Masterworks at the Fenimore Art Museum

Over just eight months, the Fenimore Art Museum, with the support of the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, expanded its fine art collection with the acquisition of twenty-seven new paintings by American nonpareils.

Thomas Eakins. Childe Hassam. John Singer Sargent. James McNeill Whistler. These are just some of the artists whose work is now included in the collection of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Paul D’Ambrosio, president of the museum, reflects on the journey to acquire these works and their powerful place in the collection.

Cynthia Falk (CF): Tell us about the Fenimore Art Museum. If people haven’t been to visit, what should they know?

Paul D’Ambrosio (PD): We’re an art museum in a beautiful setting on Otsego Lake in upstate New York with an extraordinary range of exhibitions and programs. We have some remarkable collections that you just can’t see everywhere. We have the American folk art collection begun by Stephen Clark in the 1940s, and the Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art. Now, with the American masterworks, we feel like the fine art collection measures up with the other two in terms of quality and importance.

CF: Tell me about Eugene and Clare Thaw and their relationship with the museum.

PD: Gene and Clare Thaw moved to the area in the 1970s and kept connections here even after they retired to Santa Fe. Clare was from upstate New York, not terribly far away, and had spent time in Cooperstown attending the Knox School for Girls in the Otesaga Hotel. In Santa Fe, the Thaws became major collectors of Native American art. Gene mentioned to Gilbert Vincent at the museum that he was looking for a home for that collection, and Vincent connected him with Jane Forbes Clark, granddaughter of Stephen Clark, on the chance that the two of them could work something out. They did—Clark built a wing, which opened in 1995, and the Thaws gave the collection. Gene served multiple terms as a trustee and was very active with the museum right up until his passing in 2018. It was a longstanding relationship, a good twenty-some years of Gene and Clare’s very intimate involvement with the museum.

CF: Not many museum directors get the opportunity to rethink a collection.

PD: I’ll say. I’ve been in the field for almost forty years and every second of that was worth the wait. After a board meeting last year, Katie Flanagan, president of the Eugene and Clare Thaw Charitable Trust, told me that she wanted to work with me to build a fine art collection for the museum. I didn’t know at the time the scope of what she was thinking. It was more, “Let’s begin and see how far we go. See what is available. What strikes us. And take it from there.”

I flew out to Santa Fe, where she’s based, and she set up a dinner with art dealer Gerald Peters, who was an old friend of Gene’s and of hers as well. We were at dinner with him and his wife, and this is when I realized we weren’t just talking about adding some pieces to the collection. She asked him, “Do you have
an O’Keeffe?” And I thought, OK, we’re at this level. He had three O’Keeffes. The next day, we picked the best of the three. It’s Brown and Tan Leaves, painted in 1928, just before O’Keeffe went to New Mexico. The beauty of it was that it is not only a great painting, but it was done at Lake George.

It was the O’Keeffe that helped us focus. The fine art collection that Stephen Clark had given the Fenimore was heavily weighted toward the early and mid-nineteenth century, even though some works were done later in a conservative style. The paintings are generally about rural life in preindustrial America. Katie and I strategized to fill the gap from the Civil War to the onset of the Great Depression. It wasn’t realistic to go from the Great Depression to the present—we all know the prices and availability of those works. We thought for Cooperstown we could build a stellar collection to tell the story of American art and American culture right through the nineteenth century, right up to the cusp of the modern age. And so that is what we did. We started with the O’Keeffe and worked our way backwards.

That’s essentially what you’re seeing here. The 1870 date is a loose start, and we bought a couple of 1850s pieces. And, of course, we had a detour with Joshua Johnson’s Seated Girl with Strawberries. But the vision became clear after we bought the O’Keeffe.

 

CF: You were able to purchase a lot of iconic, canonical pieces. Did you have any desire to shake up the canon?

PD: You need a canon before you shake it up. Fenimore didn’t have a canon. A couple of years before we did this, we’d been buying works by American artists who
had been working abroad. That was a sub-collection, and there were some great lesser-known artists, especially women artists, who were included in that initiative. When we did the Unmasking Venice: American Artists and the City of Water exhibition in 2022, we became good friends with a private collector who, with her husband, had assembled a terrific collection of American women artists. However, for this initiative, we made a conscious effort to represent the canon that people know.

 

CF: You referred to a detour in the Joshua Johnson. Is adding more artists of color, in addition to women, a long-term goal?

