Dear Vance: Who is — or was — the “Brooks” of Memphis Brooks Museum of Art? — R.H., Memphis.
Dear R.H.: It’s a good question, and I’m surprised it doesn’t come up more often.
The museum’s official name, when it opened in 1916, was Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, as a tribute to Samuel Hamilton Brooks. Born in 1834 in Beverly, Ohio, he came to Memphis when he was 24 and took a job in an iron foundry, according to old city directories. After the Civil War, he teamed up with a partner to establish Brooks, Neely & Company, cotton factors and grocers with offices on Front Street, and became quite wealthy. He also served as vice president of First National Bank and was a charter member of the Cotton Exchange.
The Commercial Appeal called him “a man of generous impulse, ever ready to extend a helping hand in any direction.” In 1876, he was the first to donate funds to purchase the fountain in Court Square, among other civic contributions. When he passed away in 1912 during a trip to Baltimore, the CA eulogized, “He was involved in innumerable good works for the city and for humanity, and his name and memory are held in deepest reverence by all who knew him.”
ARTWORK COURTESY MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM | CECILIA BEAUX, AMERICAN, 1855-1942, PORTRAIT OF MRS. SAMUEL HAMILTON BROOKS, 1911, OIL ON CANVAS, 47 3/4” X 35”, GIFT OF MRS. SAMUEL HAMILTON BROOKS
This oil painting of Bessie Vance Brooks was one of the few artworks on display when Brooks first opened.
Before his death, he had told friends that he hoped Memphis would someday have an art gallery, but apparently that’s as far as he got with it. The credit for turning that dream into reality goes to his wife, Bessie Vance Brooks.
Born in Memphis in 1854, Bessie was the only child of Margaret and Calvin Vance, a prominent attorney here. She attended the Clara Conway Institute, one of this city’s most prestigious schools, and also studied art in Paris.
I don’t know the circumstances — how and where they met — but in 1902, she married Samuel Hamilton Brooks. Newspaper articles describe her as a “talented artist in her own right” and she created works that are in public or private collections. Even more impressive, though, she left behind an entire art gallery.
When her husband passed away, Brooks quickly decided to create a memorial in his name. She didn’t bother asking for donations. Within months of his death, it seems she simply wrote a check for $100,000 — an astonishing sum in those days — and got to work.
The first task was to select a designer, and here again money was apparently no concern. In 1913, she hired New York architect James Gamble Rogers, who had established a national reputation for creating distinctive buildings on the campuses of Yale and Columbia universities. In Memphis, Rogers designed the Shelby County Courthouse, one of the city’s most impressive buildings.
Brooks selected a site in Overton Park, and groundbreaking took place on the relatively small building — it measured only 90 by 100 feet — in 1914. The exterior was clad in white Georgia marble, with elaborately carved panels on either side of the entrance representing Art and Sculpture. Above the doorway was an inscription chosen by Brooks: “Put thou thy faith in the Lord and be doing good.”
The Commercial Appeal helpfully explained, “If the beautiful example set by Mrs. Brooks shall be emulated by others, if the prayer that welled from the heart of the donor to be chiseled in imperishable letters over the entrance finds an echo in the hearts of all who read it, many good and profitable things will come to Memphis, for it will bring love, prosperity, and good will to all.”
“I hereby give and donate this building to the public use, as a repository, conservatory, and museum of art — to be kept and maintained forever, under the care and regulation of the Park Commission and other authorities of the City of Memphis in the State of Tennessee, to be known and designated as ‘The Samuel Hamilton Brooks Memorial’ for the free use and service of students of art and for the enjoyment, inspiration, and instruction of our people.” — Bessie Vance Brooks, 1914
The interior, which offered visitors two floors of galleries, featured walls of gleaming white marble panels, with floors of polished teakwood. When it first opened, though, the building was practically empty. Inside were two paintings — life-size oil portraits of Bessie (shown here) and Samuel, painted by Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942), a highly regarded Philadelphia-born artist — along with “a very suitable exhibition” arranged by the Memphis Art Association, though newspapers didn’t provide details. Other paintings and sculptures would come later, of course.
The formal dedication of the building took place at 5 p.m. on May 25, 1916, with hundreds of men and women gathered around the entrance. Although Mayor Thomas Ashcroft couldn’t attend “on account of city budget matters,” he still sent a huge bouquet of red roses for Brooks, “along with the hope that the perfume from every flower would bring a sweet thought to the recipient.”
City Attorney Charles Bryan formally accepted the building as a gift to the citizens of Memphis, referring to Overton Park as “this garden spot, which only needed a jewel to make it complete.” For years afterwards, Brooks Art Gallery was called “the jewel box in the park.”
Bishop Thomas F. Gailor gave a lengthy invocation and then read a short speech prepared by Brooks, who didn’t want to speak before such a large crowd:
“I hereby give and donate this building to the public use, as a repository, conservatory, and museum of art — to be kept and maintained forever, under the care and regulation of the Park Commission and other authorities of the City of Memphis in the State of Tennessee, to be known and designated as ‘The Samuel Hamilton Brooks Memorial’ for the free use and service of students of art and for the enjoyment, inspiration, and instruction of our people.”
Another part of the official dedication involved presenting the gallery keys to Robert Galloway, chairman of the Memphis Park Commission. “Colonel Galloway was almost overcome at several stages of his address,” reported The Commercial Appeal, “but he made an eloquent reply and said that the value of an art gallery was immeasurable.”
The last speaker was Frances Church, president of the Memphis Art Association. Her remarks give present-day readers some idea of the enormity of the gift Bessie Brooks had bestowed upon Memphis, saying that “she had lost all hope of seeing an art gallery in Memphis, but now she witnessed the realization of this hope. This made her believe that many good things would yet come to pass.”
After all the speeches, the newspaper reported that “Mrs. Brooks was showered with thanks from grateful hearts, accepting all with graceful modesty and an expression of happiness in the thought that she had done some good for Memphis.”
Indeed she had. Just a few months after the gallery opened, however, she moved away to Daytona, Florida, where she lived until her death in 1943. She is buried in the Brooks family plot in Elmwood Cemetery, but for reasons I can’t explain, the space on her husband’s gravestone, where her name should have been carved, remains blank.
This postcard view of the original Brooks Memorial Art Gallery shows how small the building was when it opened. The “footprint” of the structure was only 100 by 90 feet.
Over the years, of course, the little “jewel box in the park” has outgrown the original building, with major expansions in 1955, 1973, and 1989. The name has changed too, from Brooks Memorial Art Gallery to Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Current plans, as most people know, involve moving Brooks out of Overton Park entirely, where it has stood for more than a century, and relocating it to a modern building Downtown, overlooking the river at Front and Union. Those plans don’t specify what would happen to the original building.
The remarkable contribution of Bessie Vance Brooks hasn’t been forgotten. In 2014, the Women of Achievement honored her life and work in the category of “Heritage,” for “a woman of generations past whose achievements enrich our lives.”
The award made this observation: “Bessie’s generosity provided more than a building; it created a place where many other women in the city contributed to the arts and, especially, to arts education.” Among them were the Memphis Art Association, which eventually became the Memphis College of Art, and the Brooks Museum League, a women’s organization with a special emphasis on children’s programs.
The Women of Achievement concluded their 2014 tribute in this way: “With a collection that numbers almost 9,000 works of art, and a building that has been expanded three times, the Brooks has no doubt exceeded what Bessie imagined for her community. Her legacy endures, and generations have benefited from the beauty and glory of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.”
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Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, P.O. Box 1738, Memphis, TN 38101
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