00:07 - Today we're speaking with

00:08 - Jennifer Thompson, the curator of European painting at the Philadelphia Art Museum.

00:13 - Jennifer, how did you first hear about Anna Stack?

00:16 - But when you work at the Philadelphia museum of Art,

00:18 - you encounter the stack name many, many times.

00:22 - The wheel stacks are associated with over 1500 objects in this collection.

00:28 - Anna's name, however, is only associated

00:30 - with about 500 gifts to the museum.

00:34 - So I was familiar with her, through working at the museum,

00:38 - but it was only quite recently that I began to investigate Anna

00:42 - and to try to learn a bit more about her life.

00:45 - Well, what do we know about Anna?

00:47 - Will Stack's early life?

00:49 - Well, this is one of the challenges.

00:51 - You know, Anna Will stack was born in 1814 here in Philadelphia.

00:55 - And like many women in the 19th century, she led what appears to be a fairly

01:01 - quiet life in terms of sort of newspaper accounts or financial records.

01:07 - So in that era, women lived lives largely devoted to their families

01:13 - and to sort of that the household, they had a great deal of agency

01:17 - within their, within that world, but they didn't

01:20 - often appear in the newspaper.

01:24 - Anna also doesn't seem to have left us any diaries or letters.

01:28 - So we really have to piece together

01:31 - information about her life from multiple sources.

01:34 - And for me, as a curator of the Art Museum, I, of course, began with her

01:39 - collection, and I used it to kind of tease out

01:43 - some information about her life.

01:46 - And largely that means understanding when and where she might have.

01:50 - She and her husband, William, acquired their works of art,

01:54 - and when and where they showed them, in the city of Philadelphia.

01:57 - And that's given us something of a, maybe a trail of breadcrumbs

02:02 - through which we can begin to piece together,

02:05 - portions of Anna and her husband William's life.

02:09 - How did Anna

02:09 - first become interested in the art world?

02:12 - Well, we're not sure about that.

02:15 - She had a very good education.

02:17 - We know her father paid for her to go to attend the Bussell Town.

02:20 - Academy from age six onward.

02:23 - Her father was a prominent citizen in Philadelphia.

02:27 - He was a director

02:28 - of the Bank of Philadelphia, was involved in a number of organizations here.

02:33 - And they have a library of 50 books, which for the early 19th

02:37 - century was somewhat distinguished.

02:40 - So she had a very strong education.

02:43 - But her first exposure to art is unknown.

02:47 - It's an unknown to us.

02:49 - We do know that she lived not far from the Pennsylvania.

02:54 - Academy of the Fine Arts, which had opened in 1805.

02:59 - They had an annual exhibition from 1811 onward.

03:03 - So I would imagine that she attended exhibitions,

03:06 - you know, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

03:09 - Throughout her, you know, very young adulthood

03:12 - and certainly, I would imagine, during her married life,

03:16 - when she and her husband began to form their art collection.

03:20 - Yeah. I wanted to touch on that.

03:22 - We know that she built this collection with her husband, William.

03:24 - What do we know about him?

03:27 - So William Penn.

03:28 - Well, stack, was just about roughly her age.

03:32 - She was two years older than he was.

03:34 - They married in 1841.

03:37 - At the time, he was working for a merchant in Philadelphia.

03:41 - In the year of their marriage, her father, Theophilus Harris, passed away.

03:47 - And we think she inherited some money from him

03:50 - that enabled William to be able to open a saddlery

03:54 - and a hardware store in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia.

03:58 - It was on North Third Street.

04:00 - And that, business started

04:04 - to grow throughout the 1840s,

04:08 - so that by the 1860s,

04:10 - his one of the most significant,

04:13 - providers of supplies for the Union Army.

04:17 - So he had a exclusive contract to be supplying buttons and insignia,

04:23 - horse bits and pin fire cartridges to the Union Army.

04:28 - And that that contract, seems to have certainly kind of

04:32 - helped the, the families, sort of financial prospects.

04:37 - What was the art market like

04:39 - in the late 19th century, when the wool stocks began collecting?

04:43 - So when they when they were initially collecting,

04:45 - and we think they began sometime probably in the 1850s,

04:50 - you would largely buy art from an exhibition,

04:53 - so you might attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

04:56 - and buy one of the works on display there.

05:00 - There were a handful of dealers that were just

05:02 - sort of forming galleries, in the city of Philadelphia.

05:06 - But the middle of the 19th century

05:09 - is a moment when the art gallery and dealer system

05:14 - that we know today was just getting off the ground.

05:18 - So it wasn't quite as robust.

