Art: Circulating Collections

Into the capacious lap of Yale (“Mother of Men”) fell yet another rich gift last week. In honor of his wife Mabel, sister of the late Papal Marquis Nicholas Frederic Brady, and on the occasion of their 20th wedding anniversary, onetime alien property custodian (now chemical tycoon) Francis Patrick Garvan presented to the university his enormously valuable collection of early Americana—furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, prints—to be known as the Mabel Brady Garvan Collections. He also set up a Mabel Brady Garvan foundation to take care of them.

Different from most bequests is this Garvan gift. The various articles will not be assembled in one group at New Haven, but will remain where they are now, scattered loans in colleges, museums and restored colonial mansions. Yale’s duty will be to keep track and care of them, to keep the Mabel Brady Garvan Collections circulating throughout the land where they may be seen by the greatest numbers of people. Wrote Donor Garvan:

“I am a believer in universality. . . . I presume that there are at the present moment in this city [Manhattan] paintings and objects of art to an aggregate $250,000,000 buried in the vaults of art dealers or covered with cheesecloth in private residences, closed up most of the year, where even the owners receive no enjoyment from them. . . . I believe that with the purpose generally understood much of this ‘dead art’ can be brought back to life in the interest of American culture. . . . Let us start the art of the country in circulation. . . I am not claiming credit for originating this idea. What first gave me the thought was the loan of Dutch Masters from all parts of the world and the bringing of Italian primitives across the seas on a stormy voyage for the great exhibitions in London last year.”