Glencairn Museum News | Number 1, 2025

George Grey Barnard (left, Marceau, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) and Raymond Pitcairn (right, The Raymond & Mildred Pitcairn Papers, Glencairn Museum).

The year 2025 marks a significant centennial for medieval art in America: in 1925, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased the collection of the artist and entrepreneur George Grey Barnard for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The collection comprised over 900 artworks dated between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Its acquisition paved the way for the creation of The Met Cloisters, a museum in northern Manhattan dedicated exclusively to medieval European art and architecture. Yet, well before The Met Cloisters was built, Barnard had displayed his objects in an eccentric museum entirely of his own design, sparking an American fascination with the Middle Ages that was to have lasting consequences.

Figure 1: The interior of Barnard’s Cloisters, c. 1926.

Among those enchanted by Barnard’s Cloisters was Raymond Pitcairn, who as a young man made many pilgrimages to this unique space. Designed to evoke a church interior, the museum was crammed with idiosyncratically arranged medieval sculptures and architectural fragments. Pitcairn is believed to have taken some inspiration from Barnard’s Cloisters for the eventual display of his own medieval collection in his home, Glencairn, built in the 1930s.¹ The two men knew each other, and Pitcairn even purchased sculptures from Barnard. That said, they could not have differed more in personality or comportment, and their motivations and collecting practices diverged significantly. So too did their reasons for collecting the Middle Ages. Barnard’s enthusiasm for the medieval stemmed from a deep-seated belief in the enduring excellence of French sculpture, which he saw as originating in the Gothic period. Pitcairn’s reverence for medieval art resided in the conviction that the Middle Ages was a golden age of honesty and integrity in craft. Barnard collected medieval art with the intention of eventually selling it, while Pitcairn saw it as integral to the building of community in Bryn Athyn (see lead image).

Despite their significant differences, as collectors Barnard and Pitcairn were united in their precocity in acquiring medieval art at a time when most Americans had little awareness of or interest in this material. In addition, each was, in his own way, committed to sharing his collection with others, rather than buying art simply for the sake of accumulating it. For Barnard, the impulse to bring medieval art to a broader public brought him, incredibly, to create his own museum. While the audience for Pitcairn’s collection initially was smaller, comprising the craft community of Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, his goals were no less oriented toward the edification of others. For each, however, public-mindedness hinged upon a shared belief: that works of medieval art are marvelous things for makers to learn from. Barnard’s pedagogical views emerged from his career as an accomplished sculptor, while Pitcairn’s were nourished by his experience of the building of Bryn Athyn Cathedral.

Both Barnard and Pitcairn understood learning from the art of the past to be a cornerstone of artistic education. They knew that scrutinizing the surface of a painting brings better understanding of the manipulation of a brush, while examining the textured surface of a terra cotta figure reveals the act of shaping a form. By amassing and sharing their collections with educational intent, they participated in a larger movement to expose makers of all kinds to works of art. This movement was exemplified by the missions of many large institutions founded in the nineteenth century, especially the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Barnard and Pitcairn each pursued similar goals, but on their own terms, on a smaller scale, and for very specific audiences. In what follows, I will explore Barnard and Pitcairn’s approaches in turn.

George Grey Barnard: The Power of the Chisel

George Grey Barnard (1863–1938) came to art collecting in a roundabout way. He was a sculptor, specializing in large-scale figural works in marble. In 1902, he received a prestigious commission: to complete an ambitious, multi-figure ensemble for the façade of the Pennsylvania Capitol building. He moved to France with his family to complete the work. When a corruption scandal broke out in Harrisburg, halting the project and its funds, Barnard turned to buying and selling art to stay afloat. He quickly found that medieval art was often undervalued and focused his efforts on Romanesque and Gothic sculptures, which he frequently purchased during scouting expeditions in the French countryside, although he also sometimes bought from other art dealers. He continued this lucrative endeavor even after work resumed on the Capitol project. He remained in France until 1913, when he transported his entire collection to New York and set up his home and studio in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.²

Figure 2: The exterior of Barnard’s Cloisters, c. 1926.

