Searching for Oldman: Museum Collaboration Across the Globe

Since 2010, a project has been underway at the National Museum of the American Indian to reunite archival records with our collections and reconstruct the provenance, or record of ownership, of objects. You can read more about what we refer to as the Retro-Accession Lot Project here. Our research began by utilizing our own resources in the NMAI Archive Center, the Museum of the American Indian - Heye Foundation Records, but has since grown to include archival resources at other institutions including one halfway around the world.

Early in the project it became evident that the history of the MAI, our predecessor institution, was intertwined with that of other organizations. It was also clear that the world of collecting Native American objects in the 20th century was a relatively small one. Many anthropologists and archaeologists worked for multiple institutions over the course of their lives; the result was that their papers were often spread between several locations. Objects for sale were offered to multiple institutions or collectors and if one potential buyer declined to purchase an item, another might scoop it up. For this reason, documentation about these transactions may exist in multiple archives. We knew that for some objects in our collection, the only way to get the full picture of their provenance was to expand the search to other institutions. This would also give us a better understanding of the interconnected network of dealers in Native American objects.

The George G. Heye Collection of North American Ethnology on display at the University Museum in 1910.
Photo Courtesy of the Penn Museum.

In 2015, we expanded our search for collections documentation to the University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives. In 1908, George Heye struck a deal to place his growing North American ethnology and archaeology collections at the University Museum in Philadelphia. There, the collections were cared for and exhibited in two galleries from 1909 until 1916 when Heye withdrew them to create the MAI, much to the dismay of the University Museum staff, who believed he would donate his collection to their museum. George Hubbard Pepper and Mark Raymond Harrington, who would later join the MAI staff, were employed at the University Museum to care for the Heye collection, conduct research and collect additional objects. Due to these relationships, the Penn Museum archives hold documentation from this early period of Heye’s collecting. 

Surprisingly, correspondence in the Penn archives between Heye and George Byron Gordon, the University Museum’s director, pointed to a new connection. In a letter to Gordon dated July 19, 1909, Heye wrote that he had in his possession “a British Columbia painted skin from Oldman.” This led to the discovery of an incredibly rich archival collection on the other side of the world.

I recognized the name Oldman from Museum of the American Indian catalog records: William Ockleford Oldman (1879–1949) was a British dealer in ethnographic art and European weaponry. He sold to museums and collectors throughout Europe and the United States, including George Heye. The NMAI collections include hundreds of objects recorded as purchased from Oldman, but we had no record of a 1909 purchase. Searching our collections database, I found a painted skin from British Columbia acquired in 1909 but there was no source named: its catalog card simply indicated that it was a purchase.

2/2063 Painted Skin from British Columbia purchased from W.O. Oldman in 1909 and its catalog card. Photo by Ernest Amoroso.

Digging deeper, I learned that Oldman was not only a dealer but also a collector. He sold his personal collection of Oceanic objects to the Government of New Zealand in 1948. This collection, including his business records, is now part of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington.

To learn more about these business records, I contacted Te Papa’s archives and received word that they had several of Oldman’s sale registers as well as his collection ledgers and correspondence. Their archivist, Jennifer Twist, kindly provided a few photographs of the material so I could evaluate the type of information included. One photo from Oldman’s ledger confirmed not only the sale of the painted skin in June 1909 to George Heye but other objects Heye had purchased at the same time. Based on the descriptions in Oldman’s ledgers, I succeeded in identifying several other NMAI objects that were described simply as purchases on their catalog cards. As an added bonus, Oldman had recorded the date he had purchased the items and from whom. The painted skin that began this search was purchased by Oldman from the J.C. Stevens Auction on February 16, 1909. Documentation at Te Papa confirmed the items’ association with Oldman but also provided starting points for research into his sources and the hands objects had traveled through.

W. O. Oldman Sale Register CA000228/001/0001 page 209, New Zealand Museum Te Papa Tongarewa

It became clear that the information in the Oldman ledgers was pertinent not only to NMAI and our provenance research project but also to other museums around the world that also hold collections purchased from Oldman. Gaining a better sense of who Oldman bought from also has the potential to improve our understanding of how Native American objects made their way to Europe in the first place.

To maximize the importance of the Oldman records to NMAI and to other institutions, we initiated a collaborative project with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa to digitize the Oldman ledgers and make digital images accessible to the public. Te Papa has digitized five Oldman sale registers and two collection ledgers dating from 1902 to 1916. These collaborative research materials are now available for review on the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archive here . Since the ledgers date from the early 20th century and are handwritten, we have also begun a Smithsonian Transcription Center project to have them transcribed. Please take some time to check out this important project and become a volunteer!

Without the connections we have made with other institutions, research about the NMAI collections—including the Oldman objects—would quickly have reached a dead end. By researching relationships between early collectors, dealers, and museums, we can fill in some gaps in our catalog data and restore the connections that have long been broken between our objects and the individuals that made, used, or sold these items.

Many thanks to Alessandro Pezzati and Eric Schnittke for providing access and guidance during research at the Penn Museum Archives and to Jennifer Twist, Mike O’Neill, and Victoria Leachman at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa for their hard work in collaborating with us on this project.

Maria Galban, Collections Documentation Manager
National Museum of the American Indian

American Women's Role as Collectors, Patrons, and Museum Founders

As collectors, patrons, and museum founders, American women have played an influential role in national and international art circles from the late nineteenth century until today. With the rise of first-wave feminism, women acquired greater financial independence and access to education and professional careers. They also gained confidence in visiting galleries and museums and participating in cultural organizations. In turn, women commissioned and acquired fine art and decorative objects directly from the artists, or through dealers and commercial galleries. Some even went on to found museums in an effort to share their collections with broader audiences.

From the 1890s to the 1920s, these female patrons were quintessential "New Women." The author Henry James popularized the term, which referred to the growing number of feminists who made their presence felt in cultural, educational, and political groups. Active in the suffragist cause, they exhibited their art collections to raise funds for the movement. In honor of the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, which celebrates the centennial of women's suffrage in the United States, this study of female collectors, patrons, and museum founders highlights the women who made a substantial impact on the cultural advancement of their generations.

One of the Smithsonian Institution’s nineteen museums owes its existence to some of the earliest women founders. In 1897, sisters Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Sarah Cooper Hewitt opened the Museum for the Arts of Decoration (now the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum) in New York. Their grandfather Peter Cooper was the industrialist and inventor who had established the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a free school for adults, in 1853. The Hewitt sisters founded their museum as part of Cooper Union and curated its collection of drawings, prints, textiles, furniture, and decorative art objects, which they had acquired in the United States and Europe. They aimed to create a "practical working laboratory," where students and artists could interact with the objects and be inspired by the designs.

A few years later, in 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Boston mansion, Fenway Court, to the public. Isabella Stewart was married to the prominent banker and civic leader John Lowell Gardner, who shared her interest in art collecting and traveling. After his death in 1898, she carried out their plans to build a private museum in the style of a Venetian palace with an inner garden courtyard.  In her last will, she instructed that Fenway Court (now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) would be for "the education and enjoyment of the public forever."

Ultimately, Isabella Stewart Gardner amassed a collection of nearly 3,000 objects that includes fine and decorative art from America, Europe, and Asia. Its treasures span classical antiquity and the Renaissance to the modern art of her own day. Not only did she collect art, but she also supported the influential art historian Bernard Berenson, who advised her collecting practice. She was also a patron of the artists James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Anders Zorn, who created remarkable portraits of her. Zorn's first commission from Gardner is an 1894 etching that depicts her seated in an Italian "scabello" armchair, which appears to merge in the shadow of an opulent drapery. She is dressed in a stately, long black dress and fur mantle with a plumed headpiece that echoes the coat of arms in the background.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Anders Leonard Zorn, 1894, etching on paper, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (NPG.91.34)

Like Isabella Stewart Gardner, Katherine Sophie Dreier was both a collector and a patron. Together with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Dreier established the Société Anonyme in New York City. She later added the subtitle “Museum of Modern Art: 1920” to commemorate the year it was founded. With Duchamp's assistance, Dreier became the driving force behind this first "experimental museum" of contemporary art in America. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she organized and funded an extensive schedule of programs, exhibitions, and publications that featured over seventy American and international artists. In 1941, Dreier and Duchamp promised the Société Anonyme’s collection of more than 1,000 modernist works to the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. Although Dreier was not successful in establishing an independent museum, the Société Anonyme served in part as a model for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Around the 1930s, women patrons actively launched some of New York's leading museums: the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In 1929, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller invited her friends Lillie Plummer Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan to join her in founding the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), as a way to support contemporary artists. The three women selected A. Conger Goodyear as president of the board of trustees, and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. as the museum’s director. MoMA established a canonical modern art collection, which it augmented with a program of avant-garde exhibitions from America and abroad. As the museum grew, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller continued to play a pivotal role. In addition to donating over 2,000 works and providing acquisition funds, she acted as treasurer and trustee. Furthermore, she collected nineteenth-century folk art, which she gave to Colonial Williamsburg in 1939 and was transferred to the newly-built Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in 1957.

