Farnsworth Art Museum

The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, United States, offers a nationally recognized collection of American art in its elegantly appointed galleries. Such great names in 18th- and 19th-century American art history as Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, Fitz Henry Lane, Frank Benson, Childe Hassam, and Maurice Prendergast are represented in the museum's permanent collection.

The museum also houses the nation's second-largest collection of works by premier 20th-century sculptor Louise Nevelson and has opened four new galleries to showcase contemporary art. The Farnsworth also has one of the nation's largest collections of the paintings of the Wyeth family: N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth.

The museum's mission is to celebrate Maine's role in American art.

History and Collection

Lucy Copeland Farnsworth, last surviving member of her family and the daughter of a successful Rockland lime merchant who founded the local water company, instructed in her will that a building she owned on Main Street “be put into condition to serve as an art gallery,” which along with a library and the mid-Victorian house she grew up in were to be open to the public and named after her father. The task of creating and operating the museum was assigned by her trustee, the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company, to Robert Peabody Bellows, a Harvard graduate and a partner in the Boston architectural firm of Aldrich and Bellows.

Even before the museum opened its doors to the public on August 15, 1948, it had acquired works by George Bellows, William Zorach, and Andrew Wyeth, all of whom had already established their reputations at least in part by the work they did here. Between June 1943 and July 1948, the museum acquired 915 works of art, establishing what would become the central strength of the Farnsworth, works by some of America’s foremost landscape painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early purchases by Robert Bellows included Eastman Johnson’s American Farmer, George Inness’s In the White Mountains, and Winslow Homer’s New England Coast, followed by purchases of paintings by George Bellows, Joseph DeCamp, Frank Duveneck, John La Farge, and William Zorach. Bellows donated a small painting from his own collection by Thomas Cole, Cattle and Distant Mountains, considered to be the artist’s earliest extant oil painting. In addition, Bellows acquired six works by the then little-known twenty-seven-year-old Andrew Wyeth, one of many artists painting along the Maine coast. In 1951, the Farnsworth organized a major exhibition of the young Wyeth’s work, further developing a relationship with the Wyeth family of artists that quickly came to include Andrew’s father, N.C., the well-known illustrator and painter, and Andrew’s son, James Browning (Jamie) Wyeth, whose own career benefited from a major exhibition at the Farnsworth in 1967.

In the years since, the Farnsworth has continued to collect and exhibit the work of nationally prominent artists whose careers have been associated closely with Maine. In the 1950s a younger generation of New York artists began to summer in Maine and eventually became identified with the work they produced here, among them the painters Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Fairfield Porter, Lois Dodd, and Yvonne Jacquette, as well as photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burkhardt. In 1969, Robert Indiana, already nationally renowned for his prints, paintings, and sculpture, and perhaps best known for his LOVE paintings, prints and sculptures, made his first visit to Vinalhaven, an island just off the coast of Rockland, and moved there permanently in 1978. When the museum’s 1979 exhibition on the work of sculptor and former Rockland resident Louise Nevelson was followed in 1985 by major donations of her work by Nevelson and members of her family, the Farnsworth engaged itself even more deeply into the world of American contemporary art.

The museum’s holdings of contemporary art have been significantly expanded, too, by donations from the Alex Katz Foundation, which include paintings by Jennifer Bartlett, Francesco Clemente, Janet Fish, Red Grooms, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Philip Pearlstein, David Salle, and Hunt Slonem, sculptures by Bernard Langlais and William Ryman, and photographs by Rudy Burkhardt. The Friends of the Collection, a group founded in 2002, whose sole purpose is to provide funds for museum acquisitions, has brought works by contemporary artists John Bisbee, Sam Cady, David Driskell, Richard Estes, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Alan Magee, Louise Nevelson, Brian White, and others into the collection. The museum has also formed significant holdings of twentieth-century and contemporary photography, again focusing on artists who have worked in Maine. Among this group of more than 1400 photographs are works by Berenice Abbott, Rudy Burkhardt, Paul Caponigro, Joyce Tenneson, Elliot Porter, and Rockland native Kosti Ruohomaa.

The Farnsworth collection is promoted through school visits, studio programs, teacher workshops, lectures, family programs, youth and adult docent programs, video and film programs and seasonal celebrations. The Maine in America collection catalogue, exhibition catalogues, articles in scholarly and popular journals, and the museum's Web site provide further access. The museum's collection is rooted in the history of Maine, its people, their occupations and values, central to the Farnsworth’s mission to celebrate Maine’s role in American art.

The Farnsworth's Wyeth Center

The Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum consists of several discrete components dedicated to collecting, research, exhibitions and interpretive programs related to three generations of Wyeths in Maine: N.C., Andrew, and James Wyeth.

Exhibits focusing primarily on James Wyeth and N. C. Wyeth are presented at the "church" building on Union Street, an example of adaptive re-use of the United Methodist Church, one of Rockland's most prominent and venerable structures dating from the last quarter of the 19th century. Although major thematic shows occasionally present all three Wyeths at the church, the downstairs Linda Bean Folkers Gallery is primarily devoted to works by N.C. Wyeth while the upstairs, Marylouise Tandy Cowan Gallery usually presents works by James Wyeth.

An addition to the original museum building houses an extensive collection of temperas, watercolors, drybrush paintings and drawings by Andrew Wyeth. Rotating exhibits of Andrew Wyeth's work are largely drawn from this collection and are shown in the Study Center and adjacent Hadlock Galleries.

Finally, a large Victorian house across from the church on Grace Street houses a separate research facility primarily devoted to James Wyeth but which also includes a basic information and standard reference materials related to all three generations of artists in Maine.

Historic Properties

Two Historic Properties are part of the Farnsworth Art Museum: The Farnsworth Homestead and the Olson House

The 1850 Farnsworth Homestead was the home of Lucy Farnsworth, the museum's original benefactor, and is part of the main museum campus. The architectural style of the house and outbuildings is Greek Revival but the interior is decorated in high Victorian style. The elegant structure has survived intact, with virtually no adaptation. Minimal electrical systems were added for safety purposes, but all the original heating and plumbing is still in place, including what was probably the first indoor bathroom with a flush toilet in the city. Thanks to a generous inheritance from her father and brother James, and to her own business acumen, Lucy Farnsworth left a sizable estate. She directed that the bulk of it be used to establish the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum as a memorial to her father. She recognized the historical importance and the potential educational value of the family's house and left instructions that it be maintained with the original furnishings and be kept open to the public. The Homestead was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

The Olson House was the subject of numerous works of art by Andrew Wyeth, including his well-known 1948 painting Christina's World, owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the summer of 1939, seventeen-year-old Betsy James, who would later marry Andrew Wyeth, introduced him to her neighbors Christina and Alvaro Olson. Over the next three decades a friendship developed between the artist and the Olsons. Wyeth was allowed to wander through the house as he pleased and used an upstairs room as a studio. Wyeth's series of drawings, watercolors and tempera paintings featuring Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro and the house itself, occupied Wyeth from 1939 through 1968. The land on which the house, a classic "saltwater" two-story Maine farm house, was built was part of a 300-acre parcel granted in 1743 to William Hathorn IV, Samuel Hathorn I and Alexander Hathorn. The house was constructed in the late 1700s and underwent enlargements and additions up until around 1871. It has remained essentially unchanged since that time. The Olson House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1993

External links

• Farnsworth Art Museum