ABOUT THE CLARK’S COLLECTIONS
The collection of the Clark Art Institute features European and American paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, and decorative arts from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. The collection is especially rich in French Impressionist and Academic paintings, British oil sketches, drawings, and silver, and the work of American artists Winslow Homer, George Inness, and John Singer Sargent. Based on the founding gift from Sterling and Francine Clark, the collection has expanded over the years through numerous acquisitions as well as significant gifts and bequests, including the gift of the Sir Edwin and Lady Manton Collection of British Art and the gift of paintings by George Inness by Frank and Katherine Martucci.
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AMERICAN DECORATIVE ARTS GALLERIES
The Clark’s American decorative arts collection is housed in the Henry Morris and Elizabeth H. Burrows Gallery and the Lauzon Glass Study Gallery in the Manton Research Center. The Burrows Gallery features early American paintings, furniture, and the Burrows collection of American silver, composed of more than 340 objects including tea and coffee wares, tankards and porringers, objects for personal adornment, church silver, and presentation pieces.
The gallery features prized objects including furniture from the Florence Cluett Chambers collection, a partial Chinese export porcelain dining service made to memorialize George Washington donated by Phoebe Prime Swain, paintings by Gilbert Stuart, Ammi Phillips, and others, as well as several new loans. The suite of rooms feature groupings that look at the role of silver and other materials in early American culture, the development of regional styles of decoration, and social customs such as tea and coffee drinking, dining, and the use of silver for personal adornment.
The installation of the Henry Morris and Elizabeth H. Burrows Gallery and the Lauzon Glass Study Gallery was supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
THE MANTON COLLECTION OF BRITISH ART
The Manton Collection of British Art includes more than three hundred paintings, drawings, and prints by Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, and others. The collection was created by business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909–2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton (1911–2003). Born in Essex County, just twenty miles from “Constable Country” in the east of England, Sir Edwin arrived in New York in 1933 to help develop the American International Group. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States, though his love of British art, which he began collecting with his wife in the 1940s, was testimony to his continued devotion to his native country.
Sir Edwin was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1994 for his generous contributions to the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in London. Throughout his life, his appetite for art collecting never diminished. “I am a compulsive buyer,” he once observed. “It’s better than spending your money on bottles of Scotch.” This magnificent collection, a gift from the Manton Foundation in 2007, constitutes the most significant addition of art to the Clark since it was founded in 1955, and perfectly complements the Clark’s holdings of nineteenth-century French and American art.
MANTON STUDY CENTER FOR WORKS ON PAPER
The study center houses the Clark’s collection of works on paper and is open to the public by appointment. For more information on the collection or to make an appointment, please call 413 458 0560 or complete this form.
The Clark’s collection of more than six thousand prints, drawings, and photographs spans the history of the graphic arts from the fifteenth century through the early twentieth century. The collection includes significant concentrations of work by Albrecht Dürer, Claude Lorraine, John Constable, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Winslow Homer. The Clark’s small but important group of pastels by Degas, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, and Jean-François Millet are also housed in the department.
In 1998 the Clark began a major initiative to establish a core collection of European and American photography from the 1840s through the 1910s. The collection now numbers more than one thousand works, including important photographs by Eugène Atget, Édouard Baldus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Francis Frith, Gustave Le Gray, Nadar, William Henry Fox Talbot, Alfred Stieglitz, Linneaus Tripe, and Carleton Watkins.
PROVENANCE RESEARCH PROJECT
The history of ownership and collecting is intimately connected with the history of art and is taken especially seriously by museums based upon private collections, such as the Clark. The Clark has focused its provenance examination on paintings purchased by Sterling and Francine Clark, the Institute, and donors from 1933 to the present, with special emphasis on those paintings that might have changed ownership between 1933 and 1945. Researchers continue to gather all available provenance information on the Clark's collection, including European paintings.
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COLLECTION ACTIVITY
The Clark Art Institute continues to build and shape its collection to realize more fully and effectively its mission. To view recent acquisitions and deaccessions from the Clark's collection, click here.