For Sidney Hamper and his wife, Grace, caretakers of the John H. Vanderpoel Memorial Art Collection, every picture really does tell a story. Take Roscona at Sunrise, a scene of a tall ship in a Venetian harbor that assumes a prominent spot in a back alcove of the Vanderpoel Gallery in Beverly. It was painted in 1892 by marine artist Walter Brown, a friend of the Dutch-born John Vanderpoel, who was an influential teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for more than 30 years.
“It’s certainly one of the few concentrated holdings of fine arts by Chicago-area artists,” says Wendy Greenhouse, an independent art historian and curator. “It’s altogether a choice collection that deserves much more exposure and accessibility.”
Johannes van der Poel was born near Haarlem, Holland, in 1857, the seventh of ten children; his sister Mathilde also became an artist. Their parents, Jan and Maria, ran a flax business. “His mother probably worked herself to death,” says Jimmie Lee Buehler, a writer and lay historian who’s been a Vanderpoel Art Association board member since the mid-1980s. “He loved women, and I think missed his mother. Many of his paintings show women working.”
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He took a leave of absence in the mid-1880s to further his studies in Paris and to tour Europe. In 1893, a year after losing sight in one eye, he exhibited five paintings at the World’s Columbian Exposition, where he also sat on the jury for the Palace of Fine Arts. He married in 1896, and the following year he and his wife moved to Beverly, into a house at 9319 S. Pleasant that’s still standing. A Vanderpoel work took the bronze medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, and three years later the artist was commissioned to paint an elaborate ceiling mural in DePaul University’s College Theatre, which was demolished in 1979.
Dudley Crafts Watson, a Chicago artist who’d just become the first director of the Milwaukee Art Institute (now the Milwaukee Art Museum), unveiled the painting at the elementary school in 1914. “Don’t let this be the end of this beautiful tribute,” he said. “Scores of American painters loved and honored your neighbor. Ask each of them to contribute one of their works to a great memorial to Vanderpoel.” Soon eight artists had each given a painting. In 1915, Campbell chartered the John H. Vanderpoel Art Association “to perpetuate the name and memory of John H. Vanderpoel…to receive, care for, and maintain a collection of pictures, paintings, and other works of art to be kept and exhibited at Chicago, Illinois.”
In the years following Campbell’s death, the board became dominated by wives of prominent Beverly businessmen and civic leaders, according to the Hampers, and the association acquired a reputation for being cliquish and snooty. “Most of these women did nothing but let things lay,” says Sidney Hamper. “Very little preservation was done. Paintings got old and dried out and cracked up. The acid from paper mattes leached into prints. You had hot summers with the skylight up there, and cold winters. [The collection] was in this room for more than 30 years before it was air-conditioned.”
By 1968 the Baers, the Pillsburys, and other association members as well as the academy had contributed funds to build an on-campus facility at 2153 W. 111th, “with the primary purpose of providing a permanent home for the art collection,” says Hamper. The academy, which would administer the building, gave the primary 50-year lease to the arts center; because two-thirds of the cost had been donated by Vanderpoel board members, the arts center in turn issued a 50-year sublease to the association, at $10 a year, for use of the gallery. The academy was given use of the auditorium and would share classrooms, lounges, and the theater with the arts center.
