“The Seine, Right Bank, Paris,” a 1905 pastel and goache work by Edward Shinn (1876-1953), part of the Daywood Collection

Click here to view a slideshow of some notable works from the Daywood Collection at the Huntington Museum of Art. The slideshow is a multimedia companion piece to an article in the March 11, 2007 Sunday Gazette-Mail by Bob Schwarz, on the 300-piece Daywood Collection. It came to the museum in the mid-60s, along with restrictions, which museum officials are happy to live with to house such a body of work.

By Bob Schwarz

When Ruth Wood Dayton was shopping around her Daywood Collection in the mid-1960s, the Huntington Museum of Art was still in its early teens.

Dayton wasn’t wanting money, but she sought a guarantee that the new owner would properly house and show the American art that she and her late husband, lawyer Arthur Dayton, had taken so much care assembling.

Sunrise Museum, just getting started in Charleston and not yet a collecting museum, said no thanks. West Virginia University, decades away from its current plans for an art museum, passed too. The Huntington Museum got the 300-piece Daywood Collection after agreeing to build a big new wing and display highlights from the collection six months a year.

In a single stroke, Huntington gained paintings by big-league American artists whose works you could see in major museums across America: Childe Hassam, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Everett Shinn, Ernest Lawson, Charles Burchfield, Andrew Wyeth, William Glackens.

It was a coup - except for one thing. The obligation to keep Daywood on the walls six months a year kept other works off the walls…

To read the rest of this story, click here.

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