Glencairn Museum News | Number 3, 2020
Charles T. Little, Curator Emeritus of The Medieval Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Just as an entire community of people came together to build Bryn Athyn Cathedral in the 1910s, and again in the 1930s to build the Pitcairn family home, a broad network of people worked tirelessly to create Glencairn Museum, which opened to the public in 1982. In addition to the energetic efforts of the people of Bryn Athyn, many others came from farther afield to contribute their skills and expertise. Dr. Charles T. Little, Curator Emeritus in the Department of Medieval Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, remembers with great fondness his time studying the Pitcairn family’s collection during this very exciting period in Glencairn’s history. Recently, I had the opportunity to ask Chuck, as he is known by all, about his experiences working with the Glencairn collection.
The Pitcairn family’s connection to The Metropolitan Museum of Art took form over many years. A particularly important moment in this history was the 1965 visit to Glencairn of James J. Rorimer, then the Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with members of his staff. At the time, the Pitcairn collection was not well known, despite the long-term loan of several of its works to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the years following this visit, the Pitcairns anonymously lent a number of works to a series of exhibitions held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters. As a result of these loans, Cloisters Curator Jane Hayward, a specialist in medieval stained glass, took a strong interest in the Pitcairns’ rich collection. In the mid-1970s, Hayward undertook an inventory of its holdings. She brought other medieval art specialists to Glencairn from near and far to identify the many unknown works in the collection. Chuck Little, then an assistant curator at the beginning of his career in The Met’s Department of Medieval Art, sometimes accompanied Hayward on regular trips to Bryn Athyn.
Figure 1: Met Director James J. Rorimer visited Glencairn with a group of Met staff members in November 1965. This visit would be the first of many by Met staff to Glencairn in the coming years. A photograph of the group in Glencairn’s cloister: (l-r) E. Bruce Glenn, Thomas P. Miller, Mildred Pitcairn, Bonnie Young, Carmen Gómez-Moreno, James Rorimer, Raymond Pitcairn, Harry Parker III, Lachlan Pitcairn (slightly behind), William H. Forsyth, and Thomas Hoving. Photograph by Michael Pitcairn.
Though preceding the official mandate to create Glencairn Museum, these organizational efforts constituted a foundation for what came next. In 1980, the collections of both the Pitcairn family and the Academy of the New Church merged to create Glencairn Museum, which opened to the public in 1982 under the leadership of Director Martin Pryke. Coinciding with the Museum’s opening in Bryn Athyn, Jane Hayward and Walter Cahn, a Yale University art historian, organized the exhibition Radiance and Reflection: Medieval Art from the Raymond Pitcairn Collection for The Cloisters. Featuring over 120 works of art, the exhibition introduced Glencairn to a broad audience.
Chuck’s fond reminiscences shed fascinating light on what it was like to create a new museum and share the Pitcairns’ marvelous collection with the world. We hope you enjoy our conversation!
Chuck, the beginning of your history with Glencairn really coincides with the beginning of your career as a medieval art curator. So, before we talk about Glencairn, I thought I would ask: how did you get started studying the art of the Middle Ages?
I was a long-time curator at The Met, but I didn’t start at The Met. I started like everybody else, as a young student, learning to love the Middle Ages. I was exposed to art early on, growing up in Cleveland, Ohio. The Cleveland Museum of Art has a great collection, and I took art classes. Later, I ended up living in Germany in the mid-60s, and traveling in Europe was my first exposure to the great monuments. That whet my appetite to continue in that area. I studied art history at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which had a very strong art program. That really got me interested in ancient history, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, though pre-Renaissance was my main interest.
When I ended up in graduate school, at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, I had intended to study with the great Erwin Panofsky, inspired very much by his work on the German painter Albrecht Dürer and Netherlandish painting, but he passed away the year I arrived. Nevertheless, I continued my studies with various other professors. I also was in the Institute’s Curatorial Studies program. That introduced me to The Met, its great works of art, and its staff. I ended up doing several internships at The Met, and I chose the medieval department to work in because that was my interest. That’s how I actually got started. Luckily, a long-time colleague at The Met, William Forsyth, was retiring in the early 1970s, and I essentially became his successor when I joined the medieval art department in 1973.
What made you want to work in a museum?
The career paths of most of my colleagues were in teaching, but I was always engaged with objects. I thought it was more fascinating to understand an object and its meaning, its context, its characteristics—physical connoisseurship, if you want to call it that. I also did some archeological work, which connected in many ways to museum work. I did an internship in The Met’s medieval department just at the moment that the curatorial staff was completing a great exhibition called The Year 1200, one of The Met’s centennial celebration exhibitions in 1970. That cemented my interest in museums. I was exposed to really great works of art that came from all over Europe for that exhibition—manuscripts, ivories, metalwork, stained glass, etc. I watched a great team of scholars work under the leadership of Tom Hoving, the director at the time.
