4 MORE: Borrowed Gems
As part of our year-end issue, we are revisiting Cincinnati People interviews from 2021.
We checked in with Deborah Emont Scott, The Louise Taft Semple President/CEO of the Taft Museum of Art, and Elizabeth Pierce, CEO of Cincinnati Museum Center, who we spoke to about Borrowed Gems from the Taft Museum of Art, an exhibition of 47 works from the Taft currently on view at CMC.
The original interview about the exhibition from July is below.
Deborah Emont Scott, The Louise Taft Semple President/CEO
What’s been the biggest surprise to you in 2021?
The success of our museum’s mission and the love we receive by our community during these trying times have been heartwarming. It is truly because of our dedicated team and passionate partners like the Cincinnati Museum Center that the Taft Museum of Art’s historic house will thrive for another 200 years. Their advocacy and support were integral in keeping the Bicentennial Infrastructure Project moving forward as we sought a temporary home for nearly 40 works in our collection—amidst a pandemic.
What’s changed since we last spoke?
Our bicentennial exhibitions, In a New Light: Treasures from the Taft in our Fifth Third Gallery and Borrowed Gems from the Taft Museum of Art on loan to Cincinnati Museum Center, are now in their final months. This means we are approaching a new and exciting phase of the project, reinterpreting and reinstalling our historic house collection alongside the debut of the newly restored and preserved home. For example, some works have never had labels before—which will allow us to share more educational and artistic resources with the public—while some works have been restored after quite some time off view.
During this time, we have also diligently continued to raise funds for the Love This House campaign, which supports the Bicentennial Infrastructure Project. We are now 80% of the way to our goal of $12.7 million!
What did you learn about Cincinnati?
Cincinnati is a place where people care about its history and culture. Since both the Taft and the Cincinnati Museum Center are so interwoven into the fabric of the Queen City, visitors to both exhibitions have been able to find a part of themselves in our collection, its history, and the insight it continues to provide to 21st century audiences. Visitors will soon too be able to further experience this within the Taft historic house.
What are you most looking forward to in 2022?
As the Taft Museum of Art celebrates our 90th birthday this year, we are also elated to be in the final stretches of our Bicentennial Infrastructure Project! It has been a unique pleasure to share this experience with our city and I look forward to the grand reveal of the house, alongside our cinematic exhibition this June, Jane Austen: Fashion & Sensibility, our Light Up the Night Gala, and celebrating with community events—further exploring the living art and history this place holds.
Elizabeth Pierce, President and CEO
What’s been the biggest surprise to you in 2021?
The biggest surprise is that 2021 has felt more difficult in some ways than 2020.
What’s changed since we last spoke?
Since we talked in July about Borrowed Gems, the Holiday Trains have opened and we are welcoming lots of people back to Union Terminal. Visitors are loving the Ice Age Trail, which opened in July for the first time in five years. As a destination experience, we are continuing to adapt working hours and working styles appreciating the financial ups and protecting against the financial downs of our business.
What did you learn about Cincinnati?
This exhibition of the Taft’s Borrowed Gems gave me a greater understanding of Charles and Anna’s desire to inspire the artisans and makers in the community. And, working on other projects that are upcoming in 2022, we see the impact of inspiration. We have new experiences upcoming in the history museum focused on items and companies “made in Cincinnati” influenced by the creativity that Taft’s shared with our region.
What are you most looking forward to in 2022?
The schedule of really interesting projects we’ve been working on to debut in 2022. In April, Our Shared Story celebrating 200 years of Jewish settlement and impact in Cincinnati will be wonderful. There are so many aspects of Cincinnati tied to this bicentennial, I think people will really be surprised and delighted to make these connections. Starting in May , we’re celebrating “America’s Epic Treasures” with a great package of our 19th century American landscape art, paired with immersive paintings from Michael Scott and his Preternatural collection, paired with an incredible OMNIMAX voyage Into America’s Wild. Then, on Nov. 4, 2022, we’ll have our next party, Layers of Nature, when we’ll be joyfully eating, drinking, and dancing through the layers of Union Terminal as part of the celebration and installation of our permanent exhibit named for John and Judy Ruthven, Get Into Nature.
These are all long-time projects coming to fruition and will make this community smile in many ways. Lots of great community partnerships and projects that celebrate history, science, art, curiosity, and more!
Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) is partnering with the Taft Museum of Art to care for nearly 50 artworks during the restoration of the Taft’s 200-year-old historic house. These works will be showcased at CMC in the featured exhibition Borrowed Gems from the Taft Museum of Art. Borrowed Gems opens Friday.
Borrowed Gems showcases the collection of Charles Phelps Taft and Anna Sinton Taft, displaying work from masters including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Charles François Daubigny, J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Gainsborough, in addition to decorative arts featuring Qing dynasty Chinese ceramics and 18th-century watches. The exhibition continues the reinterpretation of the Taft’s permanent collection, covering a broad range of eras, cultures and art forms and the Taft’s More to the Story interpretive texts, providing audiences a more diverse understanding of history. Select works are also highlighted with Closer Look labels to engage families and children with self-guided learning prompts.
Organized by subject matter, Borrowed Gems shows the full range of paintings collected by the Tafts. The couple enjoyed collecting portraits, scenes from daily life and landscapes that could also serve as educational models for artists working in Cincinnati who would look at, and even copy, works by masters of the past. Highlighted portraits in the exhibition include British works such as Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Maria, Duchess of Gloucester and Edinburgh and Joshua Reynolds’ Mrs. Stephen Payne-Gallwey and Her Son Charles. These works continue to offer insights today, providing context into the stories behind the faces seen in the paintings. The portraits are accompanied by 18th-century European watches made of gold and precious gems, bought by the Tafts to inspire Cincinnati’s watchmaking industry. Rather than precision timepieces, these watches are miniature works of art that demonstrated their owners’ fascination with technology. Each watch in Borrowed Gems required the hand of many skilled artisans, from goldsmiths to enamelers to the makers of the movement.
Borrowed Gems also features paintings and porcelains made by Chinese, Dutch, English and French artists of the 18th and 19th centuries portraying people, illustrating narratives and depicting scenes from daily life. The varied cultures and time periods represented in the collection point to the universal impulse to examine relationships and tell stories. Exhibition features include Jean-Francois Millet’s Mother and Child, Anton Mauve’s Cattle Grazing and Adriaen van Ostade’s Interior of an Inn with Three Men and a Boy, which share scenes of people at work, tender family moments and playful vignettes of childhood. Works from the Taft’s collection featured in Borrowed Gems also showcase Chinese vases that illustrate action-filled narratives from Chinese history and literature such as the Vase with the Battle of Kunyang.
Landscapes in the exhibition feature vistas of the French, Dutch and English countryside by painters including J. M. W. Turner’s The Trout Stream and multiple works by Camille Corot. These paintings likely provided respite to the Tafts as they lived in the heart of downtown surrounded by newly built factories. A selection of landscape-inspired Chinese porcelains with designs derived by nature such as the Vase with Lotus Flowers is also on display in the exhibition. During their lifetimes, the Tafts invited artists to see the works from their collections in their home, hoping to encourage creativity in the arts and even inspiring Rookwood Pottery artists with their more than 200 pieces of Chinese ceramics.
Borrowed Gems from the Taft Museum of Art is open through February 21, 2022 in the John A. Ruthven Gallery and the William L. Mallory Sr. Gallery at Cincinnati Museum Center. Admission is free.