NOTES BCSC is Special Collections, Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, Bowdoin College. All correspondence is in BCSC unless oth erwise noted. BCMA is Bowdoin College Museum of Art. 1 am indebted to Laura F. Sprague, consulting curator of decorative arts for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, for sharing her extensive researches into the Walker family genealogy, residences, and art collection; to Susan L. Ransom for her careful editing; and to scholars Eileen Sinnott Pols and Ann Elaine Robertson for their informed studies of the architecture of the Walker Art Building. 1. Martin Brimmer, Address delivered at Bowdoin College Upon the Opening of the Walker Art Building, June VII. MDCCCXCIV (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1894), 2. 2. Harriet Sarah Walker to William D. Northend, 6 April 1891; Misses Walker to Northend, 4 June 1891, Walker correspondence. 3. Report of Robert Hallowell Gardiner, chairman of Chapel Committee, November 1839, Chapel file, BCSC. 4. Leonard Woods, Jr., to Theophilus W. Walker, Brunswick, 9 September 1850. In 1852, Walker was asked to select the room in the building that should be set aside as the Sophia Wheeler Walker Gallery. See Leonard Woods, Jr., to "My dear Cousin," Brunswick, 24 August 1852. For Woods, see Dictionary of American Biography. 5. See Obituary, "Theophilus W. Walker," in "Recent Deaths," Boston Evening Transcript, 16 April 1890, 5; Eileen Sinnott Pols, "The Walker Art Building, 1894. Charles F. McKim's First Museum Design," M. A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1985, 37-38. Pols's thesis provides valuable and extensive documentary materials concerning the planning and construction of the Walker Art Building and the commissioning of its murals. 6. See W. D. Northend to George T. Little, 1 (5 July 1889, Northend biographical Files. 7. President Woods had opposed the effort of some members of the Board to rescind the degree awarded to Confederate president Jefferson Davis by Bowdoin College in 1858. The controversy engendered by the president's unpopular stance upset Walker, who shared his cousin's politics, but his concern for the paintings and interest in the College remained unabated. When the paintings began to show signs of deterioration as a result of faulty heating and lack of care, Walker called their condition to the attention of the college authorities, and during the 1860s, he protested the preemption of the gallery by the Maine Historical Society that resulted in the dispersal of the paintings to other college build ings. See Pols, 39, 40; Ann Elaine Robertson, "The Facade of the Walker Art Building. Indicator of the Architect's and Patrons' Intentions." Honors paper for the Department of .Art History, Bowdoin College, 1990. Copy in files of BCMA, 21-22; W. D. Northend to George T. Little, 16 July 1889, Northend biographical files. 8. Northend's interest in the College's art collection began as early asJanuary 1881, when he sought contribu tions from alumni for the conservation of two portraits. See copy of W. D. Northend to alumni, January 1881, Northend biographical files.
9. George T. Little served also as curator of the art col lection between 1887 and 1892; in 1892, he became head of the library and Henry Johnson, professor of mod ern languages, assumed his curatorial duties. 10. W. D. Northend to George T. Little, 16 July 1889, Northend biographical files; see also Pols, 40. 11. W. D. Northend to George T. Little, 25 November 1889, Northend biographical files. 12. W. D. Northend to George T. Little, 22 June 1890, 6 April 1891, Northend biographical files; Misses Walker to W. D. Northend, 5 June 1891, Walker correspondence. 13. William D. Northend, dedication speech at the Walker Art Gallery, reported in the student newspaper, The Boxvdoin Orient, 20 June 1894, 51; quoted in Robertson, 6. 14. See Pols, 40; Robertson, 6; Richard V. West, The Walker Art Building Murals, Occasional Papers I, (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1972); David S. Berreth, Nineteenth-Century American Paintings at Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1974). 15. W. D. Northend to George T. Little, 21 April 1891, Northend biographical files. 16. See Appendix, p. 217. 17. Harriet S. Walker to Charles F. McKim, 6 July 1891, Walker correspondence. 18. The sisters may also have given art special study. Not only was Harriet an amateur artist, but an intriguing entry in the list of exhibitors at the Paris Salon for both 1879 and 1880 names a possible relative, a Mile. Sophia A. Walker, "nee aux Etats-Unis d'Amerique," as a pupil of G. Boulanger and Lefebvre, and indicates that she was exhibiting a portrait drawing of a "Mile H. . . ." Lois Marie Fink, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Paris Salons (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 402. According to Fink, the portrait draw ing may have been either a miniature or watercolor since all works that were not oils were categorized under "D" for drawings. 19. The Flemish tapestry was left to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, bv Maty Sophia in 1904, as a gift from Harriet. Mary also presented a portion of Harriet's collec tion of miniatures (fifty-seven of them) and a Brussels tapestry of the sixteenth or seventeenth century to Bowdoin College after Harriet's death. See Bowdoin Museum of Fine Arts. Walker Art Building, Descriptive Catalogue of the Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings and of the Walker Collection, 4th ed. (Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College, 1930), 26, 39-41, 47; Last Will and Testament of Mary Sophia Walker, filed 18 February 1904. #64003, Middlesex County Courthouse, Cambridge, MA. Copy in BCSC, Misses Walker Papers. Also see Adolph S. Cavallo, Tapestries of Europe and of Colonial Peru in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1967), 1:109-15, 2: plate 31. I am grateful to Laura F. Sprague for calling this last reference to my attention. 20. These were the kinds of artistic objects encouraged by the writers of the Aesthetic Movement, whose influ ence was particularly strong from the 1870s through the 1880s. See the Metropolitan Museum of Art, In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York,
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