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art turned down sculptor and patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s offer to donate her collection of modern American art, she took matters into her own hands. In 1930, she founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, contributing about 700 works to its core collection. Under its first director Juliana Force, the museum became an influential center for American art. Indeed, the founder had wanted her museum to be "devoted both to assembling the best of American art past and present and to fostering the work of living artists, particularly those working in avant-garde styles." Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's long-term commitment to living artists is exemplified by this 1968 bronze cast after the 1916 original portrait bust, which she commissioned from the struggling young artist Jo Davidson.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, by Jo Davidson, 1968 cast after 1916 original, bronze sculpture, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (NPG.68.7)

A portrait commission led to the founding of another major New York City museum. The artist and collector Baroness Hilla Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, who was from an aristocratic family in Alsace, then part of Germany, had immigrated to the United States in 1927. When she painted the businessman Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1928, the two became friends and collaborators. Rebay convinced Guggenheim to begin collecting abstract art. As his advisor, she connected him to artists in Europe and eventually helped him acquire the more than 700 works that would form the basis of his museum. In 1939, he named Rebay the first director of the new Museum of Non-Objective Painting (today the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).

Rebay curated the museum's American and European exhibitions, and wrote about and lectured on abstract art. In 1943, Guggenheim and Rebay commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to build the innovative, spiraling museum building that opened in 1959. She established the Hilla von Rebay Foundation in 1967 to "foster, promote, and encourage the interest of the public in non-objective art."  Rebay's art collection and archive became part of the Guggenheim Museum after her death that same year. A 2005 retrospective exhibition of Rebay's artwork highlighted her pivotal role in founding the Guggenheim Museum.

Solomon R. Guggenheim's niece Peggy (Marguerite) Guggenheim shared his passion for abstract art, including Cubism and Surrealism. The gallerist, collector, and patron opened the Art of This Century Gallery in New York in 1942. A combined museum and commercial gallery, Art of This Century exhibited European and American artists, and gave Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko their first solo shows. During World War II, Guggenheim went even further in her role as patron, and assisted many artists in their escape from Nazi-controlled areas of Europe to America.

By 1947, Guggenheim decided to close her New York gallery and move back to Europe. She had spent many years on the continent becoming acquainted with the work of avant-garde artists like Man Ray, who photographed her in 1925. This print came from a photo session for an article about influential foreigners residing in Paris in the Swedish weekly Bonniers Vickotidnig. Guggenheim is shown in an elegant cloth-of-gold evening dress by Paul Poiret and a headdress by Vera Stravinsky.

Peggy Guggenheim, by Man Ray, 1925, gelatin silver print, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. ©2000 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society, NY/ ADAGP, Paris (NPG.84.120)

In 1948, Peggy Guggenheim was invited to display her modern art collection in its own pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She seized the opportunity to show the American Abstract Expressionists, who had never been publicly exhibited in Europe. In 1949, she moved to Venice, where she purchased an eighteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal called the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. In forming her collection of avant-garde art, Guggenheim had consulted with the artist Marcel Duchamp and the art historian Herbert Read. In 1951, she opened the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni to the public. For her important cultural contributions, she was nominated as an Honorary Citizen of Venice in 1962. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection opened in 1980 under the management of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, to which she had bequeathed her art collection and palazzo, stipulating that the artworks remain in the Venetian residence.

Like Peggy Guggenheim, the collectors and patrons Anne Tracey Morgan and Marjorie Merriweather Post founded museums in stately residences. They also shared a common interest in French history and culture. Anne Tracey Morgan was a philanthropist who supported relief efforts for France during and after World War I and World War II. In 1929, Morgan presented a seventeenth-century palace museum to France, which became the Musée National de la Cooperation Franco-Américain du Château de Blérancourt. Its collection focuses on the historical, cultural, and artistic relations of our two nations from the seventeenth century to the present. In 1932, she became the first American woman to be appointed as a commander of the French Legion of Honor.

Marjorie Merriweather Post was a philanthropist who likewise received the French Legion of Honor for funding the construction of field hospitals in France during World War I. Post was an astute businesswoman who expanded her family's Postum Cereal Company to form the General Foods Corporation, which she directed until 1958. She purchased the 1920s Georgian-style Hillwood mansion in Washington, D.C. in 1955, and opened it as a museum in 1977. Post hoped her rare collection of eighteenth-century French and Russian imperial fine and decorative art "would inspire and educate the public." The Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens includes exceptional portraits of European and American historical figures, as well as Post's own portrait commissions of herself and her family members. Alfred Cheney Johnston's photograph of young Marjorie Merriweather Post shows her great poise in a formal gown and feather headdress and veil, which she wore when received by King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in 1929. Callot Soeurs, a woman-owned fashion design house in Paris, created her presentation at court dress.

