SCAD museum receives grant to preserve portrait

By: Melissa Wheeler

Published: Friday, June 29, 2007, for The Chronicle

Link: http://www.thecampuschronicle.com/features/articles/070629d.cfm

The Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art was awarded a $10,000 conservation grant by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. The grant will assist with the preservation of a significant group portrait by John Smibert (c. 1688-1751).

The large oil painting (41 by 50 inches) is the “Portrait of Sir Francis Grant, Lord Cullen (died 1726) and his Family,” a version of a 1718-19 portrait by Smibert of the Grant family. It was painted in Scotland before the artist traveled to Italy and then immigrated to America around 1729, where he became known as the first major American portrait painter.

“The work is part of the SCAD Museum of Art’s core collection of American paintings,” said Maureen Burke, Ph.D., executive director of the museum. It is one of only two large group portraits by Smibert found in the United States (the other is “The Bermuda Group” of 1729-31 in the Yale University Art Gallery).

Smibert’s painting — along with other Colonial and Federal portraits in the SCAD Museum of Art, created by artists including Joseph Blackburn, Gilbert Stuart, Jeremiah Theus, Robert Feke and Robert Street — provides a glimpse of the origins of American artistic traditions. Later American pieces in the collection include work by artists such as William Merritt Chase, early 20th-century prints, and the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American art, which spans the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Assisting with the conservation of such a significant example of early American painting will benefit the larger college community as well as those students and faculty members engaged directly in the field of American art,” Burke said. “The conservation will permit its exhibition and make the painting more available for research and scholarship. For students to have direct encounters with significant works of art also enriches the artistic, educational and cultural offerings available to the campus and wider communities.”

The conservators estimate the project will require approximately 30 days. Proposed treatments consist of additional mold remediation, removal of varnish layers, removal of the canvas from the stretcher, fill losses and more.

For more information about the SCAD Museum of Art, visit www.scad.edu/museum.


Wheeler is media relations manager.