Harriet Lane Johnston 

 and the National Collection of Fine Arts 



By Thomas M. Beggs 



Director, National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution 



[With 8 plates] 



A CONTINUING RESPONSIBILITY of the National Collection of Fine 

 Arts is the preservation of a permanent collection valued at over $10 

 million. For the establishment of this large assemblage of paintings, 

 sculptures, and decorative art objects under a separate bureau of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, the United States is especially indebted to 

 Harriet Lane Johnston, niece of James Buchanan, the fifteenth Presi- 

 dent of the United States, and hostess at the White House during his 

 Administration. 



At her death in 1903 Harriet Johnston bequeathed her precious 

 mementos, historical objects, and famous pictures with the understand- 

 ing that they should be placed in the Corcoran Gallery of Art until the 

 founding of a national gallery, when they should become the property 

 of the Nation. These provisions in her last will and testament raised 

 questions for court decision, and in 1906 Justice Wendell P. Stafford 

 of the United States District Court of the District of Columbia decreed 

 that the Smithsonian Institution was in fact the legal repository for 

 Government-owned works of art within the meaning of her will and, 

 therefore, the rightful recipient of her treasures. They were placed in 

 custody of Dr. William Henry Holmes, but not until 1920 did Congress 

 appropriate funds for salary and assistance that led to his appointment 

 as director of what is now the National Collection of Fine Arts. 



Until the terms of the Johnston will were carried out, Government 

 art collections were limited to scattered early gifts. The John Varden 

 collection had been transferred with that of the National Institute, 

 at the latter's expiration in 1861, to the Smithsonian Institution after 

 Buchanan had left the White House and Harriet Lane had gone with 

 him to Wheatlands, his Lancaster, Pa., estate. These accessions, to- 

 gether with paintings and sculptures acquired unsystematically dur- 

 ing the remainder of the nineteenth century, were so dispersed as to 

 barely deserve the impressive title her bequest invoked. Her vision 



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