An observant reader of museum labels, comparing the dates of many works’ completion to their acquisition dates, might notice that since its founding the museum has been remarkably brave in the purchase of contemporary American art. One of the earliest acquisitions, Thomas Eakins’s 1876 genre picture In Grandmother’s Time, was made by college president L. Clark Seelye in 1879, thereby becoming the first Eakins painting to enter a public collection. Acting on the advice of painter and Smith faculty member Dwight W. Tryon, Seelye purchased the Rockwell Kent painting Dublin Pond in 1904, again marking the first piece by this then twenty- one-year-old artist to enter a museum. This pioneering spirit continued in such prescient acquisitions as Charles Sheeler’s iconic Rolling Power, bought in 1940, and Alexander Calder’s Mobile, bought in 1935 by Jere Abbott (director 1932-46), each acquired one year after its creation.