A Notable Collection of Fifty Prints Given to the College by Mrs. Wade

EIGHT Durers, two Schongauers, eight Rembrandts, one van Dyck, nine Whistlers in all, fifty prints spanning six centuries have been presented to Dartmouth College by Helena M. Wade of New Canaan, Conn. Given in memory of her husband, Alfred Byers Wade, who died July 14, 1949, the prints represent one of the most important single collections ever received by the College.

In a departure from the conventional terms of gift, the Wade family directed that the prints should be entrusted to the students in Dartmouth's Graphic Arts classes under the direction of Prof. Ray Nash. Professor Nash's students will be responsible for the display of the prints in revolving exhibitions and will use them in both classroom and workshop. Although several prints are worth well over §1,500 each, Professor Nash emphasizes that "there will be no price tags mentioned. Once you set a price, the value of the print as a work of art is lost for most students. They start to hold them with both hands and set them at a distance."

The unique terms of the Wade gift encourage an intimacy with the prints. The works of the masters in the collection, all strongly framed, will thus be valued on merit rather than reputation. A student planning his own etching or engraving can have a Rembrandt or a Schongauer on the table beside him as he works.

The oldest prints in the Wade collection are the splendid copper engravings Deathof the Virgin and La Flagellation by the German, Martin Schongauer, who worked in the last half of the 15th Century.

Schongauer's influence is shown very clearly in the prints of Albrecht Diirer (1471"15a8), especially his woodcut TheDeath of the Virgin, which follows Schongauer's treatment of the same subject very closely. The Wade collection includes five Diirer woodcuts, two engravings and one etching.

The single van Dyck in the Wade Collection (see cut) was painted about 1626 and is one of the eleven etched portraits done entirely by the artist in his Antwerp days.

The superb Rembrandt prints span 25 years of his life and include all three of his developmental periods. The first Rembrandt in the Wade Collection is a selfportrait of the 25-year-old artist. Two others in the same period are an old man seated, wearing a flowing beard and a fur cap; and another self-portrait of Rembrandt, this time wearing a cap and scarf. The artist's second period is stamped clearly on four prints from the Wade Collection: the old man with a divided fur cap (1640), the man at desk wearing cross and chain (1641), St. Jerome in a dark chamber (1642), and Ephraim Bonus, Jewish physician (1647). The third period is shown in the fine portrait of Abraham Francen which was probably done some time after 1656.

Valentine Green, who engraved over 400 subjects during 40 years' work in London, supplies an important 18th century contribution to the collection with a mezzotint copy of Velasquez' well-known portrait of Pope Innocent the Tenth. Eight prints by the American, James A. Whistler (1834-1903), show his ever-present penchant for experimentation. The 20th century British artists D. Y. Cameron and James Mcbey have seven valuable prints in the collection, with Cameron's Ben Lidi (1911) of special interest.

Other important artists whose work is in the splendid Wade collection are Jakob Binck, Jean Morin, Ferdinand Boe, Muirhead Bone, Pierre Drevet, Gerard Edelinck, Antoine Masson, Jean Francois Millet, Robert Nauteuil and John Smith.

TWO OF THE OUTSTANDING PRINTS In the collection presented to the College by Mrs. Wade are the Durer woodcut "The Four Riders of the Apocalypse" (left).

Van Dyck etching. Portrait of Jean de Wael." They are among fifty which students will be privileged to work with in graphic arts courses.