Marjorie Merriweather Post, by Alfred Cheney Johnston, 1929, gelatin silver print, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Francis A. DiMauro (NPG.20011.92)

The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C. also owes its existence to a forward-thinking woman collector and patron. In 1981, Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and her husband Wallace F. Holladay incorporated NMWA. After renovating the historic Masonic Temple, they opened the museum in 1987. The couple had begun collecting women's artworks in the 1960s, when scholars and the public were beginning to recognize that women were underrepresented in major museum collections and exhibitions. Today, the collection includes over 4,500 works of fine and decorative art by American and international women artists that span the sixteenth century to the present. NMWA’s exhibitions, programs, and research library aim to advance women in the visual, literary, and performing arts. In 2006, Wilhelmina Cole Holladay received the National Medal of Arts from the United States and the Legion of Honor from France.

Women did not limit their activities to Europe and cities on the East Coast. They also created museums across the United States, in addition to funding and organizing "museums-without-walls" at fairs and international expositions, and contributing to charitable organizations. Portraits played an important role in reinforcing their status as art collectors and founders of museums. One can discover further portraits and biographies of notable women in the Catalog of American Portraits (CAP). In 1966, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery founded the CAP, a national portrait archive of historically significant subjects and artists from the colonial period to the present day. The public is welcome to access the online portrait search program of more than 100,000 records from the museum's website: Catalog of American Portraits.

Patricia H. Svoboda, Research Coordinator
Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

Portraits of Women Patrons:
Portrait of Sarah Cooper Hewitt in French Costume, by J. Carroll Beckwith, 1899, pastel crayon on paper mounted on linen, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, Bequest of Erskine Hewitt (1938-57-890). https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18351229/

Eleanor Garnier Hewitt, by Antonia de Bañuelos, 1888, oil on canvas, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, Bequest of Erskine Hewitt (1938-57-737). https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/objects/18350779/

Isabella Stewart Gardner, by John Singer Sargent, 1888, oil on canvas, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, 1924 Bequest of Isabella Stewart Gardner (P30wI). https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/10867

Self-Portrait, by Katherine S. Dreier, 1911, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier (1952.30.6). https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/48054

Portrait of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Abby Greene Aldrich), by Robert Brackman, 1941, oil on canvas, Private collection, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
http://www.artfixdaily.com/artwire/release/1414-the-abby-aldrich-rockefeller-folk-art-museum-to-hold-60th-anniver

Self-Portrait at 14, by Hilla Rebay, August 1904, drawing, Hilla von Rebay Foundation Archive, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York, NY (M0007). https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/findings/discovering-baroness-searching-hilla-rebays-past

Portrait of Miss Anne Morgan, by Walter Dean Goldbeck, c. 1905-1925, oil on canvas, Musée National de la Cooperation Franco-Américain du Château de Blérancourt, FR , Donation of Mrs. Wood, the niece of the sitter (59C 24 or 53C 24).
http://musee.louvre.fr/bases/lafayette/notice.php?lng=1&idOeuvre=490&vignette=oui&nonotice=1&no_page=1&total=1&texte=&titre=anne%20morgan&localisation=&periode=&artiste=goldbeck,%20walter%20dean&date=&domaine=&f=3110&images_sans=sans&nb_par_page=36&tri=Nom&sens=0

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, by Michele Mattei, color photograph, "You Are Invited: The National Museum of Women in the Arts Celebrates 25 years," National Museum of Women in the Arts and usairwaysmag.com, March 2012, p. 66, ill. https://nmwa.org/sites/default/files/shared/finalusairwayssection_lowres.pdf

Bibliography:
Dreier, Katherine S., Marcel Duchamp, and George H. Hamilton. Collection of the Société Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1950.

Friedman, B.H., and Flora Miller Irving. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978.

Guggenheim, Peggy. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict. Foreword by Gore Vidal; Introduction by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. New York: Universe Books, 1979.

Holladay, Wilhelmina Cole. A Museum of Their Own: National Museum of Women in the Arts. With contributions by Philip Kopper. New York: Abbeville Press, 2008.

King, Catherine and Dianne Sachko Macleod. "Women as Patrons and Collectors." Grove Art Online. Oxford University Press, 2018: http://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7002022267

Masinter, Margery F. Sarah and Eleanor: The Hewitt Sisters, Founders of the Nation's Design Museum. New York: Cooper Hewitt Museum, 2016.

Morgan, Anne. The American Girl: Her Education, Her Responsibility, Her Recreation, Her Future. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1915.

Kert, Bernice. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family. New York: Random House Trade Paperback, 2003.

