UWPRESS
.
WISC
.
EDU
23
ART HISTORY / AMERICAN STUDIES / MUSEUM STUDIES / WISCONSIN
Before Carnegie, Frick, Whitney, and Guggenheim, there was
Frederick Layton. This is the story of how he created a new art
museum experience in America.
ederick Layton (1827–1919) was among the very first art collectors in
America to fund a purpose-built civic art gallery for the public’s use and
enjoyment. Second only to the 1874 Corcoran Gallery of Art in Wash-
ington, D.C., the 1888 Layton Art Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, pre-
sented a new model for the single-patron art museum in America, one
significantly different from the established museums of Boston and New
York. Frederick Layton and his British architect George Audsley devel-
oped a new vision for a more intimate art museum experience. They drew upon
their knowledge of English precedents to create a refined, single-story, top-lit,
urban gallery that would influence the development of the American art museum
well into the twentieth century.
Layton’s Legacy
draws on a recently discovered archive of Layton family papers,
travel journals, and vintage photographs and on five years of extensive archival
research in the United States and Great Britain. John C. Eastberg traces the trajec-
tory of the collection’s development from its English origins through its grand
European acquisitions, Gilded Age art auctions in New York, Progressive-era
renovations, postwar deaccessions, and demolition of the original gallery, all lead-
ing to a new era of curatorial innovation and major American art acquisitions at
the end of the twentieth century. Eric Vogel looks more closely at the architectural
history of the original Layton Art Gallery and its influence on the continuing lin-
eage of the single-patron art museum.
Layton’s Legacy
also includes the first fully illustrated documentation of the
entire 125-year history of the Layton Art Collection. It includes object entries
from more than twenty scholars of American and European painting, furniture,
and decorative art and features the works of artists Eastman Johnson, Winslow
Homer, Frederick Church, Thomas Cole, Bastien Lepage, William Bourguereau,
James Tissot, Frederic Leighton, and Alma Tadema, among many others. Eminent
scholars of nineteenth-century art, Dianne Macleod and Giles Waterfield, contrib-
ute forewords.
John C. Eastberg
, a historian of the art and architecture of the American Gilded
Age, is senior historian at the Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. His books include
Captain Frederick Pabst Mansion: An Illustrated His-
tory
and
A Revolutionary in Milwaukee: George Mann Niedecken and His Milwau-
kee Clients.
Eric Vogel
, an architect, designer, and architectural historian, is chair
of the 3D Design Department at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
MAY
440 PP. 10 ½ X 12 ½
400 COLOR AND B/W ILLUS.
Distributed for The Layton Art Collection, Inc.
• this book is the comPanion to an
EXHIBIT, APRIL 6–SEPTEMBER 2, 2013,
AT THE MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM,
CELEBRATING THE 125TH ANNIVERSARY
OF THE LAYTON ART COLLECTION.
“The Layton Art Gallery and its
founder Frederick Layton provide
the missing link between the
design and collecting policies of
the early British art gallery and the
nineteenth-century single-patron
art museum in America.”
Giles Waterfield, Courtauld Institute
of Art
I...,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22 24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,...42