Timken Museum of Art
Welcome Affectionately known as San Diego’s “jewel box” of fine art, the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego’s historic Balboa Park is home to the Putnam Foundation’s significant collection of European old masters, 19th century American art and Russian icons. The collection also includes the only Rembrandt painting on public display in San Diego. Considered one of the finest small museums in the world, the Timken Museum of Art, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2015, provides visitors with an accessible and enriching cultural experience featuring a beautiful collection, intimate surroundings and perennially free admission. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and Sundays 12:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. It is closed on Mondays and all major holidays. For more information visit our website at timkenmuseum.org or call (619) 239-5548. Follow us on Facebook at Timken Museum of Art, Twitter at @TimkenMuseum, Instagram at Timken Museum of Art and Pinterest at Timken Museum of Art.
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History In an effort to secure the Putnam Foundation Collection for San Diego, Ames secured financial support from the Ohio-based Timken family of the Timken roller bearing fame to help build a new gallery for San Diego. The institution first opened its doors to the public in October 1965. The institution was named the Timken Art Gallery (now the Timken Museum of Art) because of the very generous contributions the Timken family had made to the cultural life of San Diego. In the years between the Foundation’s establishment and the opening of the museum, the Putnam Foundation Collection paintings remained on loan to institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. In 1965, the paintings were reunited, and hung in their new permanent quarters at the Timken. Located on the Prado in San Diego’s beautiful Balboa Park, the museum displays more than 60 extraordinary artworks, predominantly paintings
augmented by a small holding of sculpture and decorative art objects. The works in the Putnam Foundation Collection are primarily in three distinct areas: European old master paintings, 18th and 19thcentury American art, and Russian icons. Each collection boasts unique and priceless representations of the specific genre. Notable works in the collection include Rembrandt’s Saint Bartholomew (the only painting by the Dutch artist on public display in San Diego); Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Parable of the Sower; John Singleton Copley’s Portrait of Mrs. Thomas Gage; Eastman Johnson’s classic The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket; and JeanBaptiste-Camille Corot’s View of Volterra. The Timken is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 AM to 4:30 PM, and Sunday from noon to 4:30 PM. The museum is closed Monday. Admission is always free.
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Architecture The mid-century modern Timken Museum of Art today stands on a prime location in Balboa Park’s Plaza de Panama, the site of an important, but temporary, edifice for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. That structure, the Home Economy Building designed by architect Carleton Winslow, was demolished in 1963. The Timken is arguably the second most important mid-century building in San Diego, after Louis Kahn’s iconic Salk Institute. The Timken is all the more significant for being designed by a local, San Deigan, architect. The groundwork for the museum began in 1951. With the help of longtime friend and lawyer Walter Ames, the sisters Amy and Anne Putnam established the nonprofit Putnam Foundation, under which any art acquired became part of the Putnam Foundation Collection. After Ames secured financial support from the Timken family and its foundation, the firm of Frank L. Hope and Associates, the largest of its kind in the region, was hired to design and build a museum to display the collection in San Diego in perpetuity.
