Frederick Mason Perkins

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FREDERICK MASON PERKINS

 

Frederick Mason Perkins was an American art historian and connoisseur. He first settled in Rome, then in Siena, and later in Florence. He studied music and piano in Germany and arrived in Italy in the 1890s. He acquired the villa Sassoforte in Lastra Signa and decorated it with a collection of early Italian pictures. In Italy he related with members of the Anglo-American community and became a friend of art historians and collectors. These included Bernard and Mary Berenson, Robert Langton Douglas, Robert Hobart Cust, Edward Hutton, William Heywood, Charles Fairfax Murray, and Herbert Horne.

In 1900 Mason Perkins married Lucy Olcott (1877-1922), an art historian and author of the book Guide to Siena. He travelled extensively in Tuscany and Umbria and soon became an expert and leading connoisseur of Sienese art. Often he was the first to identify paintings of old masters in remote churches and to publish these findings in numerous articles in the Rassegna d’Arte Senese, L’Arte, The Burlington Magazine, and other art history journals.

Along with his studies Mason Perkins was engaged as an agent for collectors and acquired paintings and sculptures on their behalf. Some of the most important American and Italian collections of his time were developed with his help. These include the Dan Fellows Platt collection in Englewood and the collections of Helen Frick and George Blumenthal in New York.

After Lucy’s death he married the English art historian Irene Vavasour Elder (1883-1971). He lived for several decades of his life in Assisi in the house at Piazza del Vescovado. Part of his art collection was donated to the Sacro Convento of Assisi.

The collection (8,170 photographic prints, 261 letters, as well as notes, invoices, and other items) includes vintage photographic prints reproducing European artworks dated from the 13th to the 18th century. The bulk of the collection documents Italian painting mainly from the regions of Florence, Siena, and parts of Central Italy.

It provides detailed documentation of paintings and sculptures in American and European private collections and museums during the late 19th and early 20th century, offering an overview of collectors' preferences and tastes in that period. On the versos of the photos there are notes by Mason Perkins and Vavasour Elder related to the attribution, date, and literature of the artworks, but most importantly, notes include rich provenance information for the paintings. The materials extensively document some of the most important collections of the time, such as the collections of Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Bernard d’Hendecourt, Dan Fellows Platt, Bernard Berenson, Charles Loeser, Helen Clay Frick, Samuel Henry Kress, Robert Jenkins Nevin, Herbert Horne, Maitland Fuller Griggs, George Blumenthal, and Frederick Mason Perkins. They also record the activity of numerous art dealers in Europe and the U.S. such as Luigi Bellini, Eugenio Ventura, Luigi Albrighi, as well as the Ehrich Galleries. Some interesting photographs show art forgeries that were once accepted as genuine.

A large number of the photographs were commissioned by Frederick Mason Perkins himself and these are often the first reproductions of paintings he found in churches in remote places around Italy. These items illustrate his research interests in the Siena school of painting, his activity as a connoisseur, the role he had in the art market, and his interest in photography.

Mason Perkins’s notes provide valuable information regarding the names of photographers and the dates of photographs. Images of approximately one hundred photographers are part of the collection. Most of them are by the firms Alinari, Anderson, Hanfstaengl, Harry Burton, Lévy, Lombardi, M.N. Conger, Mario Sansoni, Murray K. Keyes, Reali, and Sansoni & Nesti. In addition to the photographs, the collection also contains a limited number of other materials forming series II and III and including notes, photographers' receipts, and scholarly and personal correspondence of interest for art historiography and the history of photography.