#Benjamin west engraving fidelia and speranza professional#
(It is Petersen’s 80-year-old mother who warns, “If anyone says they knew them, they’re lying.”) Although Ames sometimes visited the mansion daily, his professional discretion was complete. Nancy Ames Petersen, executive director of the Timken Art Gallery and a member of the board of directors of the Putnam Foundation, is the daughter of the late Walter Ames, the sisters’ attorney. Almost to the end, what they did, they did anonymously, although the staff and board of directors of the Fine Arts Gallery certainly knew who their benefactors were. Finally their great black limousine appeared in the plaza and Miss Amy and Miss Anne were ushered in, the chauffeur remaining with the equipage while the ladies made their ‘royal progress.’ ” These came before or after gallery hours. The late Julia Gethman Andrews, a Fine Arts Gallery employee during the sisters’ lifetimes, recalled their visits to the gallery as “in character always announced days in advance, it was an occasion planned for in detail - everything clean and shining, a fresh bouquet beneath their latest gift. When it was necessary for Amy to be at the downtown Bank of America, arrangements were made to admit her before the bank opened. Stories of the sisters’ reclusiveness are not exaggerated. Immediately these were successful, and Henry began to fabricate other articles for domestic use. Henry Putnam began to manufacture his bottle “cap,” which, foresightedly, he patented. Bartholomew a number of distinguished American works, including Eastman Johnson’s celebrated Cranberry Harvest, a Winslow Homer, the Benjamin West Fidelia and Speranza, a Frederic Remington, and a gorgeous melancholy landscape by George Inness. And the sisters’ gifts continue to radiate throughout the Timken Art Gallery, new purchases by the Putnam Foundation adding yearly to the growing list of Old Masters: the Petrus Christus Death of the Virgin with its angels ascending toward heaven bearing the Virgin’s soul the Pieter Brueghel Parable of the Sower that beckons the viewer into its luminous, infinite distances Rembrandt’s St. (Amy wrote in 1950: “I am allergic to funerals, and wish to be sure mine is simple, and that no one sees me.”) The Putnams’ earlier gifts (a total of 115) can still be seen in the San Diego Museum of Art, enriching that gallery’s collection.
Twenty years have passed since the last sister was buried, without ceremony, in a Greenwood Cemetery family plot. That gallery now houses a remarkable collection of art composed exclusively of Putnam purchases. Later, through the Timken family of the Timken roller bearing fortune, Ames acquired funds to build the Timken Art Gallery in Balboa Park. In 1950 San Diego attorney Walter Ames took over the sisters’ affairs and helped them to create the nonprofit Putnam Foundation, a move that would eventually secure all the Putnam paintings for San Diego. What happened between Amy and the handsome young gallery director, no one knew. The sisters’ acquisitions from that time on did not stay in town but instead traveled the nation, on loan to such prestigious institutions as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Washington’s National Gallery, Harvard’s Fogg, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Putnam paintings were no longer donated to San Diego.
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Then in the late ’40s, the Gallery’s first director fell out of Amy’s favor. Old Masters of quality became available at reasonable prices. The Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II in Europe liquefied the art market. "Young Man with a Cock's Feather in His Cap," by Rembrandt.
For a time after World War II, helped by Putnam contributions, San Diego’s Fine Arts Gallery (since 1978 the San Diego Museum of Art) became the largest holder of Old Masters this side of the Mississippi. They donated an El Greco a Goya a Van Dyck a glorious Murillo the Zurbarán Agnus Dei, from which the woolly Lamb of God, bound for sacrifice, gazes helplessly off the canvas at the viewer.
In 1938 the sisters began to lavish San Diego with Old Masters. They were zoo visitors, and contributed generously to the Zoological and Humane Societies. Only an occasional citizen glimpsed them. The wealthy, reclusive spinsters went to and from their Hillcrest mansion at Fourth Avenue and Walnut Street in a curtain-shrouded limousine. “If anyone tells you they knew them, they’re lying,” one longtime San Diegan says, when asked about the late Putnam sisters. Amy complained that Poland, who brought ceramics and prints, contemporary and Asian art to the gallery, had turned too much to modern art.Īmy, Anne, and Irene. "Death of the Virgin," by Petrus Christus.
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