John Wilmerding

John Currie Wilmerding Jr. (April 28, 1938 – June 6, 2024) was an American professor of art, collector, curator and author of books on American art.

Early life Wilmerding was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 28, 1938, and was descended from prominent families in old New York City social circles. His parents were John Currie Wilmerding Sr. (1911–1965), a vice president in the personal trust division of Bankers Trust Company, and Lila Vanderbilt (née Webb) Wilmerding (1913–1961). He had two siblings, James Wilmerding and Lila Wilmerding. the daughter of Samuel Agar Salvage and widow of Frank Lyon Polk Jr.

His maternal grandparents were James Watson Webb (1884–1960) and Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), co-founders of the Shelburne Museum, which showcases the family's "collection of collections" of early American homes and public buildings, including a general store, meeting house, log cabin, and a steamship. His great-grandfather, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife, Louisine Waldron Havemeyer, were also art collectors who bequeathed a large group of their European and Asian works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His dissertation was on American marine painting.

Career After graduating from Harvard, he taught art history at Dartmouth College from 1966 until 1977. He served as Christopher Binyon Sarofim Professor of American Art at Princeton University.

In 2016, the Walton Family Foundation and Alice Walton granted $10 million to the National Gallery of Art to establish the John Wilmerding Fund for Education in honor of Wilmerding's contributions to the Gallery and to art history. He died of congestive heart failure in Manhattan, on June 6, 2024, at the age of 86.

Art collection Wilmerding began collecting art while still a student at Harvard, purchasing the 1857 painting Stage Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor by Fitz Hugh Lane during his senior year for $3,500.

At the May 2004 opening of the National Gallery of Art's exhibit American Masters From Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection, Wilmerding announced that his entire collection would remain at the Gallery in perpetuity, His contribution broadened the Gallery's holdings by adding many examples of types of works that the Gallery had not yet managed to acquire.

Publications A History of American Marine Painting (Peabody Museum of Salem, 1968) Robert Salmon, Painter of Ship & Shore (Peabody Museum of Salem, 1971) Winslow Homer (Praeger Publishers, 1972) Important Information inside: The Art of John F. Peto and the Idea of Still-Life Painting in Nineteenth-Century America (National Gallery of Art, 1983) American Art (Pelican History of Art) (Puffin, 1976) American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art (Gramercy, 1980) American Marine Painting (Harry N. Abrams, 1987) Andrew Wyeth—The Helga Pictures (Harry N. Abrams, 1987) Paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane (Harry N. Abrams, 1988) Frank W. Benson—The Impressionist Years (Spanierman Gallery, 1988) American Views—Essays on American Art (Princeton University Press, 1993) The Artist's Mount Desert: American Painters on the Maine Coast (Princeton University Press, 1994) Compass and Clock: Defining Moments in American Culture (Harry N. Abrams, 1999) Signs of the Artist: Signatures and Self-Expression in American Painting (Yale University Press, 2003) Robert Indiana—The Artist and His Work 1955–2005 (Rizzoli, 2006) Tom Wesselmann—His Voice and Vision (Rizzoli, 2008) The Pop Object: The Still Life Tradition in Pop Art (Rizzoli, 2013)