How did you first learn about the Pitcairn collection, as it was known before the Pitcairn family home was turned into Glencairn Museum?
In 1968, I saw a wonderful exhibition at The Cloisters called Medieval Art from Private Collections. I saw that in the first months of my arrival in New York. As I studied all of the works in the exhibition, I encountered for the first time works from the Raymond Pitcairn collection, which piqued my curiosity. The collection was a bit of a mystery. As a young student, I wouldn’t have known it. It was not something that was on the radar for scholars at the time. The selection had been arranged by the principal curator of the exhibition, Carmen Gómez-Moreno, and The Met’s director at the time, Tom Hoving, though I think the exhibition itself was instigated by James Rorimer, the previous director of The Met, together with Hoving. Rorimer seemed to have been interested in some kind of partnership with Raymond Pitcairn. That exhibition was probably most people’s exposure to the Pitcairn collection at the time. For most of the works of art in that exhibition, the gallery labels included the name of the collector, rather than “anonymous,” or “private collection,” so you could get a sense of who owned what. There wasn’t much discussion about who these people were, though.
Figure 2: Introduced to the American public in The Met’s 1968 exhibition Medieval Art from Private Collections, this tiny head of a king from the Cathedral of Saint-Lazare in Autun was one of the treasures of the Pitcairn collection (09.SP.2).
Figure 3: This engaging Romanesque capital from the Pitcairn collection was also included in The Met’s 1968 exhibition Medieval Art from Private Collections. Made of marble, it depicts the biblical story of the sacrifice of Cain and Abel (09.SP.70).
It sounds like that exhibition in 1968 really sparked many people’s curiosity. How did medieval art scholars, yourself included, start to get involved in researching the Pitcairn collection?
Following The Met’s Year 1200 exhibition of 1970, I researched some stained glass from Troyes Cathedral that had been in that show. I published an early article on that material, which included pieces from the Pitcairn collection that had been lent to that show. At around the same time as the Year 1200 exhibition, The Met hired Jane Hayward, a specialist in the medieval stained glass of France, as a curator of medieval art. She took a very active interest in the Pitcairn’s still completely unknown collection housed in Bryn Athyn. It was through her instigation that, aside from what was already selected for The Met’s exhibitions in 1968 and 1970, research began on the Pitcairns’ glass collection in earnest. People became more curious about what else was there, and wondered if more of it would ever come to The Met.
When did you first visit Glencairn? What was your impression of the house?
While I can’t recall an actual date, I started to go in the mid-70s. I’m pretty sure I went first with Jane Hayward. On my first visit there I had a rather ironic entrance to Glencairn, and that was a life-sized photograph of Richard Nixon with Raymond Pitcairn—something that left a strong impression at that time. It was subsequently suppressed, as you can imagine, but nonetheless this life-sized photograph was quite extraordinary.
Figure 4: View of the Great Hall from the north side looking toward the Upper Hall (date unknown). The sight of so much medieval and medieval-inspired art in one room made a profound impression on Chuck Little during his first visit to Glencairn, then the Pitcairn family’s home.
At first, going into the house was kind of overwhelming. Going into the Great Hall, which has full-sized replicas of stained glass from the transept of Chartres Cathedral, plus all the other glass, and all of the sculptures housed there—it was really overwhelming. I had never known anybody living in such grandeur—I had never visited a mansion, though I’d been to some royal palaces in England. But Glencairn was still a home and was private. In the early 70s, much of the medieval material that was available to see—some sculpture, maybe a little bit of stained glass, I recall—was housed not at Glencairn, but in the library of the school across the way, where it was on display.
Figure 5: Three of the replicas of stained-glass from Chartres Cathedral in Glencairn’s Great Hall. When he first visited, Chuck Little immediately recognized the inspiration for the massive windows in Glencairn’s Great Hall: the north transept of Chartres Cathedral.
How did Met curatorial staff become involved in studying the Pitcairn collection?
Certainly, the famous visit of Rorimer, Hoving, and Carmen Gómez-Moreno [on November 11, 1965; Figure 1] was important. They went with an eye for selecting objects, I am sure, for Medieval Art from Private Collections. That opened the window, clearly, to creating a museum after the passing of Raymond Pitcairn. And I think the trustees of the Academy of the New Church saw a partnership with The Met as a positive thing, since the [Bryn Athyn] Cathedral building, its sculpture, and stained glass were inspired, in many ways, by Pitcairn’s collection.
