While at the National Gallery of Art, John Wilmerding served as curator of American art and senior curator from 1977 to 1983 and as deputy director from 1983 to 1988. A number of remarkable paintings entered the National Gallery's collection during his tenure, including the Peale, Lane, and Heade canvases seen below. Wilmerding has also served as a member of the advisory board of the Gallery's Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and, more recently, as a member of the Trustees' Council. He donated Eakins' oil sketch The Chaperone, which is included in this exhibition, in honor of the Gallery's fiftieth anniversary in 1991.
Wilmerding's exhibitions--ranging from monographic shows on artists such as Fitz Hugh Lane and John F. Peto, to installations of important private collections and thematic exhibitions like the majestic American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875--helped establish the American art department at the National Gallery and introduced literally thousands to our nation's artistic treasures.
As an important collector of American art Wilmerding has assembled over the years a superb group of paintings and drawings from the mid-to-late 19th century. Other than friends and family members, relatively few have had the pleasure of seeing these works, because he has been characteristically modest about his activities as a collector. That he has now generously agreed to share his collection with a wider audience is indeed a cause for celebration.
John Wilmerding comes from a family with a rich history of collecting art. Wilmerding's great-grandparents, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his second wife, Louisine Waldron Havemeyer, amassed an extraordinary group of European and oriental works of art that was eventually bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Renowned in its own day, as it still is today, for its old master and impressionist paintings and for its Chinese and Japanese precious objects, prints, and textiles, the Havemeyer Collection is among the most magnificent gifts the Metropolitan has ever received. One of the Havemeyers' daughters, Electra Havemeyer Webb (Wilmerding's grandmother), was an eclectic acquirer of American fine and folk paintings and sculptures, decorative arts, quilts, tools, vernacular objects, toys, buildings, and transportation vehicles. Her remarkable and vast collection was the genesis of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.
John Wilmerding is currently the Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University and visiting curator in the department of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is trustee emeritus of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont and a member of the boards of trustees of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the College of the Atlantic in Maine. He serves on advisory boards or committees for Smithsonian Studies in American Art, the Archives of American Art, Harvard University Art Museums, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. He also holds a presidential appointment to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House.
Wilmerding is the author of many books and catalogues on American art, including American Marine Painting (1987); American Views (1991); monographic studies of Robert Salmon, Fitz H. Lane, John F. Peto, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins; The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast(1994); and Compass and Clock (1999). His most recent book, Signs of the Artist: Signatures and Self-Expression in American Painting (2003), is a study of autobiographical embodiments of artists in their works expressed through their signatures.
