The Brooklyn Museum’s predecessor, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, opened its doors in 1897 in the Beaux-Arts building the museum still occupies today. Unlike the Museum’s current plan, American art did not have its own galleries; American paintings and sculpture were grouped together with works by European artists (see photo). With only a small permanent American collection at the time, the curator of Brooklyn’s Fine Art department worked with wealthy local collectors to organize loan exhibitions showcasing important works by American and European artists. Although American works were outnumbered by European examples, the American selections nevertheless represented a broad spectrum of periods and styles, such as early American portraiture, notably represented by the Pierrepont family’s George Washington by Gilbert Stuart; early nineteenth-century genre paintings including works by William Sidney Mount and John Quidor; a handful of Hudson River School landscapes by Louis Remy Mignot and Francis A. Silva; and numerous late nineteenth-century figure paintings and landscapes by George Inness, Ralph Blakelock, and Daniel Ridgeway Knight (see Knight’s The Shepherdess of Rolleboise in the back of the photo, still in the collection today.)
For both the 1897 and 1898 loan exhibitions, the installation was divided into two sections, on two different floors: European and Contemporary American paintings were arranged in today’s fifth-floor galleries, apart from the colonial and early American portraits, portraits of former Brooklyn Institute worthies and what were described rather dismissively as American “landscapes of great historic value,” which were installed in galleries on the third floor. This segregation demonstrated an inclination to distinguish works of current aesthetic interest from those considered at the time to be of merely antiquarian value. Before permanent collections were formed, these loans shows (which took place at other cultural institutions in the city as well) were a crucial means of bringing art to large audiences.