05:20 - As, as we would we would, you know, find things, today.

05:25 - What were some of the earliest acquisitions in their collection?

05:29 - So I'm actually standing in front of one of their earlier acquisitions,

05:33 - which is a painting by a German artist, Carl.

05:36 - Friedrich Lessing, called The Robber and His Child.

05:39 - It's a work.

05:41 - Was painted in 1832.

05:44 - We know that the wheel stacks owned it by 1864.

05:47 - We aren't certain where they where they acquired it.

05:51 - It's a a painting the more typical of their collection in the sense that it,

05:56 - it tells a story. It has a strong narrative,

06:00 - aspect to it.

06:01 - So you see a, a a man who's seated on a mountain.

06:07 - There's something in his hand, pulled up to his head in despair.

06:11 - He's got his arm around his son.

06:13 - That's the sense that these, individuals are somewhat a social outcast.

06:17 - So they're not part of a community.

06:20 - The title robber and his child, tells

06:23 - gives us a sense that this man has had turned to thievery.

06:27 - Presumably to be able to support himself and his son and this,

06:32 - kind of, sense of compassion

06:36 - for someone who's fallen on hard times is a theme that we often

06:40 - find throughout works that the, but the will starts.

06:43 - Oh, then it was very common,

06:46 - at the time, which we might think of as being roughly the Victorian period.

06:51 - The sense of, compassion for others is, is a thread

06:55 - that we find, throughout art at that moment.

06:59 - What types of art interested them the most?

07:02 - So they abut a number of landscapes.

07:05 - They would go on to travel throughout Europe and where

07:08 - by a number of landscapes depicting European subjects.

07:12 - They also like moralizing stories, a handful of portraits.

07:17 - But but it was largely, paintings that told stories and that could

07:22 - transport you to sort of other lands, other moments in time.

07:26 - That seemed to appeal to and, you at the height of their collecting,

07:31 - do we know how many works were they across acquiring at one time?

07:36 - We know that they had 518 works.

07:40 - When Anna died, that's what the the collection that she left,

07:44 - to the art museum in the 1880s.

07:48 - She made an inventory or had an inventory made of her collection

07:51 - that described where everything was in the house.

07:54 - So we know that in their drawing room,

07:57 - the major room in which they would entertain families, friends and guests.

08:02 - They had 78 paintings and some of them very large scale.

08:07 - So I can only imagine that that room was installed with paintings

08:11 - hung frame to frame and had a real density, to it.

08:15 - So that gives us a bit of a flavor, for their, for their collection

08:20 - and then also a flavor of how art was displayed, at the time, which was not,

08:27 - the way we might

08:27 - think of it today on a white wall, whether to, paintings.

08:31 - But really, I kind of just, you know, prolific arrangement and variety

08:36 - and hung quite close together and maybe hung two,

08:39 - three high, on a wall.

08:42 - When you look at her collection today, what does her art

08:44 - collection reveal about her?

08:48 - One of the fascinating things to me about the Will start

08:51 - collection is that they were buying largely contemporary works.

08:55 - So things that were fresh off the artist's easel.

09:00 - And this is unique.

09:01 - It's like it would be like attending, you know, a contemporary art fair today,

09:05 - such as a freezer art puzzle, really taking kind of risk on young artists

09:10 - that might or might not, you know, go on to become, big names.

09:15 - So it's kind of fascinating to think of them as

09:18 - being essentially on the cutting edge of the art world.

09:22 - At the time.

09:22 - So they weren't buying sort of tried and true old master paintings,

09:28 - works by, say, Rembrandt, Rubens

09:31 - or a variety of other artists.

09:34 - They were really going for art that was of its, of their day.

09:39 - Very much of its, of its movement.

09:42 - You mentioned the painting behind you.

09:44 - Are there any other notable works that make up her collection

09:47 - so that

09:48 - there's a wide range of works in the collection?

09:51 - Obviously European artworks of around the 1840s, 1850s.

09:57 - They also have a strong collection of American paintings.

10:00 - They had a wonderful, portrait of George Washington

10:03 - that was done in lots of monochrome colors, that was meant to look

10:08 - as if it was actually a sculptural bust.

10:12 - The variety, particularly of of watercolors and drawings,

10:16 - as well as showing sort of majestic,

10:19 - American, American backing sites of the American, sort of landscape.

10:26 - They the wheel sets were prominent donors to an important of arcs here

10:32 - in the United States or in particularly in the Philadelphia area.

10:36 - And that was called the Great Central Fair of 1864,

10:41 - which was held it's also called the Sanitary Fair

10:44 - was held in Logan Square in the center of Philadelphia.

