By Myrna Sloam
Remembered locally as the Roslyn area’s most prominent former resident, and as the founder of the Roslyn “Reading Room,” which later became the Bryant Library, William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was known internationally as a poet, journalist, and supporter of the arts and artists. He had a close friendship with many of the Hudson River School of painters, and he and Thomas Cole are depicted in Asher Durand’s best known work, “Kindred Spirits.” Bryant’s fifty years as editor and owner of the New York Evening Post newspaper gave him a forum to express his views and to advocate for the public welfare. Among Bryant’s many accomplishments is that he is credited as the first to propose the establishment of a Central Park in New York City. Less known, is his connection to the founding of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, on November 23, 1869 Bryant, serving as Chairman of the Union Art League in New York City, gave the opening speech detailing the need for a public art museum in the city. On January 31, 1870 Bryant was elected as one of two vice-presidents [History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Winifred Eva Howe, 1913] and on April 13, 1870, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was officially founded.
The following is an excerpt from Bryant’s 1869 speech. The full text of the speech can be found through the library’s Electronic Resources in the LitFinder database or the New York Times Historical Newspaper database.
“WE ARE assembled, my friends, to consider the subject of founding in this city a museum of art, a repository of the productions of artists of every class, which shall be in some measure worthy of this great metropolis and of the wide empire of which New York is the commercial centre. I understand that no rivalry with any other project is contemplated, no competition save with similar institutions in other countries, and then only such modest competition as a museum in its infancy may aspire to hold with those which were founded centuries ago, and are enriched with the additions made by the munificence of successive generations. No precise method of reaching this result has been determined on, but the object of the present meeting is to awaken the public, so far as our proceedings can influence the general mind, to the importance of taking early and effectual measures for founding such a museum as I have described.
Our city is the third great city of the civilized world. Our republic has already taken its place among the great powers of the earth; it is great in extent, great in population, great in the activity and enterprise of her people. It is the richest nation in the world if paying off an enormous national debt with a rapidity unexampled in history be any proof of riches; the richest in the world if contented submission to heavy taxation be a sign of wealth; the richest in the world if quietly to allow itself to be annually plundered of immense sums by men who seek public stations for their individual profit be a token of public prosperity.
My friends, if a tenth part of what is every year stolen from us in this way, in the city where we live, under pretence of the public service, and poured profusely into the coffers of political rogues, were expended on a museum of art, we might have, deposited in spacious and stately buildings, collections formed of works left by the world’s greatest artists, which would be the pride of our country. We might have an annual revenue which would bring to the museum every stray statue and picture of merit for which there should be no ready sale to individuals, every smaller collection in the country which its owner could no longer conveniently keep, every noble work by the artists of former ages which by any casualty, after long remaining on the walls of some ancient building, should be again thrown upon the world.
But what have we done—numerous as our people are, and so rich as to be contentedly cheated and plundered, what have we done toward founding such a repository? We have hardly made a step toward it. ….when the owner of a private gallery of art desires to leave his treasures where they can be seen by the public, he looks in vain for any institution to which he can send them. A public-spirited citizen desires to employ a favorite artist upon some great historical picture; there are no walls on which it can hang in public sight. A large collection of works of art, made at great cost, and with great pains, gathered perhaps during a lifetime, is for sale in Europe. We may find here men willing to contribute to purchase it, but if it should be brought to our country there is no edifice here to give it hospitality.
Moreover, we require an extensive public gallery to contain the greater works of our own painters and sculptors. The American soil is prolific of artists. The fine arts blossom not only in the populous regions of our country, but even in its solitary places. Go where you will, into whatever museum of art in the Old World, you find there artists from the new, contemplating or copying the masterpieces of art which they contain. Our artists swarm in Italy. When I was last at Rome, two years since, I found the number of American artists residing there as two to one compared with those from the British isles. But there are beginners among us who have not the means of resorting to distant countries for that instruction in art which is derived from carefully studying works of acknowledged excellence. For these a gallery is needed at home which shall vie with those abroad, if not in the multitude, yet in the merit of the works it contains.
Yet further, it is unfortunate for our artists, our painters especially, that they too often find their genius cramped by the narrow space in which it is constrained to exert itself. It is like a bird in a cage which can only take short flights from one perch to another and longs to stretch its wings in an ampler atmosphere. Producing works for private dwellings, our painters are for the most part obliged to confine themselves to cabinet pictures, and have little opportunity for that larger treatment of important subjects which a greater breadth of canvas would allow them, and by which the higher and nobler triumphs of their art have been achieved.
There is yet another view of the subject, and a most important one. When I consider, my friends, the prospect which opens before this great mart of the western world I am moved by feelings which I feel it somewhat difficult clearly to define. The growth of our city is already wonderfully rapid; it is every day spreading itself into the surrounding region, and overwhelming it like an inundation. Now that our great railway has been laid from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Eastern Asia and Western Europe will shake hands over our republic. New York will be the mart from which Europe will receive a large proportion of the products of China, and will become not only a centre of commerce for the New World, but for that region which is to Europe the most remote part of the Old. A new impulse will be given to the growth of our city, which I cannot contemplate without an emotion akin to dismay. Men will flock in greater numbers than ever before to plant themselves on a spot so favorable to the exchange of commodities between distant regions; and here will be an aggregation of human life, a concentration of all that ennobles and all that degrades humanity, on a scale which the imagination cannot venture to measure. To great cities resort not only all that is eminent in talent, all that is splendid in genius, and all that is active in philanthropy; but also all that is most dexterous in villainy, and all that is most foul in guilt. It is in the labyrinths of such mighty and crowded populations that crime finds its safest lurking-places; it is there that vice spreads its most seductive and fatal snares, and sin is pampered and festers and spreads its contagion in the greatest security.
My friends, it is important that we should encounter the temptations to vice in this great and too rapidly growing capital by attractive entertainments of an innocent and improving character. We have libraries and reading-rooms, and this is well; we have also spacious halls for musical entertainments, and that also is well; but there are times when we do not care to read and are satiate with the listening to sweet sounds, and when we more willingly contemplate works of art. It is the business of the true philanthropist to find means of gratifying this preference. We must be beforehand with vice in our arrangements for all that gives grace and cheerfulness to society. The influence of works of art is wholesome, ennobling, instructive. Besides the cultivation of the sense of beauty—in other words, the perception of order, symmetry, proportion of parts, which is of near kindred to the moral sentiments—the intelligent contemplation of a great gallery of works of art is a lesson in history, a lesson in biography, a lesson in the antiquities of different countries. Half our knowledge of the customs and modes of life among the ancient Greeks and Romans is derived from the remains of ancient art.
Let it be remembered to the honor of art that if it has ever been perverted to the purposes of vice, it has only been at the bidding of some corrupt court or at the desire of some opulent and powerful voluptuary whose word was law. When intended for the general eye no such stain rests on the works of art.”
