With Éclat: The Boston Athenæum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Notes

NOTES ABBREVIATIONS The following abbreviations and short titles are used for the two major institutions under discussion, frequently cited manuscript sources, and published works. Institutions BA: Boston Athenæum MFA: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Manuscript Sources ASSA Records American Social Science Association Records. Manuscripts and Archives. Yale University Library BA Fine Arts Committee Records BA Letters BA Proprietors Records BA Trustees Records Boston Athenæum Archive Cleveland-Perkins Family Papers Cleveland-Perkins Family Papers. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations MFA Building Records MFA Committee on the Museum Records MFA Director’s Correspondence MFA Early Organizational Material MFA General Correspondence MFA General Organizational Material MFA Trustees Minutes Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Archives [ 175 ] MFA Register of BA Loans MFA Register of Casts MFA Register of Purchases, 1876–1906 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Department of Conservation and Collections Management Ward-Perkins Family Papers Ward-Perkins Family Papers. Mss 129. Department of Special Collections. Davidson Library. University of California, Santa Barbara Published Works Perkins, “American Art Museums” Perkins, Charles Callahan. “American Art Museums.” North American Review 111 (July 1870): 1–29. Perkins, Art Education in America Perkins, Charles Callahan. Art Education in America: Read before the American Social Science Association at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Feb. 22, 1870. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1870. Perkins, Art in Education Perkins, Charles Callahan. Art in Education: Reprinted from the Second Volume of the Journal of the American Social Science Association. New York: Nation Press, 1870. Proceedings Proceedings at the Opening of the Museum of Fine Arts: with the Reports for 1876. Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1876. Quincy, History Quincy, Josiah. The History of the Boston Athenæum, with Biographical Notes of Its Deceased Founders. Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Company, 1851. Slautterback, Designing the BA Slautterback, Catharina. Designing the Boston Athenæum: 10½ at 150. Boston: Boston Athenæum, 1999. Swan, Athenæum Gallery Swan, Mabel Munson. The Athenæum Gallery, 1827–1873: The Boston Athenæum as An Early Patron of Art. Boston: Boston Athenæum, 1940. Whitehill, MFA Whitehill, Walter Muir. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. notes [ 176 ] NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. BA Fine Arts Committee Records, October 18, 1875. 2. Ibid. The sum of $8,000 in 1876 was equivalent to $168,000 in 2010, using the Consumer Price Index. http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare. 3. Whitehill, MFA, 1–2. 4. Swan, Athenæum Gallery, 173–174; and Whitehill, MFA, 1–22, 27–30. 5. Martin Burgess Green, The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966); Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980); Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (January 1982): 33–50; Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700– 1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York: New York University Press, 1982); and Robert F. Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 6. For an example of the first charge, see a comment by Matthew Stewart Prichard, a later staff member of the museum: “A few families had a special cult for [the museum], regarded it as their appanage . . . [and] their family tomb,” quoted in Whitehill, MFA, 212; for the second, see Frank Jewett Mather, “An Art Museum for the People,” Atlantic Monthly 100 (December 1907): 729–740, and John Cotton Dana, The Gloom of the Museum (Woodstock, VT: Elm Tree Press, 1917); and for the third, John Kouwenhoven, Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948). 7. For one, the historian Neil Harris countered the prevailing twentieth-century views of the museum’s origin by demonstrating, in a 1962 article, the central role that education had played in the institution’s founding vision. Harris, “The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement,” American Quarterly 14 (Winter 1962): 545–566. 8. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1861), 17, 24. According to Holmes, the “Brahmin caste of New England” consisted of the “races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these markers of it...