Paintings and Sculpture

Thomas Eakins's In Grandmother's Time, the first painting purchased by the college, was one of 27 oils by living American artists that President Seelye bought in 1879. Today, nineteenth-century America is also represented in the collection by Hudson River School landscapes, folk art and paintings by major artists such as Albert Bierstadt, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and James Abbot McNeill Whistler. Eakins's late masterpiece, Portrait of Edith Mahon, and The Mourning Picture by regional artist Edwin Romanzo Elmer are signature works from this period. Interestingly, the first non- American paintings to be acquired were scrolls by Chinese and Japanese masters; it was not until 1919 that the first European painting, Georges Michel's Landscape, was purchased.

Twentieth-century American holdings range from Charles Sheeler's Rolling Power to Frank Stella's forty-foot-long canvas Damascus Gate (Variation III) and works by Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko and Smith alumnae Joan Mitchell (class of 1946) and Sandy Skoglund (class of 1968). The first American sculpture acquired by the museum was Daniel Chester French's The May Queen, which was donated shortly after the purchase of the first European sculpture, Auguste Rodin's Children with Lizard. Sculptures by Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, among others, complement the painting collection.

The many fine examples of eighteenth-century art include John Singleton Copley's portrait of Boston merchant John Erving and A Cavern, Evening by Joseph Wright of Derby; and while there are fewer works from each successively earlier century, distinguished examples of painting and sculpture are to be found. Among the highlights are seventeenth-century Dutch paintings by Hendrick Terbrugghen, Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael.

Paintings and sculptures from Smith often appear in major loan exhibitions both in the United States and abroad, a testament to the international reputation of Smith's holdings.

Prints

An impression of Rembrandt van Rijn's The Three Crosses, c. 1660, purchased in 1911 by students in the Studio Club, was the museum's first print acquisition. From this exemplary beginning, the collection has grown through gifts and purchases to include approximately 8,000 prints, dating from the fifteenth century to the present. The print room houses fine examples of the work of many master printmakers, both Western and Eastern, including Albrecht Dürer, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Eugene Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Degas, Henri Matisse, Hiroshige and Hokusai. Superb impressions, such as Durer's engraving Adam and Eve, Rembrandt's etching of the same subject, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's lithograph of Loie Fuller printed with gold, are joined by the entire Carceri and Vedute di Roma of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and by a complete first-edition set of Francisco Goya's Caprichos.

Drawings

Smith's 1,600 drawings reflect the history of Western draftsmanship from the sixteenth century to the present. Notable are Study of Drapery by the sixteenth-century German master Mathis Grünewald, Portrait of a Young Man by early Flemish artist Dieric Bouts, Rosso Fiorentino's Martyrdom of Sts. Marcellinus and Mark, and Jean Michel Moreau the Younger's drawings celebrating the birth of the first Dauphin of Louis XVI. Representative of the nineteenth and twentieth century are sheets by Ingres, Matisse, Cézanne, Maurice Prendergast and John James Audubon; two studies for Seurat's La Grande Jatte; Piet Mondrian's Chrysanthemum; and Paul Klee's Goat.

Photographs

The museum's rich holdings in photography span the history of the medium, from William Henry Fox Talbot, Edward Muybridge and other major photographers of the nineteenth century, to contemporary artists Cindy Sherman, Chris Enos and Robert Mapplethorpe. The earliest acquisitions were images by Luke Swank, Walker Evans, George Platt Lynes and László Moholy-Nagy purchased in 1933; photography became a regular part of the exhibition and acquisition program in the 1960s. The collection today consists of more than 5,700 photographic prints and gravures.

Other Collections

Although the museum's collecting focus has been on modern Western art, through the generosity of alumnae and friends several other important collections have been added. These enhance the remarkable depth of the permanent collection, giving context to the other works. Holdings of ancient art, for example, comprise approximately 600 examples of pottery, sculpture, small bronzes, lamps, coins and glass vessels, among them a fine Greek white-ground lekythos dating from the fifth century B.C. They belong to Mediterranean cultures and range in date from the Bronze Age to the early Christian period. Most pertain to the Graeco-Roman tradition, but a few objects come from the societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete and the Cyclades.

The decorative arts holdings of approximately 2,100 objects, reflecting the tastes of individual collectors, range from Baccarat paperweights to seventeenth-century embroidered pictures.

Collections of Asian art, totaling about 600 items, include jades, porcelains, bronzes, paintings and prints. Fifty-seven archaic Chinese jades, originally acquired by a Dutch financier in the 1930s, were given to the museum in the early 1960s, and 34 examples of Indian painting, from the Rajasthan, Central India and Punjab Hills schools, were the gift of Ambassador and Mrs. John Kenneth Galbraith (Catherine Atwater '34). The museum's holdings in the art of other traditional societies include examples from four principal regions: West Africa, the Pacific from Hawaii to Australia, the Northwestern coast of North America, and the American Southwest. Among them are ceramics, baskets, rugs, masks, headdresses, dolls and other objects. Probably the finest is a Luba ceremonial axe from Zaire, purchased in 1939.