Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs (January 4, 1851- October 20, 1936) was a Baltimore socialite, philanthropist, and art collector. She is best known for her collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs (January 4, 1851- October 20, 1936) was a Baltimore socialite, philanthropist, and art collector. She is best known for her collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Born in Baltimore in 1851, Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs (née Mary Sloan Frick) was one of three children. Her father was a prominent attorney, and her mother was a descendant of Sir George Yeardly, who had been appointed governor of Virginia and was knighted by James VI and I in 1618. [1] Throughout her childhood, she was educated by governesses and tutors and was not permitted to leave home without the accompaniment of a tutor or family member. In 1872, Mary wed Robert Garrett, the oldest son of John W. Garrett, who was president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Robert Garrett & Sons Bank. After suffering from years of mental and physical breakdowns, Robert Garret died in 1896 of kidney failure. Now widowed, Mary married Robert Garret’s longtime, personal physician, Henry Barton Jacobs, in 1902 at Grace Protestant Episcopal Church. [1] She did not have any children and died in 1936, leaving an estate of $5.5 million to her husband, Henry Barton Jacobs. [1] Mary became one of the first women to be part of the Baltimore Municipal Art Society in 1899 and then became an official member in 1902. She ultimately became the society's leader later that year. [2] In addition to her art contributions, she was also well known for her skills in entertaining. [3]
Though Mary divided her time among her residences in Mount Vernon, Baltimore, Uplands (her family’s country estate), and Newport, Rhode Island and maintained a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, she was an active participant in the civic life of Baltimore and contributed to various charitable pursuits. She established the Robert Garrett Hospital for Children at 27 North Carey Street as well as a training school for nurses attached to the hospital. She paid for the children to recuperate in Mount Airy, Maryland during the summer months and provided the railway fares for mothers to visit their children whenever they wished. [1] While the hospital was turned over to the city in 1923, Jacobs continued to maintain the facility with her own funds and set up six free clinics under the direction of Dr. William S. Baer. Mary remodeled 11 West Mt. Vernon Place in 1913, building an art gallery and glass domed conservatory. [2] In 1928, she built and equipped the Hospital for Tuberculosis Children on the grounds of the Eudowood Sanitarium. [1] Jacobs supported the American District Telegraph Boys of Baltimore and served as the treasurer of the Aviator Club, which raised money for a sanitarium for tuberculosis in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland. [4]
With her fortune, Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs amassed a collection of European paintings from the 15th to 19th centuries, tapestries, miniatures, porcelain, and jades. [3] Her paintings included works by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Charles Willson Peale, Pietro Perugino, Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Thomas Sully, and George Romney (painter). In 1934 Jacobs offered her art collection to the Baltimore Museum of Art under several conditions. [5] One of the conditions was that John Russell Pope would be the architect to design the wing in which her collection would be displayed, a request the board acquiesced to. [5]
Clarissa Harlowe Barton was an American nurse who founded the American Red Cross. She was a hospital nurse in the American Civil War, a teacher, and a patent clerk. Since nursing education was not then very formalized and she did not attend nursing school, she provided self-taught nursing care. Barton is noteworthy for doing humanitarian work and civil rights advocacy at a time before women had the right to vote. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.
Robert S. Garrett was an American athlete, as well as investment banker and philanthropist in Baltimore, Maryland and financier of several important archeological excavations. Garrett was the first modern Olympic champion in discus throw as well as shot put.
Rembrandt Peale was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties.
John Work Garrett was an American merchant turned banker who became president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) in 1858 and led the railroad for nearly three decades. The B&O became one of the most important American railroads by the time Garrett died, and Garret would also become a noted philanthropist. He provided crucial support for the Union cause during the Civil War, expanded the railroad to reach Chicago, Illinois, and competed with the Pennsylvania Railroad for access to New York City.
Mount Vernon is a neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, located immediately north of the city's downtown. It is named for George Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Virginia, as the site of the city's Washington Monument.