10:47 - And there's a fundraising,

10:50 - sort of,

10:51 - opportunity, meant to raise money for the Union Army, in particular

10:57 - for soldiers that had been injured in the Civil War.

11:01 - And at the time, the largest art exhibition

11:04 - ever organized in the United States was put in a tent in the middle

11:08 - of Logan Square and over a thousand paintings were shown there.

11:12 - Those paintings were just lent by a variety of collectors,

11:17 - including the will stacks, who lent 2021 works.

11:21 - And so it's it's a pretty exciting moment to think about Philadelphians, other

11:27 - people from Pennsylvania encountering

11:30 - works of art, perhaps for the first time.

11:33 - And we see it on such a large scale.

11:36 - So this is the kind of scale that you could only imagine,

11:40 - in London repair, I said that day.

11:43 - And we're quite proud of the fact that in Philadelphia, the great Central Fair,

11:48 - showed a thousand works, which was the largest of any of the,

11:51 - the sanitary fairs that were organized

11:54 - that far more than, New York, had had.

11:58 - So it was a point of pride for Philadelphia to be able

12:01 - to assemble so many paintings in one place.

12:04 - How did the Will stacks collection compare with other collections

12:07 - at the time in Philadelphia or the United States as a whole?

12:11 - So it was quite comparable.

12:12 - There were a number of other collectors in Philadelphia Isaac Lee, John

12:18 - Henry Gibson, Jay and Fell, who were also acquiring works.

12:23 - Initially the will start so largely buying American works

12:28 - the unlike some of their peers who were starting to buy European works.

12:33 - I think initially the West were pretty focused

12:35 - on the American and a fairly local art community.

12:40 - And that would change, of course, when it went to Europe, in the 1860s,

12:46 - there was a

12:47 - hesitation amongst American collectors,

12:51 - in the middle of the 19th century about buying European old Masters,

12:57 - because a number of sort of fakes and forgeries, were sent to the U.S,

13:02 - thinking that Americans wouldn't know any better,

13:06 - and that they would be sort of fooled by these copies of,

13:09 - you know, Leonardo, Michelangelo or any of these other well known artists.

13:14 - And many American collectors realized this.

13:17 - And so this was part of is against the Will Stack's interest

13:22 - in collecting the very latest art, because they could get to know the artists

13:26 - they were sure of the art was genuine, that it was authentic,

13:30 - that they weren't being sold something, that was sort

13:33 - of of a dubious, quality.

13:36 - Now we know her husband, William dies in 1870.

13:39 - What instructions that he lay out in regards to the collection after he passed

13:44 - to her,

13:45 - her husband had left his will, providing,

13:50 - actually a variety of

13:52 - of different gifts to Philadelphia institutions.

13:55 - And others quickly

13:57 - point out that he was very much involved in the Academy of Natural Sciences

14:00 - in Philadelphia.

14:01 - So he left them a sizable or he planned to leave them a sizable bequest.

14:06 - He was also involved in the Philadelphia School of Design for women,

14:10 - which is known today as the War College of Art and design.

14:14 - But he was also thinking very much about his collection,

14:17 - and so he laid a state of about $1 million, which he was

14:23 - had proposed that a quarter of that to about $250,000 would be given to the city

14:30 - and the state so that they could create a museum building

14:34 - where his collection, and that of many others could be shown.

14:38 - So he was very interested in giving his collection

14:43 - to his fellow citizens and then helping to create

14:47 - a museum building for it.

14:50 - Of course, you know, he passes away at age 54, in 1870,

14:55 - but and it goes on to, to live, outlive him for 22 years.

15:00 - So his, his will, which is starting to think, you know, we're very,

15:06 - very generous,

15:06 - you know, civic terms and very dedicated

15:10 - to really creating an art museum in Philadelphia.

15:14 - Doesn't ever get fulfilled because.

15:17 - And, so is his, you know, inherits the entire state.

15:21 - And then she goes on to, to make her mark,

15:25 - on, on the, you know, on the collection and on the the city's art world.

15:30 - Talk about that.

15:31 - What does she do when she inherits her husband's part of the collection?

15:36 - Yes. Well, one of the fascinating things, and it's, like, tragic, too, is that you,

15:41 - Anna and William, with their younger daughter Anna Gertrude

15:45 - had spent three years in Europe.

15:47 - And that's really that that those three years that they were in,

15:50 - you know, living in Italy and Germany,

15:53 - France and England were when the bulk of the collection was acquired.

15:57 - And there, you know, going

15:59 - and meeting artists there, buying things out of exhibitions in Europe.

