Cultural News

NEW YORK. Around 2,200 old master, 19th- and 20th-century drawings and more than 100 paintings and decorative art objects from the collection of the late Joseph McCrindle have been distributed in the past few months to more than 30 museums in the US, without any major publicity. McCrindle, a literary agent and lifelong collector, died in New York last summer aged 85, leaving a huge quantity of art to museums and to his estate; its executor, his long-time friend John Rowe, has overseen its dispersal. Christie’s is completing an appraisal that Mr Rowe says will exceed $20m. McCrindle also left amounts ranging from $100,000 to $1m to more than a dozen museums, universities, libraries and orchestras ($10m in total) and another $10m to the McCrindle Foundation, of which Mr Rowe is the president, which supports museums and other charities.

Most of the works went to the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (365 pieces), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (300), Yale Center for British Art (200—McCrindle went to Yale Law School), and the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston (100). Smaller quantities were given to art museums in Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Kansas City, New Orleans and San Francisco. In New York alone, the McCrindle beneficiaries include the Morgan, the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society.

McCrindle was raised by his wealthy grandparents who lived on Fifth Avenue. He kept a flat in London after his World War II service in the Office of Strategic Services and later revived the Transatlantic Review, which he published for 20 years. He began collecting avidly in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily in London, Paris and Rome, from dealers such as Agnew’s, Colnaghi and Carlo Sestieri. The bulk of his collection was old master drawings, mainly Italian with French, Dutch, Netherlandish and British works.

Mr Rowe describes it as “a fascinatingly rich collection with master drawings by renowned artists as well as excellent works by lesser-known draughtsmen. He was the old-fashioned collector who wanted a lot of things, lived with them, and loved to discuss and go through them.” Rhoda Eitel-Porter, head of the department of drawings and prints at the Morgan, recalls McCrindle’s Central Park West apartment with thousands of framed drawings in bookshelves and a chest of drawers filled with unframed sheets. Other than a 1991 travelling show of highlights organised by Princeton University, the collection was never shown together.

The bulk was left to the foundation and Mr Rowe and the directors decided to donate it to museums. Last autumn he invited the National Gallery of Art, Morgan, Yale and MFA Boston to submit wish lists, eventually opening participation to additional institutions. The Morgan chose works by Carlo Maratta, Hans Bol, Pissarro, Kirchner, Grosz and Demuth, as well as Romney, Sandby, Bonington, Lear, Palmer, Wyndham Lewis and Sickert. A naval battle scene by Prospero Fontana is on view in the exhibition “New at the Morgan” (until 18 October). The Morgan also received 400 literary and historical manuscripts, including letters by Dickens and Zola, and sketches by Proust.

Yale received 189 works on paper by Benjamin West, Whistler, Rowlandson and Burne-Jones, and 22 paintings by Sickert and others. The centre’s director, Amy Meyers, describes the gifts as “extremely varied in nature [with] superb bodies of study material [and] wonderful, individual works”, such as a large 1918 charcoal by Sargent for his monumental painting, Gassed, in London’s Imperial War Museum.

Polidoro da Caravaggio’s The Holy Family, 1520-25, was among six sheets left to the Metropolitan. Curator George Goldner calls it “one of his best drawings in this country and now certainly our most important drawing by him”.

The finest paintings were donated in McCrindle’s lifetime to the National Gallery of Art, including a double portrait by Jan de Bray, and Sargent’s Pavement, Cairo, 1891, as well as a Bloemaert and nine watercolours by Sargent, among others.

He left paintings and hundreds of pieces of silver to the Brooklyn Museum where he had served as a trustee, and other works to Princeton. He also gave a Greuze drawing to the Getty, a double-sided Fragonard sheet to the Cleveland Museum of Art, and paintings by Sargent to the Saint Louis Art Museum, North Carolina Museum in Raleigh, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Hundreds of prints were given to the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill, drawings by Steinlen and Tchelichev went to the New Orleans Museum of Art, dozens of pre-Columbian objects were given to the Cincinnati Art Museum, and portraits by McCrindle’s great-grandfather, the painter Henry Mosler, will go to ten institutions.