There, Barnard undertook the ambitious project of creating his own display space. He ran his Cloisters museum from 1914 to 1925, until The Metropolitan Museum of Art took over its management. (In 1938, The Met relocated the collection to a new building half a mile north, today’s Met Cloisters). Ever the businessman, Barnard undoubtedly built his own museum with the intention of selling its contents eventually. His motives become complicated, however, when one considers the loving care he poured into his presentation of hundreds of medieval sculptures and architectural fragments. He created a dreamlike, theatrical setting for the objects, seeking to orchestrate a special experience for his visitors. The assemblage of objects was based less on art historical principles and more on his artist’s knack for drama. He had guards dress as monks to lead visitors around the space. He played Gregorian chant on a gramophone.³ As a result, his Cloisters gained many devoted fans, some of whom wrote him effusive letters describing their visits’ lasting resonance.

Figure 3: Fans flock to Barnard’s Cloisters, c. 1926.

Barnard never wrote extensively on art himself (either that which he made or that which he collected) beyond occasional notes in his personal papers, descriptions in his letters, and a terse, typescript guide to his Cloisters. On the other hand, as a bit of a showman, he was fond of speaking to the press. His outsized personality made him eminently quotable, and so snippets of his views on medieval art also may be gleaned from the newspapers of the day.

Figure 4: The interior of Barnard’s Cloisters, c. 1926.

Notably, Barnard often described his Cloisters as a means of introducing young American artists to medieval art, stating that he wished “to give documents to the American sculptors and students” in the form of objects from which they might learn. This reveals Barnard’s interest in serving a younger generation by supporting both the technical and creative facets of their work. The statement may have reflected his own past experience teaching at the Art Students League in New York City around 1900, where, he lamented, students were woefully uninformed about medieval sculpture.⁴

Figure 5: Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, *Portrait of Sculptor George Grey Barnard in his Atelier*, 1890 (Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).

Given that by the turn of the century New York City was full of interesting artworks from different times and places, Barnard’s wish for access to medieval carvings might seem strange. Yet it was medieval sculpture that Barnard wished for students to see, and there were not many examples of that in New York. Knowing this underscores Barnard’s strong commitment to the medieval as an aficionado, a collector, and a dealer, but it also says something about his own elusive student days. After he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, he continued his training across the Atlantic at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1884.

Paris would have exposed Barnard to many kinds of art that he had never seen before. There, he would have experienced a total history of western art, encountering works from antiquity to modernity in the city’s museums, galleries, and ateliers. Surely, medieval art comprised only one part of his education there. Nonetheless, something about it seems to have stuck with him. The art historian Elizabeth Bradford Smith has written about the setting of Barnard’s Parisian education, the École des Beaux-Arts. At that time, a portion of the school’s complex of buildings still housed the remains of a curious museum, the Musée des Monuments Français, which was founded in the wake of the French Revolution. Though the museum had closed to the public in 1816, Smith argued that Barnard and his fellow students would have had access to its galleries, which housed many works of medieval sculpture and architectural fragments, the kinds of objects that Barnard would one day collect. She further suggested that Barnard’s memories of the shuttered Parisian museum later inspired his Cloisters.⁵ In light of this, it is possible to imagine Barnard examining closely the many medieval sculptures in the museum and taking away some enhanced understanding of his craft.

Years later, having left his student days behind, and even having ceased to teach in formal settings like the Art Students League, Barnard continued to see museums as classrooms and medieval sculptures as exempla from which to learn. But what was it that he found so compelling about the arts of the Middle Ages? It is worth asking the question, since the answer is not obvious. Barnard’s own sculptures do not bear much resemblance to those of the medieval period, superficially or otherwise; for example, he was enthralled by Rodin, and that inspiration is arguably more palpable in his work than that of the Gothic cathedrals. In attempting to answer this question, it is important to remember that Barnard looked at sculptures with an artist’s eye, and that he saw them not only as finished products, but also as the results of processes of making. He saw raw materials, he saw the tools used to work these materials, he saw the movements of those who wielded the tools, and he saw the transformations undergone by the materials as they became artificial forms.

Figure 6: The interior of Barnard’s Cloisters, c. 1926.