16:04 - So they essentially had a three year art buying spree.

16:08 - When they come back to the U.S., it's because there's a war breaking out

16:12 - in Europe.

16:12 - The Franco-Prussian War is just about to get underway.

16:16 - William dies right after they get back home, perhaps sort of an illness

16:20 - he brought back.

16:21 - So he never gets to see the art collection that they created in their house.

16:26 - So, Anna, one of the first things that happens

16:28 - when Anna sort of gets through the initial period of grieving

16:32 - is that she takes these works that they've bought together in Europe,

16:35 - and then she installs them in their house, which was right

16:39 - on the edge of Rittenhouse Square.

16:41 - So she has since becomes the first curator of the collection

16:46 - in in terms of taking what the purchases and finding homes

16:50 - for them in the house and arranging them within the house.

16:54 - She is, I mentioned, lives

16:55 - for 22 years after William's death.

17:00 - This is where it becomes

17:02 - a particularly difficult to track her because she's a widow.

17:05 - She is not terribly engaged in a number of,

17:10 - these charities or other organizations in Philadelphia.

17:13 - I think she became very close to her family and to,

17:19 - into her son's domestic life.

17:21 - So it's hard to track her.

17:24 - But one of the fascinating things that happens

17:27 - is that when she passes away in 1892,

17:31 - Williams estate, which was valued at $1 million

17:34 - in 1870, has grown to $5 million.

17:38 - So it was very, very wisely invested.

17:41 - I can't help but think that Anna had some role in that.

17:44 - They had she had considerable real estate holdings.

17:47 - There were some stocks and bonds.

17:49 - So she must have been a very savvy investor and presumably

17:54 - also had some and some advisors,

17:57 - who helped her to, to grow the collection.

18:00 - But she's also, over that period of time and clearly

18:04 - been thinking about the art community in Philadelphia

18:08 - because she makes provisions in her will for the collection.

18:12 - And she, you know, as William had proposed,

18:15 - she gives the collection of 500 works to the city,

18:19 - but she also gives approximately $1 million

18:24 - for the care and upkeep of Memorial Hall, which was the building

18:29 - still survives today at the home of the Please Touch Museum.

18:33 - It was built in 1876 to house

18:36 - the art display at the Centennial Exposition.

18:40 - So that was a major change from William's death to Anna's,

18:43 - which is that suddenly

18:44 - there was a building in Philadelphia where Art could be and was shown

18:49 - that was where the that was the first home of the Pennsylvania museum.

18:53 - And School of Industrial Art.

18:56 - So she turned her attention

18:58 - to making sure that the building is in good repair.

19:02 - She's concerned that the labels on all of their works,

19:06 - you know, very clearly state that they're the will stop collection.

19:11 - And then she leaves a fund of $600,000,

19:15 - which in today's terms, that would be $15 million.

19:20 - And with that fund, she specifies that the city

19:24 - should go on to continue to acquire works of art,

19:28 - and that they should be works of art that would inspire people through beauty,

19:33 - through their skills, through sort of a certain degree of moralizing

19:37 - of character and stories and that,

19:41 - that is a very astonishing step for Anna to take.

19:46 - I've only found one other precedent,

19:49 - around that same moment of another woman doing that.

19:53 - And that's a New Yorker named Katherine Lorillard Wolfe,

19:56 - who passed away in the 1880s and left 140 paintings

20:00 - in $200,000, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

20:05 - So Anna is really at the forefront front of philanthropy and,

20:11 - you know, thinking about the art world in Philadelphia

20:14 - and thinking about the legacy that the little stacks might leave, to,

20:19 - not just to Philadelphians, but to those across

20:23 - the whole the whole region in the state of Pennsylvania.

20:26 - So she was incredible, for foresight on her part.

20:47 - So earlier you were standing in front of one of her paintings

20:49 - at the Philadelphia Art Museum,

20:51 - and I wanted to give our audience a chance to see more of her paintings

20:54 - in real life.

20:55 - So tell us about the work behind you.

20:58 - But I'm moved to stand in front of a work that was acquired with the fund.

21:03 - That and to establish.

21:04 - So I'm an son of Henry also was Tanner's Annunciation,

21:09 - which was acquired with the Will stack fund in 1899.

21:14 - So six years after six, seven years after,

21:19 - Anna's Anna's death,

21:21 - the Fairmount Park Art Association acquires this work, which is a much,

21:26 - much larger picture

21:28 - I think I should have mentioned with the friend of the last thing

21:30 - is a quite a relatively small picture that would fit quite nicely in a home.

21:36 - Right? This is a gallery picture.

