Here’s a tall tale (or rather a shaggy dog story) about the power of blogs — even for finding “lost” works of art and courting donors.
It involves the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, which for a long time has owned a portrait of Benjamin Gratz (below) painted by Thomas Sully in 1831, but not the partner picture, a portrait of his wife, Maria. When the Rosenbach acquired Benjamin’s portrait in 1970, a bequest of  Benjamin’s granddaughter, there was no sign of the companion painting.
But the Rosenbach owns four other Gratz family portraits, including a Sully painting of philanthropist, social activist and Jewish leader Rebecca Gratz, and the enterprising curator there, Judith Guston, wondered where the Maria portrait was. Last June, she decided to ask a blogger – Susan Sklaroff, who writes at Rebecca Gratz & 19th-Century America to write a post about the missing painting. Sklaroff asked readers to check their attics, friends’ homes and local museums for traces of Maria. A press release continues the story:
Three weeks later, Guston got a call from Atlanta, Georgia. Maria Gratz Roberts, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Maria, had the original Sully portrait [right] in her parlor. Although Roberts had lived with the painting throughout her life, she believed Benjamin and Maria’s portraits should be reunited. Roberts donated to the Rosenbach the Sully portrait of Maria, a pastel copy (which she also owned) and a chair that Benjamin had brought from Pennsylvania.
So ends the tale with a happy ending that illustrates, as if we needed it, the power of the internet. Except — there never would have been such a blog had not Sklaroff been a docent at the Rosenbach. As she tells the tale:
IÂ discovered Rebecca Gratz when I became a docent at the Rosenbach Museum & Library which has a lovely portrait of her by Thomas Sully. To learn more, I began to read the hundreds of Gratz family letters which survive in libraries around the country and found wonderful stories about Rebecca as well as information about customs, events and technological changes of her time. I cannot fit all this material into the talks I give on Rebecca nor into my proposed book. This blog makes it accessible to those who are interested in Rebecca Gratz and antebellum America.
So it’s the power of people, and their interests, too.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Rosenbach