COLLECTIONS OF FOGG SHOW RAPID GROWTH

The following is a partial reprinting of an article on the growth of the Fogg Museum as recently run in the ART NEWS.

The Fogg Art Museum was founded by Mrs. William Hayes Fogg of New York as a memorial to her husband and the museum which bears his name was opened in 1895. The building was intended to house only minor objects of art, casts and photographs. It was not believed that, with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts at hand, the Fogg Museum would ever own important original works of art. The exhibition gallery was badly lighted, yet apart from this one room almost no exhibition space was provided.

At Harvard the great traditions were literary and, in the nineties, art played a minor role. Nevertheless the formation of collections of original works of art began almost with the opening of the building. Charles Eliot Norton, made Professor of Fine Arts in 1875, and Professor Charles Herbert Moore, the first director, began to collect drawings and watercolors of the English School. Greek vases were lend by Edward P. Warren and in 1897 and 1898, the Gray and Rrandall print collections, on loan from Harvard in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, were transferred to the Fogg Museum. Later gifts and purchases have made the Fogg collection of early prints and engravings, next to that of Boston, the finest in the country.

Cabot Loans Japanese Art

The first Greek sculpture and Italian paintings to come to the museum were lent in 1899. The Oriental collections began with the loan by Walter, M. Cabot in 1908 of a small collection of Japanese works of art.

In 1912 the lower floor and the gallery were remodeled to increase exhibition space and provide better lighting and Edward W. Forbes '95 was made Director of the museum. He found it with only the beginnings of collections of anything except prints and with space which was even then inadequate. Three years later Paul J. Saches '01 was made Associate Director and it is to the scholarship and enthusiasm of these two men that the present state of the museum is chiefly due. Each has contributed generously from his own collections to the enrichment of the museum and their examples and earnestness have inspired other collectors.

Collection Valued at $3,000,000

Thus, from an almost unmentionable beginning the collections have grown until, in certain fields, they are to be ranked among the most important in America. With an income for the purchase of works of art which has never been greater than $3,000.00 a year the museum has acquired, in addition to loans from private sources, collections whose value is estimated to be in excess of $3,000,000.00. A new building has been erected at a cost of about $1,000,000.00 and an endowment fund of equal amount has been raised. It is not seeking to become a great tomb of art. The collections on display are there for the use ond instruction of those whose interest in art is more than a polite gesture and the more completely these collections represent the great periods in art the more completely this great teaching institution can realize its ideals.

With the vast field of art before them it has been the purpose of the directors to avoid repetition and, when fine examples of a period were available in either of the other public collections in Boston the Fogg Museum has wisely counted these as part of its teaching equipment and made its greatest effort to bring to Cambridge the work of men whose paintings could not be studied to advantage elsewhere. This principle has been extended to include the various periods in the work of great master