By Jean Allman Gilmore

This article was published in Museum News, July/August issue.

Excerpted from Collection Conundrums: Solving Collections Management Mysteries, edited by Rebecca A. Buck and Jean Allman Gilmore and published by the American Association of Museums, May 2007.

To give context to works of art in its collection, the Brandywine River Museum accumulated a small number of objects of artist’s memorabilia but did not face great challenges in cataloguing, housing or accounting for them; they were simply tracked as part of the library collection. In 1994, however, this situation changed with the bequest of artist N. C. Wyeth’s house and studio from his daughter Carolyn. Suddenly, the museum’s collection expanded six-fold to include a wealth of historic artifacts, including props, costumes and artist’s materials; books, motion picture films and photographs; furniture, household goods and thousands of large and small items from the family’s daily life. As registrar, I was accustomed to accessioning one or a few—only on the rare occasion a few hundred—objects at a time, assigning and affixing an accession number to each one, completing an accession sheet, setting up an object file with ownership documents and reporting accessions quarterly to the board of trustees for acceptance into the permanent collection. I now faced the task of accessioning nearly 10,000 diverse, historic artifacts, a situation akin to discovering an eight-foot polar bear in the parlor. Taming the huge beast demanded a fresh strategy. I started with the Wyeth studio.

When we first entered N. C. Wyeth’s studio in 1995, it seemed untouched since the artist himself had walked out of it for the last time in October 1945. Of course, we knew this was not the case. For one thing, an estate appraiser had been through, pulling objects out of cupboards and drawers and moving things around. And we knew that the studio had been used off and on over the years by other members of this artistic family; Carolyn Wyeth taught art classes there for many years, for example. We knew also that certain key items from the studio had been moved to Harrisburg in the 1970s to recreate N. C. Wyeth’s studio for an exhibition at the Pennsylvania State Museum. The Miss-Havisham’s-dining-room aspect of the studio resulted from the fact that it had not been modified, renovated or even cleaned very often over the years. It had received basic maintenance to keep the roof sound and the furnace functioning, but shelves of books and chests and stacks of materials were still roughly where they had been in N. C. Wyeth’s time.

Dirt and pest damage were key enemies to combat. Books, for example, had a thick layer of dust on the top edge, making us reluctant to open them to place numbers inside and collect basic catalogue information lest we scatter the dirt among the pages. A prop and frame storage room attached to the rear of the studio had suffered water damage, collapsing the floor under a loaded bookcase. Repairing that breach and closing other entryways to varmints was the first item on the agenda of our facilities maintenance staff, who sought the services of a restoration carpenter to make repairs in keeping with the style and appearance of the historic structure.

To tackle the enormous task of accessioning studio contents, we acquired a computer and a collections management database and hired Ruth Power. We told her the job would be data entry, but it turned out to involve much more, including such tasks as vacuuming mouse nests from inside trunks and cabinets. Her most startling encounter occurred as she pulled books off the shelf over the collapsed floor to make way for the carpenter and found two peacefully sleeping snakes. Amazingly, she returned the next day to continue assigning and affixing numbers to objects one by one, measuring them, photographing them and creating a record for each in the database.

We contracted with conservators to remove the grime of decades and pack each item for temporary storage. Technicians from the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts performed initial cleaning and produced a preliminary conservation assessment of the books. Objects Conservator Kory Berrett set up a field conservation lab in the anteroom, placing a portable utility sink outside for washing objects because there was no running water at the studio. Kory’s wife, Pat Keller, a historian and freelance curator, assisted him in processing the objects and added valuable information to the database, identifying makers, materials, uses and dates wherever possible. Her expertise nicely supplemented our staff curators, who are exclusively art historians.

Eventually, everything was recorded, washed, assessed and packed away. Objects made of organic materials were placed in a freezer truck, rented for the occasion, to rid them of insect infestations.

Christine Podmaniczky, our associate curator who had for several years been assembling a catalogue raisonné of N. C. Wyeth’s work, took over management of the studio. She arranged for further conservation and the repair of items that were to be displayed in the recreated studio and returned materials to their 1945 places, as shown in archival photographs, which someone with great foresight took soon after the artist’s death. Storage space was created in the attic of the barn on the premises for those materials not included in the studio’s final presentation.