With that in mind, comments he once made about the utility of studying medieval works in limestone are particularly telling. He stated that limestone was “the best material for educating American sculptors in ‘the power of the chisel,’ about which ‘they knew nothing.’”⁶ Limestone is a sedimentary rock mostly composed of calcium carbonate; there are many different kinds of limestone of varying textures and porosity, widely available across western Europe. Medieval builders and stone carvers did not work exclusively in limestone, but it was the predominantly worked stone of the Middle Ages due to its abundance and durability. Sculptors preferred fine-grained limestones, which could be brought to a high degree of finish, although even these often have a matte or grainy surface.

Barnard wrote of limestone that it “is of a soft texture which prohibits an extreme finish and reveals in every touch of the sculptor’s the manner in which he wrought his lights and shades and forms.” He went on to state that in contrast, ancient Greek sculptures made of highly polished marble do not reveal the gestures of the artist: rather, the polish hides the artist’s work. He concluded that “it was my discovery of this fact that led to the awakening of my interest in Gothic sculpture.”⁷ In saying this, Barnard possibly found himself reflecting on his own practice, as well as that of the Greeks, since marble was the material with which he principally worked as a sculptor. He evidently considered the finish he preferred for his own sculptures to hinder those learning the craft.

Figure 7: Sculptures from the Cloister of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, as installed at The Met Cloisters, c. 1200.

In championing limestone as a material from which to learn for its ability to reveal the artist’s trace, Barnard often cited the importance of encountering “the chisel” in works of medieval sculpture. The chisel is the carver’s principal tool, regardless of the material; typically, there are several different kinds of chisel involved in cutting a stone surface—different shapes, sizes, and edges. For Barnard, the chisel became a symbol of medieval carvers’ skills and techniques. It also emblematized artistic temperament. Perhaps the most famous Barnard quotation cites “the patient Gothic chisel,” which (in true Barnard fashion) poetically described the kind of sculptors he felt students should be: that is, careful craftspeople taking the time to execute their work. This additionally says something about Barnard’s perception of the medieval ethos of making, carried out in a slowness of time that stands in contrast to the harried, modernizing world of the early twentieth century.

We might question the sincerity of Barnard’s statements—many certainly have. Barnard’s Cloisters were, in the end, economically motivated. Yet this is not to say that Barnard did not admire the medieval works in his care. On the contrary, he frequently was enraptured by them. He particularly appreciated the works of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and though he lacked formal art-historical training, he was no less enthusiastic about the material. For example, he spoke rapturously of the twelfth-century cloister elements from the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert in his collection, which he placed prominently around the central atrium of his museum, and he frequently cited these delicate and inventive carvings as key examples from which to learn.⁸

In the end, however, it is not clear how Barnard’s perspective on learning from medieval art played out in practice. That is, we do not know specifically what he, as an artist, gained from looking at medieval sculpture, either when he was a student, or when he became a mature artist. Nor do we know how he might have interacted with fellow artists at his Cloisters, or what he might have encouraged them to focus on.

Raymond Pitcairn: Living Architecture

Turning to Raymond Pitcairn (1885–1966), the story is different. In contrast to Barnard, whose views we glean from scattered letters, brief quotations from the press, and the short guide to his Cloisters, Pitcairn was explicit about the merits of medieval art and architecture, and his surviving writings expound on this. His thoughts on the past are also evident in his actions.

The inspiration that Raymond Pitcairn took from the art and architecture of the Middle Ages was strong. His exposure to all things medieval began at a young age, when, encouraged by his mother, he traveled to Europe and saw monuments such as the great Gothic cathedrals in situ.⁹ This enabled him to develop an appreciation and a taste for this material, as well as a desire to understand the historical circumstances of their creation.

Given his first-hand experience of medieval monuments and his sensitivity to the period’s forms and styles, it was perhaps inevitable that Pitcairn became involved in the construction of Bryn Athyn Cathedral, a Gothic Revival building patronized by his father, John Pitcairn. Though this project was initiated with the Boston-based architect Ralph Adams Cram, it was completed under the aegis of Raymond, who took an increasingly active role in its design and execution.

Figure 8: Bryn Athyn Cathedral (Larry Lamb, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60724390).

