Museum accessions.(Theophilus Wheeler Walker building)

In 1891 Harriet and Sophia Walker commissioned Charles Follen McKim of the noted New York City architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White to design a building to be used exclusively for the display and study of art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Encyclopedic collectors and supporters of art education, the sisters named the building in honor of their uncle Theophilus Wheeler Walker, a successful Massachusetts merchant and entrepreneur and a first cousin of Bowdoin's fourth president, Leonard Woods. Inspired by Renaissance architecture, the building incorporated a loggia modeled on the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence and a dramatic central rotunda, the walls of which were decorated by Elihu Vedder, Kenyon Cox, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and John La Farge. The galleries were put to immediate use housing and exhibiting the substantial collection of art that James Bowdoin III had bequeathed to the college in 1811, making it one of the oldest college art collections in the United States. Today Bowdoin's holdings comprise more than fourteen thousand objects dating from the ancient world to the present. Widely considered to be the most comprehensive art collection in Maine, it is particularly strong in American paintings, ancient art of the Mediterranean world, and European Old Master drawings and prints. Next month, the building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, will reopen after a major renovation and expansion that creatively combines a preservationist's techniques with new architecture that enhances the old. Among the many recent acquisitions made that will benefit from the more than two thousand square feet of additional gallery space is Portrait of Anna Scott Fisher, by Cecilia Beaux (illustrated at left). Painted a year or so before Fisher's marriage to William Hart of Philadelphia in 1899, the likeness epitomizes Beaux's ability to sympathize with her subjects, producing portraits that capture their inner state of mind.

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Vanderbilt University's Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville and the University of Texas at Austin's Blanton Museum of Art are not as old as Bowdoin's museum, but they too have important holdings that are of interest not just to students but to the wider public.

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An alumnus, Austin B. Chinn, recently gave Vanderbilt an early etching by James McNeill Whistler entitled Seymour Standing Under a Tree (illustrated below), which depicts the son of Whistler's half-sister Deborah and her ...