Stuart, Nancy Rubin. American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post. New York: Villard Books, 1995.

Tharp, Louise Hall. Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1965.

Vail, Karole P.B., ed. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting: Hilla Rebay and the Origins of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. With contributions by Bashkoff, Tracey Bashkoff,  John G. Hanhardt, and Don Quaintance. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2009. 

Pioneering Women Photographers in Africa: Constance Stuart Larrabee

Constance Stuart with Ndebele men, South Africa, circa 1936-1945,
EEPA 1998-060866

The Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives (EEPA) is pleased to share the Constance Stuart Larrabee collection.  One of the most researched photographers at the EEPA, Larrabee’s photographic collection depicting Africa will soon be available online.  This large collection, dating from 1935 to 1988, includes over 9,000 negatives, 3,000 silver gelatin photographic prints, two of Larrabee's cameras, numerous scrapbooks, and manuscript materials, including correspondence, articles, and more! 

As part of the Pioneering Women Photographers in Africa project (an article about the project, published on the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative website, is here), the EEPA staff recently digitized over 5,700 large format black and white negatives shot by Larrabee in South Africa, previously uncatalogued and inaccessible to the public.  

Plans are underway to process Larrabee’s remaining manuscripts and her extensive office files, which will provide insights into her photographic practice after leaving South Africa and her extensive work with exhibitions and publications in the United States.

Ndebele mother and child, South Africa, 1947, EEPA 1998-060403

Born in 1914, Larrabee has played an indelible role in advancing the professionalization of women photographers, especially in Africa.  The majority of her photographs document South Africa, where she was raised.  Her socially conscious photography informed the wider world about the state of education, housing, government, religion and employment in Africa.  But mostly she conveyed the spirit and beauty of Africa; her work is clearly devoted to this great continent and the people who live there.    

Three boys in Basuto (Lesotho), 1941, EEPA 1998-062667

Educated at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Photography in London (1933-1935) and at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in Munich (1935-1936), Larrabee developed solid technical skills and a style that was influenced by the avant-garde work of the Bauhaus artists. Her camera of choice was the Rolleiflex, which she used throughout her career.   

Ndebele child, circa 1936-1949, EEPA 1998-060445

Upon returning to South Africa in 1936, Larrabee set up her own studio, the Constance Stuart Portrait Studio, in Pretoria.  There she photographed many leading cultural and political figures of the period.  In the late 1930s, Larrabee began photographing the peoples of South Africa, but soon left her homeland to serve as South Africa’s first woman war correspondent in World War II.  She worked with the South African Sixth Division in the Italian Appenines, and with the American 7^thArmy in France, writing articles and sending images for publication in the magazine Libertas.  

Recently donated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art to the EEPA, many of Larrabee’s World War II photographs are now available for research.  These images provide insight into Larrabee’s experiences during this period and reveal an evolution of style; a maturity that would inform her photography for the rest of her life.  

Following the war, Larrabee returned to South Africa and increasingly photographed the peoples of the country.  She traveled to such locations as Basutoland (now Lesotho), Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Johannesburg, Natal province, Soweto, Swaziland, Transkei, eastern Transvaal, the Umzimkulu Valley and Zululand.  She documented Afrikaners, Ndebele, Sotho, Xhosa, and others.  Her photographs convey a particular fascination with humanity, but also explore architecture, landscapes, and communities.    

Alan Paton teaching children, Natal, February 1949, EEPA 1998-060154

Larrabee published extensively, including a portfolio produced for the book, Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1948).

Royal visit of King George VI (in the white uniform) and Queen Elizabeth to Lesotho, 
1947, EEPA 1998-062832

  

In 1949 Larrabee married Colonel Sterling Larrabee and moved to Chestertown, Maryland, where she focused on photographing the coastal regions of New England and supporting the arts program of Washington College, ultimately establishing the Constance Stuart Larrabee Arts Center.  Her work was shown in major exhibitions including "The Family of Man" at the Museum of Modern Art, 1955; "Tribal Photographs" at the Corcoran Art Gallery, 1984; and "Go Well, My Child" at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), 1986.  

Larrabee passed away in 2000, leaving her photographic collection to the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives.  We hope that you enjoy her photographs as more are posted online.  You can view the collection's finding aid and explore her photographs here. 

Ndebele woman with hand over mouth, South Africa, circa 1936-1949, EEPA 1998-060339

Funding for the processing and digitization of Larrabee’s photographic collection has been provided by the Constance Stuart Larrabee Endowment, National Museum of African Art.

To obtain high-resolution images and permission for publication or exhibition, please contact the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art.

Eden Orelove, Photo Archivist
Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art