The museum is fortunate to receive on a regular basis generous gifts and loans of art from alumnae and friends. Since its establishment in 1876, the museum has also been the recipient of monetary gifts for its acquisition endowments. These funds allow the museum to buy objects that particularly enhance the collection and its use in the curriculum by many departments across the campus. This fall in the Rodney L. White Print Room, an exhibition of 30 stellar purchases, gifts and long-term loans of works on paper illustrates recent generosity. Included is a suite of six untitled etchings by noted artist Katharine Porter, part of a major donation last year by alumna Renee Conforte McKee (class of '62 ) and her husband David. Several very fine works on paper have been given by Art Advisory Board member Lisa Carbone Carl (class of '81) and her husband William. On view is their gift of the meticulous 1937 drawing of a street in Middleburg, Holland, by Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Bosch. Traditionally, studio art professor Nancy Campbell, director of the Mount Holyoke College Printmaking Workshop, presents the museum with a copy of each edition produced by the visiting artists. The workshop's most recent release, a dramatic large-scale color etching and aquatint entitled Falcon by Kiki Smith, is part of the installation. An important gift of works on paper from Robert L. and Eugenia W. Herbert, professors emeriti of art history and history, has recently come to the museum. Among these are graphic works by French 19th-century caricaturist Grandville, Japanese woodblock artist Hokusai, and French painter and printmaker Jean-François Millet, as well as an important crayon drawing by Paul Signac of the Pont Neuf in Paris. A group of Old Master drawings by Guercino, Pier Leone Ghezzi, and other Italian and northern artists has been promised to the museum by University of Massachusetts professor emeritus Thomas Cassirer, (husband of the late Sidonie Cassirer, Mount Holyoke professor emeritus of German). Three examples from this in-process gift are on view, including a remarkable large ink drawing of a cook by Ghezzi; identified on the reverse is the man's name, the household in which he worked, and the date, May 1707. An alumna who wishes to remain anonymous has added significantly to the museum's capacity for displaying the work of European modern masters with a long-term loan of major drawings and prints. The show includes stunning selections by Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, and Georges Braque. Two works by Pablo Picasso are a large-scale drypoint, Tête de Femme (1905) and a pastel and watercolor entitled La Coiffure (1899). The Art Acquisition Endowment Fund and the Bernard and Susan Eisenhart Schilling (class of '32) Fund made possible the purchases of several works on paper this year. One of those is a highly amusing and historically important intaglio print by William Hogarth depicting Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn (1747). Other purchases with those funds are a fine ink portrait of a woman by Albert Besnard and a dramatic etching of a dead toreador by Edouard Manet, one of his best-known images. Also on view is a fascinating Iris print color photograph that was part of last spring's highly acclaimed Rosamond Purcell exhibition. It was acquired after the show with funds from the Henry Rox Fund (established by Paul and Harriet Levine Weissman [class of '58]). The Madeleine Pinsof Plonsker (class of '62) Fund made possible the purchase of two beautiful black-and-white prints of the Cistercian abbey at Pontigny by New York photographer David Heald, which are part of the current installation. These images will also be part of a large body of Heald's work in The Architecture of Silence at the museum next spring.
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