BUDDING ART HISTORIAN WILL COLEMAN ‘07 GETS A JUMP START ON HIS CAREER AS AN INTERN AT THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART
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Art history major Will Coleman '07 was that rare breed of college freshman who knew exactly what he wanted to study from day one. He had known ever since that fateful high school semester he spent in Rome studying Italian Baroque painting (“Anyone would want to become an art historian after that”) with his art teacher, a“dynamo” of a woman named Pamela Christy.
“She was 4'9”, with a shrill voice that would pierce your soul,” he recalls with a fond smile.“I was half terrified of her and half in love.”
Coleman, who is presently interning at the Philadelphia Art Museum through the Hurford Humanities Center, also has art in his blood: His grandmother, Mary Irwin, was a professional still life painter.“My parents half-hope I'll become a scholar of her art,” he says. He has Haverford in his blood as well: his grandfather, John R.“Jack” Coleman, was president of the College from 1967-77, and his father John M. Coleman is a member of the Class of 1975.
His family is supportive of his academic and career aspirations, even though they won't reap financial rewards. But Coleman's focus is on his personal fulfillment, not his material gain.“What appeals to me about art history and museum work,” he says,“is the way it combines the educational role of a professorÂinterpreting objects and presenting them to the publicÂwith the opportunity for private scholarship and unfettered access to things of great beauty.”
He's getting solid experience at the Art Museum, where he was selected from hundreds of applicants across the country to participate in the institution's prestigious Museum Studies program, which trains future employees.“Will's application showed tremendous commitment to museum work, particularly curatorial work,” says Janet Cooke, coordinator of the program.“His previous experience, gained through other internships and volunteering, underscored this commitment.”
Coleman came to Haverford specifically to study art history at Bryn Mawr, and wet his feet in the gallery/museum pool by working at Haverford's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Last summer, he interned at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he dealt with the Italian maiolica (tin glazed earthenware) collected by William Randolph Hearst. Under the supervision of curator Thomas Michie, Coleman explored auction records and dealers' correspondence at the Getty Research Institute to piece together the early history of Hearst's treasures and how they came to be part of the collection.
“That kind of detective work requires a love of untangling mysteries, navigating through research libraries and special collections, patience with old, often-illegible records, and some familiarity with foreign languages,” says Michie.“I'm not sure Will knew what he was in for when he signed up, but to his credit, he took on this project with gusto.”
Coleman went on to study with one of the world's foremost authorities on Renaissance ceramics, Timothy Wilson, during his junior year abroad at Oxford University. He worked at the university-affiliated Ashmolean Museum, where in addition to ceramics he handled the drawings of Raphael (“I got to hold them in my own two hands”) and the engraved woodblocks of Lucien Pissarro, son of Camille. Coleman measured and documented each piece and dabbled in conservation, constructing foam housing to protect them.
“Conservation is not for me,” he declares.“You have to study chemistry.”
Now, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Coleman works in the department of American decorative arts, overseen by curator David Barquist. His responsibilities include checking every photograph of every piece in the American silver collection to decide which need to be re-shot, and conducting provenance (history of ownership) research on the silver, in a manner similar to last summer's project with Hearst's maiolica. He searches catalogs at places like Freeman's Auction House in downtown Philadelphia, where the vice president of American Furniture and Decorative Arts took him under her wing.“She made me think more seriously about auction work,” he says.
The real highlight of his internship has turned out to be a small black teapot, once owned by Scottish immigrant Thomas Haig in the 19th century.“I was asked to find an object in the collection lacking in research,” Coleman explains,“and to carry out that research.” By studying the personal papers of the museum director who acquired the piece and 19th-century directories, he discovered that the Haig firm had been active decades longer than previous scholars had acknowledged. Digging deeper, he found old newspaper clippings about the Philadelphia factory owned by Thomas Haig and his two sons, detailing their ability to create both practical ceramic objects like fire bricks for hearths and decorative, elegant earthenware pots. Coleman is turning his research into an article for the journal Ceramics in America; it may be published in 2007.
“Will fully embraces each opportunity that comes with the internship,” says Janet Cooke.“He asks questions and follows through with reading on his own.” He has also become something of a leader among his fellow interns, giving them tours of the maiolica in the Museum's European galleries and arranging group events at the Mann Music Center and other venues.
In his time away from the Museum, Coleman is preparing for his most ambitious undertaking yet: In March 2007, he'll curate an exhibition of Pennsylvania landscape paintings for the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. The works, on loan from local college and museum collections, date back to colonial times and will include impressionists Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber who, according to Coleman, are starting to be“hotly collected.” He's even landed an Andrew Wyeth, courtesy of Dickinson College:“That was a bit of a victory.” Ultimately, he hopes to have 35-45 works committed.
Coleman believes that Pennsylvania's paintings and painters have special significance in the art world because of the state's former status as the center of colonial government, its amiable relations with Native Americans (“There's no fear in the depictions of wilderness,” he says) and its Quaker heritage.“They had rejected paintings because they were not simple,” says Coleman, himself a Quaker,“and it wasn't until much later that they could also view art as a positive way of showing respect for the divine.”
During what little spare time he has, Coleman prepares for the GREs, with his sights set on graduate school at Yale. He's vacillating as to which genre he'll choose as his specialization. Before he went to Oxford, his passion was 19th-century English landscape painting, particularly the works of John Constable.“The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a painting of Constable's called The Lock, and I'd spend hours in front of it,” he says.“There's an honesty and originality to his work that really speaks to me.” But his preparation for both the Pennsylvania landscape exhibit and his senior thesis—a study of the Maine artist's colony Monhegan Island, where he has spent every August since childhood—has drawn him to American landscape art as well. And he hasn't ruled out Italian Renaissance ceramics:“There aren't many people writing about them, and I've been lucky enough to have a good amount of experience.” Whichever path he follows, there's little doubt he'll be more than prepared for life as an art historian.
“He is determined, persevering, and has a passionate interest in objects,” says Bryn Mawr Professor of Art History Gridley McKim-Smith, Coleman's mentor.“When museum people say they love ‘objects,' they mean they love the works in the original; not just ideas, but the actual objects themselves. Will is a museum person.”
—Brenna McBride
