The Winterbotham Collection

Guided by a mandate for enduring excellence, the terms of the collection uniquely allow the museum to sell or exchange any work from the designated collection in order to acquire a work of superior quality and significance. Because of this stipulation, the collection has continually improved in strength, evolving over decades and boasting a number of the museum’s icons, including Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait (1887), Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman (1909), Salvador Dalí’s Invention of the Monsters (1937), and René Magritte’s Time Transfixed (1938)—as well as more recent additions such as María Blanchard’s Still Life with a Box of Matches (Nature morte à la boite d’allumettes) (1918) and Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30 (1907).

Learn more about the history of the Winterbotham Collection.

The History of the Winterbotham collection

Before Joseph Winterbotham established his collection with his gift to the museum, the Art Institute had regularly exhibited important contemporary art, but it had yet to build notable holdings in this area. Winterbotham had a remarkable and farsighted idea for bringing modern European painting to Chicago. As a businessman and not a collector of art, Winterbotham traveled widely, often to Europe, and understood the importance of fine art to the cultural life of a community. He believed that to be a great city, Chicago needed a great museum full of art of the time. His gift spoke to this aspiration, providing the Art Institute with an increasingly valuable group of late 19th- and 20th-century paintings.

The Winterbotham plan has accordingly come to be known as the Art Institute’s first commitment to the acquisition of modern art. Although Joseph Winterbotham indicated only that acquisitions be of works by European artists, the first painting bought under the plan—Henri Matisse’s 1919 canvas Woman Standing at the Window—set the stage for a collection with a decidedly contemporary focus. Between 1921 and 1929, 10 of the 13 paintings then acquired for the Winterbotham Collection had been created in the 20th century. The remaining three were by Post-Impressionists, artists central to the development of Modernism, and included the Art Institute’s first painting by Paul Gauguin, Te burao (The Hibiscus Tree), which remains in the Winterbotham Collection today. This trend in selecting contemporary paintings seemed to have met with the approval of the collection’s founder; shortly before he died, he wrote to the museum’s vice-president, “I congratulate the Art Institute and myself on the fine discrimination you have heretofore exercised in selecting paintings.”

While many of the works in the Winterbotham Collection today stand among the museum’s icons, it is as much the nature of the collection—its dynamism—as the works themselves that truly distinguish the Winterbotham Collection.

The Winterbotham plan was unique in its day: to our knowledge, there was no other major museum that had a comparable arrangement. The gift of $50,000 was to be invested and maintained as principal, while the interest was to be used for the purchase of paintings by European artists. The key stipulation of the plan was that initially only 35 paintings should be purchased. Once that number was attained, which occurred in 1946, any work could be sold or exchanged for a work of superior quality and significance to the collection. In this way, Winterbotham created a living tradition: a collection of paintings that has changed—and will continue to change—in scope and in strength.

Joseph Winterbotham’s gift formed the initial Winterbotham endowment, and he was delighted to see his plan take root, encouraging the museum to build his namesake collection. The second generation of Winterbothams shared their father’s philanthropic bent and married it with a genuine love of art that would benefit Chicago as a whole and the Art Institute in particular.

By 1947, when the group of 35 paintings was finally in place, the first exhibition of the complete collection was mounted. At this time, it became clear that the pictures would be better displayed if they were interspersed among the museum’s growing holdings of 19th- and 20th-century European art. Accordingly, the Gauguins, Cezannes, Van Goghs, and Toulouse-Lautrec hung beside other Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, while the Cubist works by Picasso and Braque, the Modigliani portrait, the monumental early Chagall, and the Surrealist canvases by de Chirico, Dalí, and Tanguy joined the galleries highlighting the museum’s burgeoning 20th-century acquisitions.

This idea of actively managing the group of paintings with the expectation and anticipation that a canvas’s permanent place in the collection is not assured was radical then and remains so today. The Art Institute deaccessions objects in its collection, as do peer institutions, but doing so is a deliberate and often slow process. In general, museums acquire paintings with the intention, and even the certainty, that works will remain in the collection long into the future; as such, museums avoid taking risks. The Winterbotham Collection supports risk-taking, enabling the museum to continually acquire paintings of superior quality.

While the concept of the Winterbotham Collection and its history may be notable, it is how it impacts the visitor experience that is most important: the forward-thinking approach, the constant evolution and improvement ensures that visitors to the museum—whether in 1983 or 2083—are seeing the most significant, exciting, and importantly, relevant works of modern European art at that time.

Resources
Lyn DelliQuadri, “A Living Tradition: The Winterbothams and Their Legacy”