AFA 18th Anniversary

Antiques & Fine Art 177 2018 P lacemaking is the strategy a community employs to create public spaces that capitalize on local talents and available resources. Patronage is the tradition private agents practice using similar resources to achieve often visionary ends. Both approaches impart farsighted hopes whose long tenure can take decades to realize. Yet it is the dreams of public place makers and private patrons that drive change. In 1919 these two philanthropic forces came together when Judge John Barton Payne (1855–1935) (Fig. 1) donated fifty-one works of art to the Commonwealth of Virginia and subsequently offered a $100,000 matching grant to form the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. 2), the first state-run art museum in the United States. VMFA is pleased to celebrate the century of citizen philanthropists who have since transformed Payne’s nascent ideal into a world-class museum with an exhibition of selected works at the Winter Antiques Show. Bo r n a t t he t r a d i n g p o s t o f Pr unt y town, V i r g i n i a (now We s t Virginia), Payne was home-schooled until age fifteen. In 1870, he moved to the town of Warrenton and took a job with a general store. Three years later, a dy ing economy returned Payne to Pruntytown on family business. Taking a short-term position in the county clerk’s of f ic e , t he e i g ht e en-ye a r- old wa s introduced to William Black stone’s Commentaries, the definitive eighteenth- century treatise on English common law. Subsequent dec ade s wit ne s sed h i s growing reputation a s a successf u l businessman, lawyer, public servant, and philanthropist. Decorated by nineteen foreign powers for his work as president of the Red Cross, Payne boasted “the highest salary in the world—personal satisfaction.”  1 Following his death in 1935, a New York Times editorial made particular note of how in “giving himself wholly to public affairs and . . . next to doing justly, loving mercy,” he embodied “the f inest t ype of citizenship.”  2 Payne’s original gift, and his subsequent bequest of more than three hundred additional works, provides a lens on his era. On one hand, Payne’s collection invokes his love of the Old Dominion. It includes a contemporary image of the heroic Pocahontas (Fig. 3), and a Renaissance-inspired Virginia Madonna (Fig. 4). Like the structure that ultimately housed it, however, it also speaks to the Colonial Revival. With its roots in the founding decades of the United States, the Colonial Revival peaked in the late nineteenth centur y with the nation’s centennial and the rise of the United States as a global power. Wed to the country’s economic and political successes was the challenge of uniting the disparate people flocking to its shores and fueling its progress. In response, an Americanization movement emerged. Front-page coverage of a New York “Americanization dinner” featured Payne’s colleague, Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane, proposing to “teach the American what Americanism is and . . . what Americanism is not,” adding, “Americanization . . . must bring every American to a realization of his melting-pot duty . . . all experience, skill, idealism and ambition must find more common denominators.”  3 As Americanization provided theoretical control over the diversifying impact of demographic expansion, the Colonial Revival provided a cultural one. Through visual and material means, it invoked a selectively crafted American history whose packaged version of seminal events, founding ideals, and promised dreams were fashioned to establish a shared vision of the nation’s Fig. 2 : Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1936.