PD: Yes, absolutely. We’ve always had African American works in the folk art collection. Of course, the Thaw Collection of American Indian Art is all underrepresented artists. Both of those collections include many works by women. But in terms of the fine art collection, there’s a lot of work to be done. We’re very interested in Harlem Renaissance pieces. Acquiring them will not be easy, but I do believe that will be one area to fill with African American artists of the ’teens and ’20s. That’s a high priority. We are also looking to add more works by women fine artists, in addition to our O’Keeffe and Mary Cassatt’s portrait of Madame H. de Fleury.

Joshua Johnson tends to be lumped in with folk art. He did advertise himself as a “self-taught genius.” But given the period in which he painted, you could easily see him as a crossover talent, a very important early Black professional artist. Even though he’s at the early end of things here, we do want to tell a broad American story. We thought it was important that he enter the collection.

CF: Were there things you wanted that you couldn’t get?

PD: Yes, absolutely. Edward Hopper. We saw a lot of Edward Hoppers, some wonderful pieces, but given what you’d have to pay for a watercolor—and a watercolor for conservation reasons can have such a limited time on public view—we just couldn’t do it. A Hopper oil was prohibitive even for us.

Winslow Homer was another. There were no reasonably affordable oil paintings that came up during the period when we were acquiring. We just didn’t see any Homers that fit the bill.

Jane Peterson would have been a third, but we’re getting several really great Jane Petersons in a planned gift, so we felt like she was covered. She’s really one of my favorites, and she was well represented in the Venice exhibition.

 

CF: Is this an ongoing collaboration with the foundation?

PD: Well, this phase of the project is over. I am deeply grateful to the Thaw Charitable Trust. The next phase will be to enhance our galleries and grow the collection through acquisitions and other gifts. But twenty-seven phenomenal paintings! I would have been thrilled with them as a traveling exhibition here for one summer, but the fact that they will always be here is just beyond
my imagining.

CF: How do you think this changes the future of the Fenimore Art Museum?

PD: In many ways large and small. For example, we are now part of the commemoration of Frederic Church’s birth next year. We’re part of orbits that we were not able to be part of before. We are very active in the Mary Cassatt world now. Associate curator Ann Cannon was invited to a Cassatt study day at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

We’ve made many great connections. It’s like once you own an O’Keeffe, you’re in the O’Keeffe world. The art connects us to affinity groups that revolve around
iconic figures. That could benefit us in many ways, including providing loans for major exhibitions, publications, and being able to build our own exhibitions around these paintings like we’re doing with the Mary Cassatt/Berthe Morisot: Allies in Impressionism exhibition next year. Now we have a true center to anchor that show. Plus, we want to do our own catalogue and showcase these paintings in a lot of different ways.

CF: Do you have a favorite?
PD: Absolutely. I shouldn’t. It’s a guilty favorite, but it’s the O’Keeffe. Because it was the first. It’s what really catapulted this whole project. And I’ll never forget
it because I flew out to Santa Fe, spent three or four days there working with Katie in that whole immersive acquisition experience. And to take it out of a private
collection where it had been held for a long, long time and then to bring it here—it’s a moment I’ll never forget. I think it is as good as it gets.

It’s just as thrilling that it’s in such pristine condition, and it’s got an incredible provenance. It has a handwritten label by Alfred Stieglitz on the back from his gallery where O’Keeffe exhibited, and it’s got stickers from shows that it’s been in over the decades. The backside of it is as interesting as the front, but it’s just a beautiful, beautiful piece. It will always stand out for me.

CF: What does the future hold for these paintings?
PD: We are planning on renovating the first floor of the Fenimore Art Museum to create a masterworks gallery within the next two to three years. We’re going to upgrade systems and transform the whole first floor to the south of the main lobby into the beautiful new gallery. We will be able to do highlight shows, different changing exhibits, and then the bulk of the gallery will showcase these new acquisitions alongside the masterworks that we’ve had. That makes a great setting for playing with the canon. You set it up and then you tinker with it, right? And I think that is really what I’m looking forward to the most.

 

CYNTHIA G. FALK is assistant dean of graduate studies at SUNY Oneonta and deputy mayor of the Village of Cooperstown. She teaches material culture and historic preservation at the Cooperstown Graduate Program.

PAUL D’AMBROSIO has been the president and CEO of the Fenimore Art Museum and its sister organization, the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, since 2011.