Lawrence University is pleased to make available information and images from several of its major teaching and research collections.
The
Ottilia Buerger Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins
Ottilia M. Buerger, ’38, beginning in the 1950s, assembled a collection
of rare coins that is widely regarded as one of the finest in the United States.
Guided by the conviction that ancient coins were small and beautiful eyewitnesses
to history, Miss Buerger believed that her “baubles,” as she called
them, could bring a vivid reality to the past. In 1991 she loaned her collection
to Lawrence so that it could be studied by students and faculty. Since then,
the collection has been the subject of two major exhibitions at the Wriston
Art Center and has been studied by hundreds of art history, classics, and
history students. An online version of its catalog has
been viewed by over 4.2 million visitors. When Miss Buerger died in 2001, she
left instructions for her collection to come to Lawrence, along with a bequest
establishing the Ottilia Buerger Professorship in Classical or Medieval Studies. Contact
information
The
Permanent Art Collection
The university’s Permanent
Art Collection contains more than 3,000 items — prints, drawings,
and paintings in a variety of media, as well as three-dimensional works of
various sorts.
Holdings include early modern European and American art, with particularly
important
collections
of
German
Expressionism,
Japanese
prints, Oceanic artifacts, and ancient and Byzantine coins. Among the artists
represented are Frank Brangwyn, Heinrich Campendonk, Hendrik Goltzius, Emily
Groom, William Penhallow Henderson, Maxime Maufra, Louise Nevelson, Jan Saenredam,
Egon Schiele,
and
Paul Signac, Selections from
the permanent
collection are regularly featured
in
exhibitions
in the
three
galleries of the Wriston Art Center, art history
courses routinely incorporate the study of these original works, and
students
have
access to the collections for their research. Contact
information
The
La Vera Pohl Collection of German Expressionists
La Vera Pohl (1901-1981) was a Milwaukee artist, museum director, and collector
who studied art and art history in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Across a
40-year period, she collected some 220 prints, paintings, and drawings, most
of them by early 20th-century German artists — a collection of particular
significance because it was compiled at a time when most Americans were unaware
of modern German art. Artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, and Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff lend distinction to the collection, which
has been
described as “a sharply focused body of work . . . a survey of German
Expressionism that embraces the whole of the movement.” Mrs. Pohl bequeathed “her
books and library and pictures and drawing collection” to Milwaukee-Downer
College, which by the time of her death had become part of Lawrence University.
A major exhibition of the collection was held in the newly completed Wriston
Art Center at the time of its dedication in 1989. Contact
information
The
Rare Book Collection
Tracing its roots to the early library collections of Lawrence and Milwaukee-Downer
Colleges, subsequently augmented by gifts from the personal libraries of alumni
and other friends of the university, Lawrence’s Rare
Book Collection includes
nearly 3,500 rare or unique volumes. Some were published as early as the 16th
century, although the majority of titles date from the 1800s. Not all are valuable,
but most are, in some way, special. The oldest book in the collection is Hartmann
Schedel’s Liber Cronicarum (1493), otherwise known as The
Nuremberg Chronicle. Faculty and students use the books, which are housed
in the Milwaukee-Downer Room of the Seeley
G. Mudd Library, for study, research,
and teaching. Contact information
Books
with Fore-Edge Paintings
Included in Lawrence’s rare book holdings are some 30 examples of books with
fore-edge paintings, a style of decoration developed in the 17th century and
pursued well into the 19th. The technique consisted of fanning the outer edge
of the text pages and clamping it, so that a watercolor painting could be rendered
by hand on the fanned leaves. When the painting had dried, the fore-edge would
be gilt or marbled. The painting cannot be seen until the pages of the book
are fanned, which may have made the technique a method of secretly identifying
a book’s ownership. Although the painted scenes do not necessarily relate to
the content of the books, there are exceptions. A variation is the double fore-edge
painting: When Marmion, by Sir Walter Scott, is fanned in one direction,
Edinborough Castle appears; fanning the other way reveals Norham Castle. Lawrence’s
distinctive
collection — each book is literally one of a kind — represents
gifts from Bernice David Fligman, M-D ’22, and Dorothy Ross Pain, ’18, among
others. Contact information
The
Lincoln Reading Room Collections
The Lincoln Reading Room, located
on the first floor of the Seeley G. Mudd Library, is home to a pair of outstanding
collections of books, prints, pamphlets, and letters related to Abraham Lincoln,
slavery, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction. The French Collection,
donated by Robert S. French, ’48, includes more than 1,500 items, with an emphasis
on Lincoln. The Larson Collection, given by Keville Larson, ’20, Lawrence’s
third Rhodes Scholar, contains some 400 items dealing with the Civil War more
generally. Contact information
The
Anthropology Collections
Over the years, Lawrence’s Department of Anthropology, one
of the first to be established in a small college, has gathered
extensive collections
of archaeological and ethnographic materials from many cultural
areas. Human
ancestor casts and skeletal material are used to study human diversity and
the biological roots of humankind. Artifacts from the Aztalan site in southeastern
Wisconsin provide insights into late prehistoric life, and the Rock Island
collection from Door County provides clues to Wisconsin’s earliest inhabitants.
A substantial collection of Oceanic art, particularly that from Papua, New
Guinea, provides a rich ethnographic resource. Contact
information
Illustrations (from top): Aureus of Hadrian, A.D. 125-128, reverse: wolf suckling Romulus and Remus; Untitled (Portrait of a Boy and His Dog), Unknown (American), oil on canvas, early 19th century (from the collection of Jean Keast Gridley); Rising Sun, Paul Klee (Swiss), watercolor with ink drawing, 1919; books signed by Amelia Earhart, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Richard Wright; book with pages fanned to show the fore-edge painting; The Council of War (Grant, Lincoln, and Stanton), John Rogers (American), painted plaster sculpture, 1868; late 19th-century buckskin shirt believed to have come from the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin.
Wriston Art Center Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 12:00 noon-4:00 p.m.; closed Monday.
Seeley G. Mudd Library Hours: Monday-Thursday, 8:00 a.m.-1:00 a.m.; Friday, 8:00 a.m.-11:00 p.m.; Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-11:00 p.m.; Sunday, 11:00 a.m.-1:00 a.m.
Also of interest: