NEW YORK.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Howard Gilman Foundation announced jointly today that the Museum has acquired the Gilman Paper Company Collection, widely regarded as the world’s finest collection of photographs in private hands. With exceptional examples of 19th-century French, British, and American photographs, as well as masterpieces from the turn-of-the-century and modernist periods, the Gilman Collection has played a central role in establishing photography’s historical canon and has long set the standard for connoisseurship in the field. In addition to many unique and beautiful icons of photography by such masters as Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Mathew Brady, Carleton Watkins, Edward Steichen, and Man Ray, the Gilman Collection includes extensive bodies of work by numerous pioneers of the camera. The collection was acquired through purchase, complemented by a generous gift from the Foundation. It contains more than 8,500 photographs, dating primarily from the first century of the medium, 1839-1939.

In announcing the acquisition, Philippe de Montebello, Director of the Metropolitan, commented: “It is most gratifying to see the Metropolitan’s collection assume preeminence in yet another area of artistic endeavor. This acquisition—by far the most important that the Museum has ever made in the field of photography, indeed one of the most important acquisitions in any field—will provide our public with a rich and enduring opportunity to study and appreciate the visual innovation, expressiveness, and sheer beauty of photography at its highest level. The Museum and its public all owe a deep debt of gratitude to its Trustees, donors, and supporters, as well as to The Howard Gilman Foundation, for having given this unparalleled collection its proper home at the Metropolitan.”

Pierre Apraxine, Curator of the Gilman Paper Company Collection from its inception and a Director of The Howard Gilman Foundation, commented: “We are tremendously pleased. There could be no more perfect home for this collection than the Metropolitan Museum, where the masterpieces of photography that Howard Gilman so lovingly gathered can be enjoyed by a broad public within the rich context of the world’s best art and the panorama of history.”

Mr. de Montebello noted that, in addition to allocations from the Museum’s general art acquisition funds, including the Rogers Fund, major gifts in support of the Gilman acquisition were received from Joyce F. Menschel, a Museum Trustee and Chair of the Department of Photographs Visiting Committee, and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee; Harriette and Noel Levine; Mr. and Mrs. Andrew M. Saul; Mrs. Walter H. Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation; Joseph M. Cohen; Jennifer and Joseph Duke; Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis; Cynthia Hazen Polsky; and, collectively, The Alfred Stieglitz Society, the Friends group that supports the activities and acquisitions of the Department of Photographs. He also noted generous and timely support from the William Talbott Hillman Foundation; Robert Rosenkranz; the Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation; W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg; the Sam Salz Foundation; Heidi S. Steiger; and two anonymous donors. Additional funds for the purchase will be raised during the coming year through the sale of duplicates and other photographs from both the Met and Gilman collections. Finally, Mr. de Montebello expressed his profound thanks to The Howard Gilman Foundation, which has donated a substantial portion of the collection.

Mr. de Montebello praised the efforts over many years of Maria Morris Hambourg, founding Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs and now a Consulting Curator; Malcolm Daniel, her successor as Curator in Charge; and the staff of the Department of Photographs for their long and productive efforts to advance knowledge and appreciation of the Gilman Collection and to bring it to the Metropolitan. Mr. Daniel commented: “This acquisition does not merely improve the Museum’s photography collection—it transforms it. In many areas, the Gilman Collection alone is stronger than the Met’s, and together they constitute deep, rich holdings of work by many of the greatest artists of the medium. The union of our collections is an event long hoped for by the Metropolitan and by the late Howard Gilman, his curator Pierre Apraxine, and The Howard Gilman Foundation. This is indeed a dream come true.”

The Gilman Paper Company Collection - The Gilman Paper Company Collection was formed over the course of two decades (roughly 1977-1997) by Howard Gilman, Chairman of the Gilman Paper Company until his death in January 1998, and his curator Pierre Apraxine. Although they began by collecting photographs made during the first half of the 20th century, after several years they turned to the relatively unexplored terrain of the 19th century. Mr. Gilman explained in 1992: “It was the greater challenge—more difficult to find, appreciate, and sort out. The field was a submerged continent but it is essential as a foundation for the photography of this century.” Pierre Apraxine elaborated, “At the time it seemed almost virgin territory. For us it all started with discovering Baldus’s photograph of an afternoon in the country [édouard Baldus, Group at the Château de la Faloise, 1857]. In 1977, I didn’t know who Baldus was, but when you see something extraordinary like that, if you’ve been studying art for some time, you just know it is an overlooked masterpiece. I remember when I came back from that first visit to France, I said, ‘Howard, this is it, this is where we should go.’”

In the ensuing years, Gilman and Apraxine built a world-renowned collection that includes not only recognized and celebrated monuments in the history of photography, but also newly discovered artists and individual photographs that quickly assumed iconic status in their own right. The beautiful and mysterious Woman Seen from the Back (ca. 1862) by the little-known French photographer Onésipe Aguado is one such example; reproduced on the cover of the Metropolitan’s 1993 exhibition catalogue The Waking Dream, the photograph is now recognized as among the most elegant and enigmatic portraits of its time. Other 19th-century French photographs—an area of particular strength in the Gilman Collection—include early daguerreotypes such as Choiselat and Ratel’s dazzling Pavillon de Flore and the Tuileries Gardens (1849); portraits by the famed Nadar and his brother Adrien Tournachon, whose Self Portrait (ca. 1855) reveals a sensitive and curiously sly artist in a sketching hat and smock; 21 photographs by Gustave Le Gray, including dramatic seascapes and dappled forest scenes; and extensive explorations of Egypt and the Holy Land by Maxime du Camp, Félix Teynard, Auguste Salzmann, and Louis de Clercq.

Among the exceptional examples of 19th-century English photography are early, experimental photographs by the medium’s inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot (Botanical Specimen, 1835?); rare masterworks of landscape, architectural, still-life, portrait, and documentary photography by Roger Fenton; portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron, including Philip Stanhope Worsley (1864-66), a mesmerizing portrait of the poet that suggests both his intellectual intensity and his impending death from tuberculosis; fine examples of Lewis Carroll’s photographs of children, most notably his portrait of the girl made famous by his Alice stories, Alice Liddell as “The Beggar Maid” (ca. 1859).

Slavery, the abolitionist movement, and the Civil War are represented in a deep and nuanced way in the American photographs of the Gilman Collection. Among the works centered on this theme are a rare and particularl