Jane Hayward had been asked to sort out issues with the stained glass in this vast collection, assessing condition, state of conservation, and exhibition possibilities, and identifying what works were important and what were not important. The idea of really working on the collection was initiated by Jane, though. I give her tremendous credit. By the mid-70s, Jane was taking almost weekly trips down there for the day to study the glass. I was functioning as her assistant during some of those trips, though I only spent what time I could because I had my own projects—studying, doing an exhibition on Irish art at The Met, and finishing my dissertation at the Institute of Fine Arts! But because I had written an early article on stained glass, I was asked to be part of the team studying the Glencairn material.
After Raymond Pitcairn died, the thinking was to create a museum. And once they made the decision to create a museum, they needed to give the collection some systematic order. It was rather chaotic—things were packed away in various places, in various sites on the property of Glencairn. The organization of the collection was managed through the offices of Martin Pryke, who was the first director of the developing project.
The future of the collection had to be determined. For example, some works of art had been on long-term loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Would they stay there, or would they go back to the family? Plus, there were many, many things in storage. The Pitcairns’ property was a vast storage area. Some objects were stored in the bishop’s house [Cairnwood; Mildred Pitcairn’s son-in-law was bishop of the Swedenborgian denomination in Bryn Athyn at that time], some were in various barns and other storage facilities nearby.
Do you have any particular memories of the Pitcairn family while studying the collection?
I remember meeting Mildred Pitcairn several times while studying works of art in the house. She would be listening from her balcony by her bedroom to music being played in the Great Hall, on records. There was a continuous air of classical music for her to listen to while she either rested or read in that space overlooking the Great Hall.
Figure 6: Mildred Pitcairn posing in her walled garden on the south side of Glencairn, circa 1950s. Chuck remembers Mrs. Pitcairn listening to classical music in the Great Hall while he and others worked on the collection in Glencairn’s library.
Once the decision was made to organize and eventually display the collection as a museum, and once Jane Hayward came on board, how did work on the collection proceed?
Martin Pryke took the lead. He was not an experienced medievalist, but he was an experienced administrator, so the responsibility fell to him to help create this museum. He had to bring in a lot of outside advisors, either in Philadelphia or beyond, and because The Met already had some relationship with them, he turned to The Met as a logical partner. So that was the beginning of it. Part of our role was to set up a cataloging system. We made cards for objects, which they still have, I think. Jane of course brought in other scholars visiting from Paris, New York, New Haven to help give their opinions on various works of art in the collection. There were works in the collection that the Pitcairns already knew more about, like the little head of Gislebertus from Autun [Figure 2]. That head was in Medieval Art from Private Collections, I believe. But at that time we just didn’t know what most of these works of art were, and we had to identify them—sometimes somewhat cautiously, and there were problem pieces. We were working on a new area and our body of knowledge was limited. However, we discovered very early on that, fortunately, Raymond Pitcairn had taken very good notes on who he was buying from, including whatever information he could get from various dealers, whether it was Lucien Demotte, or Joseph Brummer—the big ones, primarily. That helped enormously in sorting out the collection.
On the first visits, the first order of business was going through the house and finding out where everything was. The idea was to inventory objects all over the different storage spaces, whether in the Academy itself, or in the bishop’s house, or in the Cathedral, and to find things there that were models for sculptors [in the decoration of the house]. It was a quest, really, to account for everything.
Figure 7: The Bryn Athyn stained-glass studio was located in the garden house of Cairnwood, the first home of the Pitcairns in Bryn Athyn. Known as the “glass house,” this building was still functioning as a glass studio for Bryn Athyn Cathedral as late as the 1960s. This photograph is from a series of photos taken in the late 1980s, just before the building was renovated.
Probably one of the biggest surprises of my life was opening up a closet in Michael’s room and, lo and behold, in there was the Pitcairns’ great Limoges secular casket, wrapped up in a towel, with things inside of it! At the time, it was like, “well, every day is Christmas here!” But it was the discovery of other things that kept materializing in odd spaces that was so fascinating. Once, up in a barn space, I remember seeing logs of teak literally 15 to 20 feet long [surplus material purchased for Glencairn’s construction]. It was more teak than we’d ever seen anywhere in the world, in one place—just raw materials. There was also a space called the glass house, beyond the bishop’s place down towards the road, that was a storage facility for extra stained glass. It was an extraordinary experience to see so much unused glass—modern glass, that is—intended for restoration of the glass of the Cathedral or of the collection. This material was subsequently moved over to the Cathedral after that, but first it was in a place called the glass house [Figure 7].
