“One of the most transformative donations in its history” is how Thomas P. Campbell, CEO and director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, describes the promised gift to the institution of the Bernard and Barbro Osher Collection of American Art. The collection not only includes examples by many of America’s foremost artists—Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, Charles Sheeler, and Alexander Calder—but also introduces works by artists not previously represented in the Fine Arts Museums, among them Robert Blum, Frank Vincent DuMond, Frederick Carl Frieseke, William McGregor Paxton, Edward Henry Potthast, and John Sloan (the only member of the Eight previously missing from the permanent collection). All sixty-one works will be on view in American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art at the de Young from May 18 to October 20.
Portrait of Samuel Jones by Thomas Hovenden (1840–1895), c. 1882. 
Boy Frightened by Lightning by Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953), 1921. © Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 
Cat-walk by Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), c. 1947.
Since it’s always interesting to learn how such important collections are assembled, we are grateful to associate curator Lauren Palmor, who organized the show and wrote the accompanying catalogue, for providing us with the following background. The Oshers’ attraction to American painting stems originally from Bernard’s years at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he studied American art under Philip Conway Beam, a Winslow Homer scholar who encouraged his interest in the artist. Osher later made some of his first acquisitions from the pioneering art dealer Edith Halpert, whose Downtown Gallery featured works by many artists who would go on to become icons of American modernism. “You’d listen to her—she would show you a picture and you bought the picture,” Osher once told Palmor. Among his early acquisitions from the Downtown Gallery was Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Boy Frightened by Lightning, long known to Kuniyoshi scholars but unlocated and studied only through archival photographs.
In 1970 Osher co-purchased the historic San Francisco auction house Butterfield and Butterfield, a move that widened his collecting interests, which grew to include key artists and movements spanning more than a hundred years of American art history. The rest, as they say . . .
Palmor also pointed out a few of the highlights of the collection, among them two of the first Southwest works by Georgia O’Keeffe to join the collection: Front of Ranchos Church (1930) and The Patio – No. 1. The latter depicts the artist’s house at Ghost Ranch, the first property she ever owned. It is the first in a series of views she painted of the house and courtyard, and through color, shape, and contrast makes apparent her interest in natural building forms. Thomas Hovenden’s Portrait of Samuel Jones depicts one of the models for Sunday Morning (1881), a painting already in the permanent collection. Jones, who was born into slavery in Maryland but lived as a free man in Pennsylvania, was in his early seventies when he met Hovenden, and served as one of his favorite models until Jones’s death in 1882. Over the course of their brief friendship, Hovenden made Jones the subject of at least six genre paintings. In a departure from those highly constructed scenes, in Portrait of Samuel Jones Hovenden simply portrays Jones as himself, with warmth and charisma.
All the works in the Osher Collection are detailed in the eponymous catalogue from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which will be published in May. To celebrate its launch, Palmor will present a curator’s talk at the de Young on May 25 at 1 pm.
American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art • Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/de Young • May 18 to October 20 • famsf.org