The work at Bryn Athyn, Pitcairn felt, should result from strong collaboration and communication among craftsmen. He proposed that the building process be responsive and flexible from start to finish. This perspective was in part inspired by theories of medieval architecture formulated by art historian William Goodyear, who Pitcairn met in 1915.¹⁰ It centered around the notion of “living architecture,” meaning that the building project did not result from a single, static set of blueprints drawn up at the outset, but evolved and improved as it proceeded, thanks to the continued input of the builders, who engaged regularly and directly with the design. This approach emphasized the local, from the hiring of workers to the sourcing of materials, enabling one and all to be as involved in all aspects of the construction as possible. These ideas reflect an understanding of medieval building projects as inherently local endeavors, which emerged out of practical necessity but ultimately led to great heights of achievement because all involved were personally and directly invested in the project’s success. Other ideals associated with medieval art and architecture were also emphasized, including the value of hand work, the minimization of hard lines and precise angles, and the appreciation of materials, even in their unexpected irregularities.¹¹

Figure 9: The interior of Bryn Athyn Cathedral (The Bryn Athyn Cathedral Collection, Glencairn Museum).

This theoretical perspective on how Bryn Athyn Cathedral should be built was borne out by the actual building process. Though not always feasible, area craftsmen were hired, and local granite and oak were sourced when possible. Pitcairn’s eventual spearheading of the project after Cram’s departure in the later 1910s resulted from the belief that the project should be managed locally. Moreover, qualities particularly associated with medieval architectural decoration, such as a love of variety, are visible in the cathedral’s sculpted elements.¹² Even the practice of using three-dimensional models instead of blueprints during the building process stemmed from the medievalist Arthur Kingsley Porter’s suggestion that Gothic builders had used models to plan their constructions.¹³

The creation of Bryn Athyn Cathedral was thus shaped by twentieth-century perceptions of medieval practices. Yet its builders’ engagement with the past went beyond the application of scholars’ theories of labor and process to include direct study of medieval works of art and architecture. Pitcairn himself already had the opportunity to do this during his travels to Europe, but he also wanted members of the Bryn Athyn craft community to study “the real thing.” To do so, he and members of his team made several trips to New York. There, they examined works of medieval art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, at the home of stained-glass collector Henry C. Lawrence, and, of course, at George Grey Barnard’s Cloisters.¹⁴

Figure 10: Tracing of Solomon window by Albert Bonnot, 1886 (The Bryn Athyn Cathedral Collection, Glencairn Museum).

Pitcairn eventually did send select artists, glassmakers Winfred Hyatt, Paul Froelich, and Lawrence Saint, to Europe as well. They studied the thirteenth-century windows of several important Gothic cathedrals—Chartres above all, but also Bourges, Rouen, Saint-Denis, and Poitiers. At these sites, the artists observed, sketched, painted, and wrote (Pitcairn even provided a detailed questionnaire for them to fill out as they examined the glass). They returned to the churches at different moments to observe changes in the light over the course of the day and sometimes received special permission to ascend scaffolding and scrutinize windows up close. They brought back books and photographs for others to examine. In addition, Pitcairn purchased cartoons (drawings) of French medieval stained-glass windows that had been made during restoration campaigns in the nineteenth century, providing an opportunity for those at home to become acquainted with the historical windows.¹⁵

At Bryn Athyn, the desire for all to learn from medieval art increasingly would be met by an additional solution: Pitcairn would purchase works of medieval art for his own community of artists to reference as they carried out their own work on the cathedral. According to Martin Pryke, Pitcairn sought “samples which would show his artists the quality that he was seeking.”¹⁶ Collecting became an important facet of the strategy to emulate the Middle Ages at the work site, enabling a finished product that met the standards of the historical model.

As cathedral construction progressed, plans for its stained glass unfurled. Medieval glass dating from the earliest period of the technique’s development in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was, to Pitcairn and his associates, the most desirable model. They admired the intensity of color and simplicity of early glass and so sought to recreate its methods—easier said than done, since materials and techniques had changed significantly over the centuries.¹⁷ To go back to the favored time period, Pitcairn asked Arthur Kingsley Porter to translate from Latin to English a description of glassmaking recorded in a twelfth-century treatise by the monk Theophilus—the only source from the time period to describe the practice.¹⁸ This text, however, hardly provides a full picture of how to make stained glass, prompting much trial and error onsite at Bryn Athyn.

