Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to Receive 61

Local philanthropists and collectors Bernard A. and Barbro Osher have made a promised gift of 61 important works from their holdings of 19th- and 20th-century American art to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young and Legion of Honor. The de Young will host an exhibition of the gift, accompanied by a catalogue, in summer 2024.

Comprising 50 paintings, nine works on paper, and two sculptures, the donation represents the work of 39 artists. Among those included are well-known American artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Charles Sheeler, and Alexander Calder. They figure alongside lesser-known ones like Boston School painter William McGregor Paxton, the influential artist-teacher Frank Vincent DuMond, and the American Impressionists Edward Henry Potthast, Frederick Carl Frieseke, and Richard Edward Miller. The work of the latter group will enter the Fine Arts Museums’ collection for the first time.

“We are delighted that these works that we have relished collecting and displaying in our home will now be appreciated by visitors to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,” the Oshers said in a joint statement. “As the largest public arts institution in our city, with the finest survey collection of American art, it is fitting that these artworks join the collection here.”

The Oshers are longtime supporters of the Fine Arts Museums, having donated to the construction of the de Young’s Herzog & de Meuron–designed building, which opened in 2005. This led to the naming of a wing and the museum’s sculpture garden in their honor. Bernard Osher is also a past board president of the Fine Arts Museums Foundation.

In a statement regarding the Oshers’ gift, Fine Arts Museums Director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell said, “Their generous donation of more than 60 works of such expansive historic scope is one of the most transformative contributions in the Museums’ history. The Oshers have enriched the Museums’ representation of American art—long considered to be one of the greatest survey collections in the United States—with a gift reflective of a dynamic period when the United States ascended to global prominence both culturally and artistically.”

Below, a look at highlights from the gift, with comments by Lauren Palmor, associate curator of American art at the Fine Arts Museums, drawn from the forthcoming catalogue.

During the 1920s, Georgia O’Keeffe established herself as a leading American modernist with her quasi-abstract close-ups of flowers. Her first trip to New Mexico in 1929, where she soon thereafter permanently relocated, proved to be a turning point, as she began depicting the Southwestern desert environs in her signature style. Completed the following year, this work is part of a suite of some eight paintings of the Catholic San Francisco de Asís Mission Church in Taos, often called Ranchos Church. The painting “offers a rare view of the horizontal sweep of the façade of this significant New Mexico landmark,” Palmor writes.

One of the most iconic American painters of the late 19th century, Winslow Homer here depicts a man fly-fishing in the Adirondacks in Upstate New York in this canvas from the 1870s. As he did in works like his famed 1865 painting The Veteran in a New Field (now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), Homer applies the same “painstaking attention to detail” to even the most minute of passages in this work, from the fisherman’s rod to “the gaping tug of the buttons on his jacket as he bends his casting arm backward,” Palmor writes.

A constant traveler across Europe, John Singer Sargent met the central model for this watercolor, Rosina Ferrara (1861–1934), while traveling in Capri the year of its creation. Popular among local artists as a model, Ferrara and another girl are shown during a local practice of stringing onions in preparation for them to “be hung to preserve the vegetables throughout the winter,” according to the catalogue.

One of two sculptures in the donation, this elegant Calder mobile was first owned by French experimental composer Edgard Varèse, who received it as a gift from Calder. Long recognized as one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century, Calder produced his iconic mobiles starting in 1931. He “reimagin[ed] sculpture by introducing movement to a medium that had historically been stationary and impervious to external influence,” per Palmor.

This 1947 painting by Charles Sheeler is drawn from a mid-1940s suite of work, based on his photographs of a rubber plant in West Virginia that highlight oblique angles he observed. Less interested in their function than in their aesthetic value, Sheeler is in top form with this work.

“Spanish Bric-à-Brac Shop (1883) depicts an antiques dealer who invites the viewer to enter his sumptuous, stagelike shop, with its artfully arranged ceramics, metalwork, textiles, furniture, and paintings on view,” Palmor writes. William Merritt Chase drew from his frequent visits to—and purchases from—storefronts in Madrid’s open-air flea market, El Rastro.

With a thin horizon line where water and sky are almost indistinguishable, Blum’s Venetian Gondoliers appears to have been painted “as if the artist set up his canvas on the rear-facing seat of a gondola,” Palmor writes, adding that gondolas were “a common source of fascination for contemporary visitors to Venice,” where they stood in stark contrast to Europe’s increasingly industrialized environs.

Painted the year he moved to Charlottesville to take a teaching position at the Virginia Summer School of Art, this work by George Wesley Bellows shows the campus during a garden party, shown here “as an atmospheric, arcadian landscape—the air heavy with humidity as young men and women walk and flirt in the long grasses, shaded by trees,” Palmor writes.

A frequenter of the beaches of Brooklyn, Edward Henry Potthast was one of the leading painters of the American Impressionist movement, having lived in Paris from around 1886 until his relocation to New York in 1895. The painting shows Potthast’s take on how sunlight suffuses the sky and water on a hot summer day.