While the Hope firm established a working team for the project, John Mock, Hope’s architect in charge of contemporary design, was responsible for the conception of the building. Mock attended several meetings with Walter Ames and Frank Hope Sr. and Jr. to discuss the main design feature – the ability to embrace Balboa Park from within the building. In contrast to other Balboa Park structures that focused internally on their own exhibits, the light and airy “see-through museum” took its unique shape. The symmetry, balance and palette of materials (travertine, bronze and glass) set the stage for an experience unlike any other structure in Balboa Park. Standing next to a 19th century cast of Giambologna’s Mercury in the foyer (consciously echoing a similar cast in the west building of Washington’s National Gallery of Art), visitors can enjoy the lily pond to the east and the Plaza de Panama to the west as the sun rises and sets. Garden courts dissect the structure’s middle and blur lines between interior and exterior spaces and engage San Diego’s moderate climate and abundant sunshine. The firm hired internationallyacclaimed lighting designer Richard Kelly to design the museum’s interior and exterior lighting scheme. Kelly, who was favored by architects such as Kahn, Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson, provided a unique skylight program for
filtered sunlight to bathe the masterpieces in a way that was both considerate to the health of the art and consistent during the sun’s daily journey across the sky. During mid-summer there is often no need for artificial lights in any of the galleries. Hope’s design leader Howard Shaw provided the designs for the grill work and bronze fascia scheme on the exterior. He also embellished the entry in floralthemed bronze plates and continued the abstraction to the bronze railings, gates and grillwork that punctuates the light, airy feeling of the Timken Museum of Art’s glazed openings. According to experts, the Timken represents some of the best evidence of 1960s modernity by some of the best talent San Diego had to offer. The Timken is a major example of a post-World War II trend to build contemporary museum buildings to display the art of the past, projects that include Kahn’s museums at Yale University (1953 and 1976) and the Kimbell in Fort Worth (1972), William Pereira’s 1966 Ahmanson Building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Philip Johnson’s museums in Utica, New York (1960), Fort Worth (1961) and Lincoln, Neb. (1963). Today’s rose-colored wall upholstery is not original, installed in the early 1990s to enhance the colors of the paintings. When the Timken opened the walls were a color complimenting the travertine floors, with the intention
that the neutral tonality of the interior would have disappeared and one’s eye only attracted to the rich colors of the paintings and the gold frames. Two other points should be remembered when considering the Timken building in the context of Balboa Park. The first is that it continues a trend of building structures of contemporary design in the park. The dominant architectural style in 1915 was revival: on the East Coast Colonial Revival architecture reflected the nation’s 18th century origins; in the Midwest one sees Romanesque Revival; in San Diego it is natural to find Spanish Revival. Twenty years later there was a trend toward modernist designs and the buildings created for the 1935 Exposition, such as the Ford Building (now the San Diego Air and Space Museum) are art deco in form. So the creation of a mid-century modern, International Style, museum in 1965, especially in Southern California, should come as a logical progression. The second point is that the Timken was the most expensive building erected in San Diego up to that time. The benefactors were proud that not only was no expense spared, but that on completion it was given to the city for the benefit, pleasure and inspiration of the citizens of San Diego and visitors to the city. The building and its contents are available free to everyone.
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Our Collection
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The world-class Putnam Foundation collection of European and American masterpieces is on permanent display at the Timken Museum of Art. The Timken’s collection spans nearly 600 years of art from early Italian Renaissance devotional paintings to late nineteenth century paintings from the United States and includes important examples of French, Dutch and Flemish paintings in addition to Italian and American. A special feature of the museum is the significant collection of Russian icons, many from the Moscow and Novgorad Schools, ranging from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century. Don’t miss San Diego’s only painting by Rembrandt, Saint Bartholomew; Jacques-Louis David’s revolutionary portrait of the Irishman Cooper Penrose; and a masterpiece by Eastman Johnson, The Cranberry Harvest. The foyer is adorned with Parisian tapestries from the seventeenth century illustrating the Stories of Queen Artemisia.
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American
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Fitz Henry Lane Castine Harbor and Town, 1851 Although known for his view of the harbors of Boston and Gloucester, Fitz Henry Lane was equally inspired by the Maine landscape. It became the subject of much of his most memorable and intensely poetic studio work from the 1850s until his death. His home base for many of his visits was the town of Castine, visible in the distance, across the harbor. One of the greatest of American marine painters, Lane imposed a sense of stillness and artificiality over the landscape and positions the ships in the harbor as if laying them out on a measured grid. Enlivening the quiet town and harbor is the almost theatrical expanse of sky, which contains a variety of clouds types and a range of light effects.
John Singleton Copley Mrs. Thomas Gage, 1771 (right) In 1771, Copley left his native Boston for a six-month stay in New York, where he accepted numerous portrait commissions. His first subject was Margaret Kemble Gage, the American-born wife of General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America, who had sat for a portrait by the artist in 1768.
Dutch & Flemish
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Pieter Claesz Still Life, 1627 The simple domestic objects are all shown in perspective and in a limited range of colors. Still life was not an independent branch of painting before the seventeenth century, though paintings of religious subjects included still-life objects. Claesz., who painted still lifes almost exclusively, spent his career devising different arrangements of straight elements and curved objects, as in this work. He became the leading still-life painter in Haarlem, the most important Dutch city at the time.
Anthony van Dyck Mary Villiers, Lady Herbert of Shurland, ca. 1636 (right) This portrait was painted at the request of King Charles I of England, in whose collection it once hung. Lady Mary Viillers (1622-1685), the daughter of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was one of the most intriguing individuals connected with the English court. She was raised in the royal household after her father was assassinated in 1628. The intimacy of this portrait is remarkable due, perhaps, to the special rapport the artist had with his young sitter, whom he had known since at least 1633.