What is now the [basement] storage facility didn’t exist then. That was something that had to be created. Anything that needed better climatization was brought into the house for security, for conservation. The exhibition space where stained glass is now shown with Romanesque sculpture [Glencairn’s Medieval Gallery]—that did not exist then. That’s a fairly new development.
How did the idea of The Met hosting an exhibition devoted to the Pitcairn collection, Radiance and Reflection, come about? What was the exhibition’s impact?
At first the exhibition was known as something like “Treasures of the Raymond Pitcairn Collection.” The title of Radiance and Reflection—that was Jane’s creation. I was not directly involved in the first phase of exhibition planning because of other projects. Walter Cahn [a specialist in Romanesque medieval art, then a professor of art history at Yale University] had already become involved as the chief “selector” of works to be included in the exhibition, both Romanesque and Gothic. I think the initial selection was his, but I also got involved with a few pieces that I knew something about.
Some of the reviews of the exhibition were both complimentary and critical. They’re still trying to sort out issues of authenticity in some cases. Or recarving, or where these things came from. That became a fascinating dimension of the afterlife of the exhibition.
In exchange for organizing and hosting the exhibition, a number of the Pitcairns’ works made their way to The Met’s collection. This included three or four works, including one engaged capital now on display at The Cloisters from the chantier of Saint-Denis, and a fragment of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus window from Rouen, and then another piece from Soissons. Nothing that was unique to the Pitcairn collection came to The Cloisters. The works we received were considered “duplicates” of the Pitcairn collection, if you want to think about it that way.
Figure 8: Limestone impost capital with acanthus leaf decoration made in the Île-de-France in the mid-12th century, perhaps from the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis. Acquired from the Pitcairn collection one year after the Radiance and Reflection exhibition, this architectural sculpture is now on exhibit at The Cloisters. Two similar sculptures remain at Glencairn (The Cloisters Collection, 1983.226).
Figure 9: Theodosius Arrives at Ephesus, a Scene from the Story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. This panel of stained glass from the Cathedral of Rouen (1200-1210) depicts an evocative scene from the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. It was acquired by The Met before its appearance in the Radiance and Reflection exhibition. Other stained glass panels from Rouen Cathedral remain at Glencairn (The Cloisters Collection, 1980.263.4).
It sounds like the research that you were doing on the Pitcairn collection, including the preparations for the exhibition, coincided with some very interesting projects in American scholarship on medieval art.
The preparation that went into Radiance and Reflection helped to start many other new research projects, including Walter Cahn’s big project, The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections, and a later publication, The Corpus of Gothic Sculpture in American Collections. We were just starting to learn about how these works fit into the regional issues so prevalent in the study of medieval art, and a number of realizations about the sculptures came about in the process.
Figure 10: The Apostle Paul or Peter, made in Paris, probably in the 19th century, limestone with traces of polychromy and gilding. Though he originally identified this sculpture in the Pitcairn collection as a work of the mid-13th century, Chuck Little later became convinced that in fact it recalls the style of the sculptor-restorer Jean-Baptiste Lassus, who worked on the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris during the mid-19th century (09.SP.127).
What is one particularly memorable story that you have about the exhibition?
I have to finish with one story in which I was directly involved concerning a giant figure of an apostle Paul or Peter in the collection—it’s on the back cover of the [Radiance and Reflection] catalogue. I was very excited and puzzled by that sculpture at the same time. I studied it and had the idea that it might be somehow related to the great apostle figures sculpted for the 13th-century Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Not to say that it was part of the Sainte-Chapelle group at all, but I thought it might be somehow connected as part of some other monument. I came up with the conclusion that this could be a piece of Parisian work of the mid-13th century. But just as we mounted the exhibition and printed the catalogue, we discovered a head that was extremely similar to it in the dépot of the sculpture department of the Louvre. It was not medieval. It was made around the time of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the restorer of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, by a sculptor who was in charge of the Notre-Dame restorations, Jean-Baptiste Lassus, and his team. Seeing that head struck terror in me because I knew, at that moment, that the game was up—that this was not a Gothic piece, but that it was “super-Gothic,” if anything. The medieval art historian Willibald Sauerlander picked up on it in his subsequent review of the exhibition, writing that the sculpture’s 13th-century origin was too good to be true. He was absolutely right. I eventually saw the head in Paris, and to me there was no question—it was the smoking gun. You live, you learn! I’ve told this story in a different fashion, published in the Corpus of Gothic sculpture in American Collections, edited by Dorothy Gillerman.
Julia Perratore, PhD
Assistant Curator, The Met Cloisters
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