21:40 - Henry, also a tenor, was a Philadelphia.

21:43 - He lived in Philadelphia.

21:44 - He trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

21:48 - before making his career in Paris.

21:52 - He found that there were many more opportunities

21:54 - for an artist of African descent,

21:58 - in, in Paris than there were in Philadelphia.

22:02 - He paints this of modern interpretation of the Annunciation,

22:07 - showing a woman from the Middle East, who's encountered,

22:12 - she's encountering the angel Gabriel, but

22:14 - he is, of course, just a shaft of light.

22:17 - And this is a work that's shown in Paris to great acclaim at the salon

22:22 - and then sent to Philadelphia to be shown where Tanner had been a student and

22:28 - and then is purchased with the Well Stack fund for the museum in Philadelphia.

22:34 - And it becomes the first work by Tanner to be purchased by a US museum.

22:40 - And, you know, one might imagine that maybe the will Stax

22:43 - had bumped into Tanner, in Paris because they they might have have,

22:48 - you know, potentially if she had she been living at that time,

22:52 - she might have, seen Tanner's work, in, in, at the salon.

22:57 - Tell us a little bit more about the works that were purchased with Anna's fund.

23:02 - She a group of sort of Philadelphia

23:05 - advisors and collectors in their own right.

23:08 - One of them being John G.

23:10 - Johnson, who would go on to acquire these in his own right, a great old master

23:15 - painting collection, which is shown, at the Philadelphia museum of Art.

23:21 - They sought to

23:24 - build out the will stack collection,

23:27 - and would do so in I by looking across time.

23:33 - To buy paintings so they would buy great works

23:36 - by noted much older painters.

23:39 - So artists like Thomas Gainsborough, Francisco Zurbaran,

23:44 - they were buying works by Peter

23:47 - Paul Rubens, the Henry, also a tenor behind me.

23:52 - So they were looking to to build out the history of,

23:56 - of art and history of painting, with a will stack with well stacked funds.

24:01 - And they bought, pictures that also often wear to very large scale.

24:05 - That worked quite well in Memorial Hall, in the little stack gallery

24:11 - and, and bought quite sensibly in the sense

24:15 - that they were buying things that would hold the test of time.

24:19 - Do any of her funds still remain today?

24:22 - So the funds are still active.

24:24 - We we use them to acquire, works of art.

24:28 - It's it continues to be an extraordinary resource,

24:32 - to this region and to the art world here in Philadelphia that there will stack,

24:37 - you know, fund created 130 years ago continues,

24:42 - to to enable us to buy works of art that can be enjoyed

24:47 - by the citizens of Philadelphia and the region.

24:50 - How widely recognized is Anna will stack and her collection today?

24:55 - So I think if you were to walk around the Philadelphia museum of Art

24:58 - and read the labels carefully, you'd see the will stack collection,

25:02 - or you'd see William or Will

25:05 - stack called out across the museum.

25:08 - You would very rarely see Anna's name,

25:11 - because when she left that fund, she had it.

25:15 - She said that the fund should be in her husband's name.

25:18 - So she was sort of honoring him, respecting and creating legacy for him

25:23 - by putting his name on all the works that would be acquired by the fund.

25:27 - So she's she's kind of the shadow heroine.

25:30 - Maybe we should say of of that fund.

25:33 - But you do have to dig deep to find information about her.

25:38 - It's something I've been working on for ten years or so.

25:41 - Others are thinking about her, particularly her involvement

25:46 - elsewhere in Philadelphia, such as at Trinity Memorial Church and and beyond.

25:51 - But we're still we're still learning more about her and bringing more visibility

25:56 - to kind of quiet sort of philanthropic efforts,

26:01 - that she that she brought to her to her age

26:05 - and to the legacy, she left legacy she left to this region.

26:10 - What lasting impact does her collection and her life have on the art community?

26:16 - Well, I think our lives are all enriched by the artworks

26:19 - that we can find here that's been acquired with with Will start fund.

26:23 - She's also an extraordinary

26:27 - example of what one individual can do,

26:31 - in sort of realizing the potential or realizing

26:35 - maybe that Philadelphia didn't have an art museum

26:39 - that was the equal of museums that could be found in Europe.

26:44 - In that day.

26:45 - And then she was able to, to make a difference

26:48 - and to do so in a very quiet, modest fashion.

26:52 - But, pleased that we're finally being able to sort of shine

26:56 - a light on other achievements and her accomplishments.

27:00 - We've been speaking with Jennifer Thompson, the curator of European

27:03 - painting at the Philadelphia Art Museum.

27:05 - Thank you.

27:06 - Thank you. Hey.