Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

  • AMMpro
  • AMM Fantasy Collecting Game
  • Podcast
  • Contact Us

Collection Built Out of Discarded Art Goes to Peabody Essex Museum

May 16, 2016 by Marion Maneker

ArtCollectors06

The Boston Globe has a fascinating story of the Sam and Sheila Robbins who built a collection of 1,000 works of regional artists depicting New Hampshire’s White Mountains. The Robbins built their collection out of love and passion but also stubborn defiance of art historical assessment. Even today, they balk at the valuation of the works they treasure.

Market value is merely and irritation, however. The collection is being donated to the Peabody Essex Museum:

“It just grew like dandelions,” Sheila Robbins said of their collection. “It wasn’t something we set out to do. Instead of spending a lot of money going out to eat, we would buy a painting.”

Six decades later, they have a vast trove of 19th- and early 20th-century New England paintings, a collection rich in White Mountain landscapes, still lifes, and modernist works by painters who once flourished around Provincetown.

Their 1,000-work collection now fills nearly every corner of their Newton home, where paintings hang from walls, stand propped against banisters, and crowd an upstairs hallway. Their children’s bedrooms have both been commandeered for storage, with hundreds of paintings standing in serried ranks, separated by cardboard and old political yard signs.

But not for much longer: The couple are donating their entire collection to the Peabody Essex Museum — a gift that promises to transform the Salem institution’s holdings of American regional painting.

This Newton couple is an art-collecting powerhouse (The Boston Globe)

More from Art Market Monitor

  • Focused on FontanaFocused on Fontana
  • Ferrari = LiquidityFerrari = Liquidity
  • Guardian OptimismGuardian Optimism
  • Note to British MuseumNote to British Museum
  • Hirst Reveals Spots SupplyHirst Reveals Spots Supply
  • Design Struggles to ShineDesign Struggles to Shine

Filed Under: General

About Marion Maneker

Want to get Art Market Monitor‘s posts sent to you in our email? Sign up below by clicking on the Subscribe button.

Top Posts

  • Keith Haring’s 1989 Retrospect Comes to Sotheby’s London Prints Sale
  • Tony Podesta's Secret Art Buying
  • Four of Picasso's Women Valued at $28m Come to Christie's from Rose-Walters Collection
  • Norman Rockwell's Not Gay. But Is He a Great Artist?
  • $10 M. Picasso Portrait Unseen for Decades to Sell at Bonhams
  • David Bowie Talks About Art (with Julian Schnabel)
  • Sotheby's Pulls in a $9m David Hockney for November
  • Roy Lichtenstein’s Top Ten Auction Prices
  • Lost Lempicka Discovered at Sotheby's
  • Vienna Secession Painting, Long Thought to Be Lost, Sets a Record at Auction
  • About Us/ Contact
  • Podcast
  • AMMpro
  • Newsletter
  • FAQ

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
California Privacy Rights
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Advertise on Art Market Monitor