Personal collecting meets institutional vision: The origins of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum

In 1891, Harvard University was the recipient of an unexpected bequest from Mrs William Hayes Fogg, who gave her collection and a substantial gift to build a museum named for her deceased husband. The Foggs had no known association with Harvard, and University officials were reportedly embarrassed and perplexed by the problem' that this gift created, since the Fogg collection was of varied quality and included the work of artists who had fallen out of fashion. Further, it was unclear what function a teaching museum would serve in a community that already boasted Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The beginnings of the Fogg Art Museum, one of the country's most distinguished university museums, represent a point of intersection where issues of personal collecting in late nineteenth-century America meet with the problems of institutional collecting for university museums through the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. [Publication Abstract]