The story of Sheila and Sam Robbins’ collection begins in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where Sheila worked in one of the area’s grand hotels and Sam attended summer camp.
The beloved landscape stuck with them. Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Sam saw a painting of the White Mountains in a Cambridge shop and made an arrangement with the owner to purchase it in a series of payments.
After they married, Sheila and Sam frequently hiked the mountain trails and eventually bought a farm along the Saco River. They soon began learning more about the 19th-century artists who flocked to the region. They sought out the talented and often overlooked artists with strong connections to the White Mountains and New England — landscape and still-life painters, women artists, modernists. For the next 70 years, the couple collected painting after painting, one discovery feeding another, sometimes even acquiring entire estates or collections of an artist they loved.
“Sam notes that they never planned to become collectors. “We never visualized building something this important or building it for a museum,” he says. “It was just having fun. Like going fishing, looking for gems.”
The grandson of a Russian immigrant, Sam worked hard with Sheila to afford the art they loved — he a financial adviser and she a piano teacher. As the collection and its prominence grew through exhibitions, the couple recognized the importance of finding it a permanent home. Recently, they gave 70 paintings to PEM with a pledge to donate the remainder of the collection, approximately 1,000 works.
PEM staff Adam Brooks and Sarah Chasse documenting the paintings in the couple’s home. Photo by Dinah Cardin/PEM.
"I’m amazed by their collecting journey, their enthusiasm and their generosity,” says Austen Barron Bailly, The George Putnam Curator of American Art. “We’re honored that the Robbins family celebrates PEM as the ideal museum for sharing these American paintings with a wide public. This really is a landmark gift, because so many of the artists and subjects are not yet represented at the museum. Now with our expanded holdings we can develop new projects and continue to build our American art collection."
On view now are a dozen highlights by such artists as Benjamin Champney, Karl Kriaths, Marguerite Pearson and Ambrose Webster in the first-floor American art galleries.
"I’ve loved them my whole life and when we made the decision, it was happy and sad. Mostly happy,” says Sheila. “I’m thrilled it’s going to a good place. Of all the places I could think of, the Peabody Essex Museum is the best."
Editor’s Note: Sam Robbins recently told Malcolm Gay of The Boston Globe:
"They had to be cheap, dirty, beat-up, and nobody wanted them…Oh, and another thing: They had to be a masterpiece."
Find the rest of the story HERE.
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