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in Baltimore, Maryland, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, as well as one of the nation's finest holdings of prints, drawings, and photographs. The galleries currently showcase collections of art from Africa; works by established and emerging contemporary artists; European and American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts; ancient Antioch mosaics; art from Asia, and textiles from around the world.
Florence Elizabeth Riefle Bahr was an American artist and activist. She made portraits of children and adults, including studies of nature as she found it. Instead of using a camera, more than 300 pen and ink sketchbooks catalog insights into her life, including her civil and human rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the many important captured events included the Washington D.C. event where Martin Luther King Jr. first gave his I Have a Dream speech. Her painting Homage to Martin Luther King hangs in the (NAACP) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's headquarters. She created illustrations for children's books and painted a mural in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for the Johns Hopkins Hospital's Harriet Lane Home for Children. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since the 1930s. In 1999, she was posthumously awarded to the State of Maryland's Women's Hall of Fame, as the first woman artist they recognized.
William Henry Rinehart was a noted American sculptor. He is considered "the last important American sculptor to work in the classical style."
Mary Elizabeth Garrett was an American suffragist and philanthropist. She was the youngest child and only daughter of John W. Garrett, a philanthropist and president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
Madonna Adoring the Child with Five Angels is a tondo or round painting by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, completed between 1485 and 1490. It is housed in the Baltimore Museum of Art, in Baltimore, Maryland. The medium is tempura and oil on a round wood panel. It is part of the Mary Frick Jacobs Collection.
Saidie Adler May (1879–1951) was an American collector of Surrealist and early Abstract Expressionist art. She was a major benefactor to the Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Garrett Jacobs Mansion is a historic home located in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland. Built in 1853 by Samuel George, the home gets its name from its last and most famous owner, Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs, who, with her husband Robert Garrett, transformed the home into a prime example of the Gilded Age mansions of the city.
Gabrielle de Veaux Clements was an American painter, print maker, and muralist. She studied art at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in Paris at Académie Julian. Clements also studied science at Cornell University and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree. She created murals, painted portraits, and made etchings. Clements taught in Philadelphia and in Baltimore at Bryn Mawr School. Her works have been exhibited in the United States and at the Paris Salon. Clements works are in several public collections. Her life companion was fellow artist Ellen Day Hale.
Gwendolyn Wilson Fowler was an African-American pharmacist, the first black woman licensed in Iowa. She also became the first African-American woman from Iowa to serve in the United States Foreign Service, when she was posted to Vietnam in the 1950s. She was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1987.
Emily Clayton Bishop was an American prize-winning sculptor. Although she died at a young age, her works in bronze and plaster are found in museum collections such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and in shows such as Modern Women at PAFA (2013). Her childhood home, the Emily Clayton Bishop house, is a Maryland State historic site. The home sold in 2019 for $115,000.
Markleton is an unincorporated community that is located in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, United States. The community is situated near the Casselman River, 7.7 miles (12.4 km) east-northeast of Confluence.
Mary Gibson Hundley was an educator and civil rights activist from Baltimore, Maryland. She was born to lawyer Malachi Gibson and teacher Mary Matilda Syphax. Through her mother's side of the family, she is a descendant of Martha Washington and the granddaughter of William Syphax, the namesake of the William Syphax School in Washington D.C. She is also a relative of Douglas Syphax, a Union army officer during the American Civil War.
Jacob Hall Pleasants (1873-1957) was an art historian and genealogist who researched and wrote about people of Maryland and especially Baltimore. Most notably he wrote scholarly articles and books about painters and silversmiths in Maryland, and early American artists such as the African-American portrait artist Joshua Johnson and landscape painter Francis Guy which led to exhibitions and more scholarship about these artists.
Henry Barton Jacobs was a physician and educator from Maryland. He taught at Johns Hopkins University and served as a trustee of Johns Hopkins Hospital and Peabody Institute later in life. He married Mary Frick Garrett, art collector and widow of a Baltimore and Ohio president.
Jacob Epstein was a Lithuanian-born Jewish-American merchant, philanthropist, and art collector from Baltimore, Maryland.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
