FILE UNDER: NMTU (Not Making This Up) So, it turns out that the Haydon Art Club, which evolved into the Nebraska Art Association and then eventually the Sheldon Art Association, began mounting annual exhibitions in 1888. The first object that the members borrowed for display in Lincoln, Nebraska was Karl von Pilotys Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (oil on canvas, 41 x 86 in.). Apparently Catharine Lorillard Wolfe had commissioned the piece around 1884 and the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York received the painting as a bequest in 1887. (Valerie Hellstein, n.b.: Yale University Art Gallery owns a different version of the same subject by the same hand.) The Haydon Art Club rented the picture for $500 (equivalent to $12,600 in 2013) and hung it in the citys Federal Court House, where visitors each paid fifty cents to view the work. Sometime later The Met deaccessioned the gargantuan painting and it ended up at Haussners Restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland. Samuel C. Waugh—a Lincolnite, a sometime member of the NAA, and a banking consultant in Washington—tracked down the work and lobbied for returning it to Lincoln. Mrs. William Haussner graciously donated the canvas to the Nebraska Art Association in 1963 and, after a conservation treatment, it proudly hung in the new Philip Johnson-designed Sheldon Museum of Art. My beloved maternal grandmother, Marie Alberta Wienhold, lived diagonally across the street from Haussners for fifty years and, in theory, could have seen the painting there. Now I, Baltimore native with memories of the eating establishment and art collection, am fortunate to serve as the Curator of American Art at the Sheldon, part of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and I am privileged to steward this picture with historical ties to both Baltimore and Lincoln for future generations.
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 02:34:25 +0000
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