Go ahead and gush about the Getty Museum’s $45 million purchase of Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino in London tonight. (You can read the Bloomberg story on that here.) I’ve got a simpler tale to tell about a library with a big painting and a big heart — one that decided to make a not-uncontroversial loan.
A few days ago, the Dover Free Public Library, in Morris County, took Emigrant Train Attacked by Indians, by Emanuel Leutze, down from its walls, packed it, and put it in a truck destined for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be on loan there for five years. After that, no one is talking.
Why?
Dover library director Robert Tambini told the Morris Country Daily Record that he was bothered that such an important painting, which hung in the library’s reading room, was unrecognized, unseen by enough people. It was lent to the library in 1934, and given to it in 1943 by a local family, the Derrys, in memory of Olivia Smith Derry.
Recently appraised for insurance, it was valued at $2.5 million, up from $300,000 in 1988, according to the DR. Here’s a link to the article.
Some library members were unhappy, but not Tambini. At the Met, he said, “It will be something people will come to see. It will be the centerpiece in a new exhibit. That’s a big deal.” Besides, he is saving the steep cost of insurance, which in this economic environment, is nothing to sneeze at.
The Met, of course, owns Leutze’s most famous work, Washington Crossing the Delaware, which I wrote about here just last week.
The Dover Library owns about 55,000 books, plus other reading/listening/viewing materials. Dover’s population is less than 18,000.
I believe in collection-sharing, though I think there should be more of it from large museums to small ones.
A strawberry to the Dover Library.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Daily Record