In finding out about Henry McIhenny and his time as a curator of the Phildelphia Museum, I have also been finding out more about Fiske Kimball, its long-serving Director, who was appointed by McIhenny’s father, who apparently described him as a ‘Germanic boor’. McIlhenny half-jokingly claimed Kimball to have caused his father’s death.   But he wasn’t German, although married to one.   He was trained as an architect, helped establish the Institute of Fine Arts, and was appointed Director of the Philadelohia Museum in 1925, so was responsible for the installation of all those period rooms.  He wrote a good description of public attitudes to curators in 1935: 

To the unreflective outsider, one fears, museum work consists in guarding and perhaps dusting the objects.   On a little higher plane, the curator is thought of as a man with a long beard who sits in a littered office, occasionally peering through a lens at some old curio, ultimately rendering a verdict on its great age and fabulous value.   The galleries, once arranged, sink gradually into drab stagnation, in which the echoing footsteps of a rare, intruding visitor arouse the resentment of the somnolent guardian.   The museum official might be forgiven if, in a moment of weariness, he wished it were actually so….

We walked from the Museum along the river Schuykill, looking east towards the Philadelphia skyline, now dominated by Norman Foster’s elegant new skyscraper for Comcast:-

Across to the 30th. Street Station, a monument to the great age of the railroad, begun in 1927 and opened in 1933:-

And down to the grand area of nineteenth-century housing down 23rd. Street, round Fitler Square and Spruce Street:-

There can surely be no grander or more ostentatious City Hall than Philadelphia’s, designed by John Macarthur Jr. in 1871 and, once the tower had been completed in 1894, the world’s tallest building:-

It is festooned with fine beaux arts carving:-

I have been meaning to find out about the Washington Monument, the piece of heroic monumental sculpture in the middle of the roundabout below the Philadelphia Museum of Art.   Apparently the idea of commemorating Washington dates back to 1810.   In 1824, a fund was estsblished to place a monument in Washington Square.   Eventually, Rudolf Siemering was commissioned in 1881 and the monument was unveiled first in Fairmont Park in 1897 and moved to its current location in 1928:-

We explored the area round Independence Hall, the centre of Benjamin Franklin’s city, close to the river and sacred space for American tourists.   I preferred the muscularity of the two neoclassical banks:  the First Bank of the United States, designed by Samuel Blodget jr., who also produced designs for the Capitol:-

And the Second Bank, based on the Parthenon:-

Then we walked through Society Hill, with its surviving row houses:-

Lunch at the Fourth Street Delicatessen:-

And back through what survives of the early nineteenth-century city, up Pine Street and Antique Row:-

I admit there could be worse places to be holed up than Philadelphia. It has given me an opportunity to explore the downtown a bit more.

The building on Juniper Street I had seen and admired:-

The DeLong Building on 13th:-

Chestnut Street:-

The Witherspoon Building on Walnut:-

And a fine example of American central heating:-

Since it looks likely that we will be holed up in Philadelphia for the forseeable future with all flights cancelled and most of yesterday spent waiting for cancelled trains, I have been trying to find out how it was that Henry McIlhenny acquired the painting now known, non-judgmentally, as Intérieur, the title by which it was first exhibited by Durand-Ruel in 1905, rather than Le Viol, as it was called from 1912 at least by friends and associates of Degas, which assumes that it is, in some way unspecified, about rape.

It was sold for 100,000 francs on 30 August 1909 by Durand-Ruel to M.Jacacci, a dealer in New York, who in turn sold it to Alfred Atmore Pope, a collector in Farmington, Connecticut in 1911, when it was exhibited and much admired at the Fogg. Pope either sold or gave it to Harris Whittemore, a friend and fellow collector. McIlhenny apparently bought it from Whittemore in 1936, the year in which he organised an exhibition on Degas. By then, he had already himself become a serious and passionate collector, buying bronze stauettes while on holiday in Egypt aged 15, and a Still Life by Chardin as a sophomore at Harvard.

Our 250th. Birthday was celebrated in some style with a special birthday cake in amongst the cast collection of the Pennsylvania Academy, on the ground floor below the top-lit galleries and in amongst the classrooms in order to provide models of European works of art to the students:-

Coming to Philadelphia makes me think about a trip here in December 1976. Henry McIlhenny had asked me to come and see his house in Rittenhouse Square (he was a member of the visiting committee at Harvard and had pulled me out of the student line-up). We were greeted not by him, but by his butler who showed us (I think) into the dining room where Degas’s Rape hung, one of the more baffling, complex and sinister of Degas’s paintings, described by Degas as ‘my genre picture’. McIlhenny had been a pupil of Paul Sachs at Harvard and had begun collecting as a student. He served as a curator of the Philadelphia Museum on a salary of $1 a year. I was pleased to have a chance to see the Rape again (but the reflections make it nearly impossible to photograph):-

I didn’t know the story of Thomas Eakins’s portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, known as The Clinic of Dr. Gross:  that it was agreed that it should be sold by Jefferson Medical College on 11 November 2006 with a proviso which allowed the city of Philadelphia to make a pre-emptive bid for a matching price of $68 million if it could raise the necessary funds by December 26th.   This led to a huge and successful fund-raising campaign by the Pennsylvania Academy and the Philadelphia Museum of Art which led to this great painting, turned down for display in the 1876 Centennial, to remain in Philadelphia, and to be seen currently in the Pennsylvania Academy:-