The studio opened to the public in the summer of 1996, and Ruth Power moved her data entry operation to the N. C. Wyeth house. Because the house had been continuously occupied by Wyeth family members, objects there did not know the same level of benign neglect as those in the studio. We discarded post-1945 items, such as television sets, and proceeded with conservation on an individual basis rather than as a full-scale campaign. The house was added to the public tour in 1997.

Our approach to cataloguing this mass of material was simply to begin at one end and work to the other. Ruth created an individual data record for each item as well as “set” records where needed to connect objects that together composed a unit. She recorded basic object information, original location (even though the object might have been moved by family members or by the estate appraiser) and the box into which it was packed for temporary storage. As the studio was reassembled, locations were updated to reflect assigned exhibition or storage areas.

We created a collection separate from the permanent collection, assigning to these objects the prefix NCWS for N. C. Wyeth Studio, followed by 1995 (the year in which we expected to take ownership) and sequential numbers thereafter.* Occasionally, when we came to a large group of items, such as glass lantern slides, we gave them the same number and added a fourth element for individual items; for example, NCWS.1995.1825.1–444. We did this to allow us to move ahead and return later to complete individual cataloguing. It also made it easier to bring together like items that had been scattered over the years.

Physical files have been created only for documents related to the bequest and for items that have received further conservation or research. Basic catalogue and accession files of this collection, however, exist only in (well backed up!) electronic form.

We continue to receive gifts to the studio collection from members of the Wyeth family: Mrs. N. C. Wyeth’s formal dresses; N. C.’s smock, palette and firearm and edged weapon collection; and the teddy bear of one of the children, among other donations. These gifts are received by a variation of the standard gift agreement, which states that they are given to the studio collection. Unless there is a gift of unusual interest, these acquisitions are reported to the board of trustees informally, via the director’s annual “status of collections” report. The entire house, studio and contents were presented, without being itemized, to the board as an acquisition in 1996. Any objects turning up later, as well as subsequent gifts, are deemed to have been included in the original board resolution to accept the collection.

The accessioning of the studio collection was an eye-opening, mind-expanding experience. The very acquisition of all these things made me more receptive to the small collection of artifacts we had received earlier from the dissolution of the Maxfield Parrish Museum. We had delayed accessioning the Parrish objects while we considered whether another museum might be a more logical home for them because they did not fit our collection. Once we had accessioned materials just like them in the studio, however, their value as support for our art collection became more apparent. I then defined an artifact collection to accommodate them and other small objects related to works in the art collection that we had acquired over the years.

Yet in my thinking, the museum’s permanent collection does not include the studio or artifact collections. If asked the size of the museum’s collection, I would report 3,185, not 14,037, counting only the works of art, not the multitude of miscellany in the studio collection. It is, however, an important part of the museum’s holdings, vital to the interpretation of the N. C. Wyeth house and studio and held in trust with equal importance as the works of art. We continue to treat objects in the studio collection professionally, conserving them as required, tracking their movements and accounting for them with periodic inventory checks. The Brandywine River Museum is still an art museum, albeit one blessed with fascinating historic structures and artifacts.

From this experience I learned that there is no substitute for clearly thought-out collecting guidelines; however, institutional authorities should judiciously massage and tweak those guidelines when the opportunity to extend and enhance their museum presents itself. I discovered that advances in technology can ease the process of assimilating a large, diverse group of objects. I learned that a registrar must be both flexible and courageous in the face of change. And I learned that a good system of processing objects is a good system, no matter what the objects may be.

Note* Although we accessioned the bequest as a 1995 acquisition, ownership was not legally transferred until 1996. We elected to retain the number 1995 for already accessioned objects, rather than remove and repaint numbers on thousands of objects. Works of art that came with the bequest had not yet been accessioned and so were given 1996 numbers in the permanent collection sequence and reported to the board of trustees in the appropriate quarter. Our sophisticated database accommodates these irregularities. Our original intent was to number items in the N. C. Wyeth House with the prefix NCWH; however, it soon became apparent that over the years objects had migrated from one building to the other. Since we had no functional need to make a distinction between house and studio, all objects received the same prefix.