French Claude-Joseph Vernet A Seaport at Sunset, 1749
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Claude-Joseph Vernet, a native of Avignon, went to Rome in 1734 and over the next decade established himself in Italy as a painter of real and imaginary landscapes based on the local countryside and seacoast. The artist depicts an idealized Mediterranean seaport and uses a variety of features from the region. The lighthouse is actually in Naples; the Arch of Constantine is in Rome and the lateen-rigged ship on the right is a type common to the eastern Mediterranean. The large warship fires a salute and the nearby ships fly the Dutch flag, indicating that the painting may have been commissioned by a Dutch client.
Jacques-Louis David Portrait of Cooper Penrose, 1802 (right) Cooper Penrose traveled from Ireland to Paris in 1802 to commission Jacques- Louis David, the most famous painter in Europe, to paint his portrait. David brings the sitter down to earth by positioning the head lower on the canvas than is traditional in French portraiture. Attention is drawn to the brilliantly painted head and hands, which form a triangle in the center of the composition.
Italian
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Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo Torment of St. Anthony, ca. 1515-20 Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo shows Saint Anthony with his hands clasped in prayer, fleeing from a dark, hellish vision into a pastoral landscape bathed in warm daylight. Like other northern Italian painters of the time, Savoldo was interested in Flemish painting, particularly Hieronymous Bosch’s nightmarish monsters, which influenced his depiction of Saint Anthony’s tormentors. As the saint flees, his hands point to a monastery, a reminder that he was the father of monasticism.
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio Portrait of a Youth Holding an Arrow, ca. 1500-10 (right) Born in Milan to a noble family, Boltraffio entered the school of Leonardo da Vinci in 1491 and remained with him until around 1498 or 1499. This work reveals an aristocratic refinement that derives as much from Boltraffio’s own artistic gifts as from Leonardo’s influences. The sitter may be Girolamo Casio, a Bolognese poet and close friend of the artist. He is shown wearing a fillet, intertwined with laurel leaves and holding an arrow - both symbols of Apollo, the patron of poetry and leader of the Muses.
Russian Icons
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St. Basil with Scenes from His Life 16th century, Moscow School In this icon Saint Basil is shown full-length with a Gospel book in his left hand; his right is raised in a two-fingered blessing. A threequarter-length figure of Christ is depicted in a roundel above his right hand; another of the Blessed Mother appears in a roundel above the Gospel. Fourteen scenes of Saint Basil’s life surround the main figure. The size of this icon suggests that it once hung on a church wall.
Our Lady of Jerusalem 17th century, Moscow School (right)
By tradition, a large icon of the Mother of God and the Christ Child is placed on the first register of the iconostatis, to the left of the Royal Gates. She is depicted in the traditional pose of the Hodigitria, Greek for “pointer of the way.” Here, the Virgin gestures with her right hand to the Christ Child as being “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” The letters on either side of the Virgin’s head mean “Mary, Mother of God.” and the letters above Christ’s halo, IC SC, stand for Jesus Christ.
French Tapestries
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Antoine Caron The Petitions, 1562-65 (right) A Group of Soldiers, 1562-65 Woven sometime between 1611 and about 1620, these four tapestries are from a series of at least eighteen, made in Paris to decorate the palace of Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy (1562-1630) in Turin, Italy. The tapesties illustrate episodes from Stories of Queen Artemisia, an epic tale created in the 1560s by Nicholas Houel. Houel based the tale on the lives of two ancient queens, both named Artemisia, combining them into a single queen of the same name. Three of the panels in the collection show this admirable monarch - rewarding her soldiers with the spoils of war, taking requests form her citizens on small pieces of paper, and listening to the reading of a petition - acts epitomizing the wisdom of an enlightened monarch. The fourth panel depicts a group of soldiers. The panels are woven of wool and silk, with luxurious metallic silver and silver-glit threads using real silver and gold.
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Contact Information Timken Museum of Art 2250 Fifth Ave Suite 500 San Diego, California 92103 Phone: 619.239.5548 Fax: 619.531.9640 Reservations: 619.261.9236 Email: info@timkenmuseum.org