PAFA’s collection of Eakins photographs, personal correspondence, drawings and oil sketches was acquired in 1985 from the estate of Charles Bregler (1864-1958).
After his years of study with Eakins in the 1880s, Bregler came to revere his teacher's memory. At the death of Eakins's widow, Susan, in 1938, the Eakins home was emptied, and the contents sold at auction. Bregler was allowed to keep the large quantity of letters, diaries, sketches, and photographs -- all material the estate executors left behind as having no monetary value.
Bregler guarded this collection lovingly, allowing few to see it (although requests to view it were rare). After his death in 1958, his wife Mary, was even more secretive about the collection’s contents. She finally sold the material to PAFA in 1985. Funds for the acquisition came from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Note: PAFA owns several major works of art by Eakins other than objects received in the Bregler collection, for which documentation is available in PAFA object files.:
- Walt Whitman, 1888
- Charles Edmund Dana, 1902
- Harrison Morris, 1896
- Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), 1874, (co-owned with the Philadelphia Museum of Art).
Bregler Collection Resources
Charles Bregler's Thomas Eakins Collection has been catalogued in four publications:
Danly, Susan, and Cheryl Leibold. Eakins and the Photograph: Work by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).
Kathleen A. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
Kathleen A. Foster and Cheryl Leibold, Writing About Eakins: The Manuscripts in Charles Bregler's Thomas Eakins Collection (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).
Susan James-Gadzinski and Mary Mullen Cunningham, American Sculpture in the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1997), pp. 90-100.