Members of Minnie Byers’s family with Phillips Head Librarian Karen Schneider
Last month, ten members of Minnie Byers’s family came from as far away as Texas to see the archival exhibition Women of Influence: Minnie Byers, Elmira Bier, and Marjorie Phillips. Materials related to the life of Minnie Byers include correspondence, photographs, and images of paintings that she owned which were gifted to her by Duncan Phillips.
From The Phillips Collection Archives
Museum founder Duncan Phillips loved making lists. He often created lists that ranked individual works of art. In a document dated 1919-1920, prior to the museum’s opening in 1921, he put Claude Monet in third place and American painter John Twachtman in first on a list titled “15 Best Purchases of 1918-19.”
On the back of an important letter to Thomas Bower (below) about the late art collector John Quinn, Phillips scrawled a list that included baby dresses, laundry, roast chicken, chicken aspic jelly, and ice cream.
From The Phillips Collection Archives
Letter from Duncan Phillips to Frank Rehn, 1922. From The Phillips Collection Library & Archives
In 1922, one year after The Phillips Collection opened to the public, Duncan Phillips explored the idea of opening a branch of the museum in New York. He reached out to Frank Rehn, a gallery owner, and A.C. Downing, Jr., of the New York Trust Company, for advice. Phillips’s treasurer, Dwight Clark, inquired about the location of the future art center of New York and specifically asked for information on the value of properties on 57th Street between Lexington Avenue and Sutton Place as well as within the bounds of Lexington Avenue, Sixth Avenue, 50th Street, and 70th Street. The New York branch never came to be because Phillips decided to make acquisitions of works of art a priority. Phillips paid $125,000 for The Luncheon of the Boating Party in 1923, which exhausted the funds needed for purchases as well as real estate.
