In the Philadelphia City Paper staff blog Mike Newall talks about all the misfortune Philadelphia has had with losing potential museum “stuff” to other cities. It’s really unbelievable how many times it has happened! Take a look:
- 1940s – the Widener family donated its large collection of Manet and Renoir paintings not to the Philadelphia Museum of Art — which had been expecting to receive it — but to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
- 1968 – American Museum of Photography in Center City closed after the death of it’s founder. The Philadelphia Museum of Art passed on the famous collection, and for almost ten years, thousands of historic photographs collected dust in storage before finally landing at the George Eastman House museum in New York.
- 1970s – The Franklin Institute sold its rare book library, including all of its collections. The Institute recently borrowed back many of these same books for its ongoing Galileo exhibit.
- 1991 – the Philadelphia Museum of Art was again left out in the cold when Walter Annenberg gave $1 billion worth of paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These works included 50 paintings by Degas, Monet, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Bonnard, Mattise, Picasso, and Braque.
- 1996 – the Library of Congress acquired the Philly-based Marian S. Carson Collection, which historians believe is the most extensive private collection of early Americana. The collection included unpublished papers of Revolutionary War figures, personal letters of Thomas Jefferson, a manuscript account of the departure of the first Pony Express rider, and what may be the earliest photograph of a human face.
Philly should feel robbed of all of these treasures!
Great post thanks
Feeling robbed because someone chose not to give you something is a character flaw.
well then philadelphia is flawed …like i said in my bio, new york is my city.