an accurate depiction of the cottage in Ballyduff, County Waterford, Ireland, where Lynch’s father Patrick lived before he emigrated to Uniontown, Penn., in the 1850s. A photograph in the collection reveals that Tiffany sketched the house and the window was made from it. The window was removed from the Lynch house and relocated to a farm in 1945; the museum purchased it at auction in 2001 and returned it to Greensburg.
Several examples of locally made salt glazed stoneware include a 4-gallon jar with an eagle decoration and a merchant bowl, both made for A.C. Trauger of Greensburg. Others are from Fayette County and include such pieces as a 12-gallon double eagle jar from the Lion Pottery, a 16-gallon jar by T.F. Reppert and a 2-gallon milk pitcher by James Hamilton and Company.
Part of the 50th anniversary celebrations is a new permanent collection catalog of 100 paintings and objects that is in production. It will be available from the museum.
The Westmoreland Museum of American Art is at 221 North Main Street. For information, www.wmuseumaa.org or 724-837-1500.
