Fine Arts Awards Endowed

A $20,000 endowment fund has been established at Dartmouth by an anonymous donor to maintain annual fine arts awards in memory of the late Professor Adelbert Ames Jr.

Income from the fund will be used to purchase paintings, drawings, and prints which will be displayed at the College Galleries and then awarded to one or more students who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in art courses. The annual awards will be known as the Adelbert Ames Fine Art Awards. The recipients will be chosen by a committee composed of members of the Art Department faculty.

Professor Ames, who died in 1955, was head of the Dartmouth Eye Institute and research professor in physiological optics. He discovered and devised a cure for an eye defect called aniseikonia, a discovery hailed as "perhaps the most important addition to the knowledge of the eye in the past fifty years." Professor Ames had an avid interest in painting and the fine arts and was a member of the original committee for the Hopkins Center at the College.

Professor Churchill P. Lathrop, director of art galleries for the College, was on sabbatical leave this past spring planning and making arrangements for the art exhibitions for the opening year of the Hopkins Center. Professor Lathrop visited many college and university art galleries and urban art museums to confer with other gallery directors, teachers of art, and museum officials.

He also consulted at length with William B. Jaffe, chairman of the Hopkins Center Art Advisory Group, and talked with numerous alumni, parents and friends of the College. Prof. Lathrop also sought out art dealers and others in the non-academic art world who will be of assistance to the exhibition program in Hopkins Center and in the continued growth and development of Dartmouth's fine art collection.

The past year has seen a great increase in new gifts of art to Dartmouth, and many more are expected as the new art facilities in the Hopkins Center come into use. In addition to outright gifts, the College has had the loan of many works of art from both private and public collections, and all of these will make possible a very rich and varied exhibition program for the Hopkins Center art galleries when they open next fall.