John Currie Wilmerding Jr., is an American professor of art, collector, and curator, and is best known as a prolific author of books on American art.
Early life
Wilmerding was born in Boston, Massachusetts on April 28, 1938 and is descended from prominent families in old New York City social circles. His parents were John Currie Wilmerding Sr., a vice president in the personal trust division of Bankers Trust Company, and Lila Vanderbilt Wilmerding. He has two siblings, James Wilmerding and Lila Wilmerding. After his mother's death, his father remarried to Katharine Polk, the daughter of Samuel Agar Salvage and widow of Frank Lyon Polk Jr. His maternal grandparents were James Watson Webb and Electra Havemeyer Webb, the co-founders of the Shelburne Museum, which showcases the family's "collection of collections" of early American homes and public buildings, including a general store, meeting house, log cabin, and a steamship. His great-grandfather, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife, Louisine Waldron Havemeyer, were also art collectors who bequeathed a large group of their European and Oriental artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wilmerding was educated at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and at Harvard University, where he received his A. B. in 1960, his masters in 1961, and his Ph.D. in 1965.
Career
After graduating from Harvard, he taught art history at Dartmouth College until 1977. From 1977 to 1983 he served as senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, and as its Deputy Director under J. Carter Brown from 1983 to 1988. He served as Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton. In 2016, the Walton Family Foundation and Alice Walton granted $10 million to the National Gallery of Art to establish the John Wilmerding Fund for Education in honor of Wilmerding's contribution to the Gallery and art history.
Art collection
Wilmerding began collecting art while still a student at Harvard, purchasing the 1857 painting Stage Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor by Fitz Hugh Lane during his senior year for $3,500. His second purchase was the 1850 painting Mississippi Boatman by George Caleb Bingham "which shows a pipe-smoking boatman sitting on top of a crate," followed by "The Newbury Marshes" by Martin Johnson Heade, circa 1890, which were all donated by Wilmerding to the National Gallery of Art. By 2004, he built a collection of 51 paintings and drawings by acknowledged masters. At the May 2004 opening of the National Gallery of Art's exhibit "American Masters From Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection," Wilmerding announced that his entire collection would remain at the Gallery in perpetuity, including works by such artists as Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Henry Lane, John F. Peto, Joseph Decker, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Edwin Church, George Caleb Bingham, and John F. Kensett, and featuring certain of his favorite works by artists who visited and painted Maine's Mount Desert Island in Acadia National Park, where he has summered for many years. His contribution broadened the Gallery's holdings by adding many examples of types of works that the Gallery had not yet managed to acquire.
