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150 Years
of Print Collecting at the Smithsonian
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Old Masters in the New World
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A Fruit Piece, 1723
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Adoration of the Magi
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Empidocles
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Sibylla Hellespontica
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Portrait of Thomas Salinus
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View of Florence from the Boboli Garden
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Decorative panel from the chambers of Cardinal Bibbiena in the Vatican
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In 1849 the Smithsonian's Board of Regents voted to purchase the first collection of
prints to be acquired by an American public institution. The personal collection of
Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh, one of the board's members, it
included original prints by Dürer, Rembrandt, and other old masters, and many
reproductive engravings after paintings. The purchase--some 1,300 items for
$3,000--represented intelligently chosen prints not widely collected in this country at
the time. As Assistant Secretary Charles Coffin Jewett stated in the Smithsonian
Annual Report for 1850,
Engraving seems to be the only branch of the fine arts which we can, for the
present, cultivate. One good picture or statue would cost more than a large
collection of prints. The formation of a gallery of the best paintings, is, in this
country, almost hopeless. . . . It can hardly be doubted, that in no way, could this
Institution for the present do so much for every department of the fine arts,
without injury to other objects of its care, as by procuring a collection of
engravings, so full and so well chosen as that which now adorns its Library.
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