In addition, Pitcairn purchased medieval works of stained glass for study as early as 1916. It was, however, his purchase in 1921 of 23 pieces of glass from the celebrated collection of Henry C. Lawrence that instantly made him a major collector of the medium.¹⁹ These works provided opportunities for everyone in Bryn Athyn to become acquainted with medieval glass, absorbing the intensity of the colors, the textures and thickness of the panes, the form and structure of the leads uniting the glass sections, and the compositions of the stylized scenes depicted.

Stained glass started Pitcairn on the path to collecting other mediums to enhance the cathedral project, and especially stone sculpture. By the time he started buying three-dimensional works, the cathedral’s main body was complete. Sculpture purchases thus were made with an eye to the next portion of the building to be constructed, the Council Hall.²⁰ To that end, in 1920, Pitcairn acquired an intricately carved twelfth-century capital from the French Benedictine monastery of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert (heavily represented in Barnard’s Cloisters) from the art dealer Henri Daguerre. The following year, he accepted George Grey Barnard’s offer of purchase for three more twelfth-century capitals from another French monastery, Saint-Michel de Cuxa.²¹

Copying is an important means of learning how to make art, but there are only two instances of direct copies of medieval art in the completed cathedral. One is a stained-glass panel in the nave that duplicates a grisaille panel—so called because of its strict use of shades of gray rather than colors—made for Salisbury Cathedral in the thirteenth century, purchased by Pitcairn in 1916.²² Another instance is found in sculptures in the Bryn Athyn Council Hall. The vegetal pattern is based on a repeating motif on an impost block acquired by Pitcairn in 1923 and said to come from Saint-Denis, the important early Gothic monastery located just outside Paris.²³ Elsewhere, the Bryn Athyn artists took inspiration from the Middle Ages but innovated designs and subjects based on the needs and wishes of the community.

Figure 14: Top: Mid-twelfth century impost block, said to come from Saint-Denis, acquired by Raymond Pitcairn in 1923 (09.SP.12). Bottom: A copy of the medieval impost block in Bryn Athyn Cathedral’s Council Hall, created by Pitcairn’s craftsmen in the 20th century.

Learning from the Middle Ages

The importance of looking to medieval art to refine one’s skills as a maker was a conviction that Barnard and Pitcairn shared. It is significant that they each espoused this view, in different ways, at a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Even as Barnard advocated for the “patient Gothic chisel,” the area of northern Manhattan that he had chosen for his museum—at first home to the last undeveloped lands in New York City—was rapidly built up, becoming just as crowded, noisy, and fast-moving as the rest of the city. While Pitcairn’s family ran the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, mass-producing glass on an industrial scale, he advocated for centuries-old techniques of glass blowing for Bryn Athyn Cathedral. It is difficult not to see something of a knee-jerk reaction to the twentieth century in both men’s championing of craft and a slower pace of work. Neither Barnard nor Pitcairn was the first to react to the pressures of modernity in this way; the Arts and Crafts movement originating in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century pioneered similar views.

There is still much to be gained from a more thorough comparison of Barnard and Pitcairn’s perspectives on medieval art. Despite their many differences, they were startlingly united in their advocacy for this period of art history. They were both curiously drawn to the arts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period in which artistic styles shifted dramatically from the stylization of the Romanesque to the greater naturalism of the Gothic. What it was that drew them to this material, however, is a topic for another day’s exploration. For the moment, it suffices to emphasize the importance of reflecting upon past collecting practices to better understand the motivations of the collectors, and to consider how they hoped to impact the times in which they lived.

Julia Perratore, PhD
Associate Curator
The Met Cloisters

Endnotes

¹ Julia Perratore, “The Cloisters Connection,” Glencairn Museum News 3 (2015).
² Timothy B. Husband, “Creating the Cloisters,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Spring 2013), 6–9.
³ Jack L. Schrader, “George Grey Barnard: The Cloisters and the Abbaye,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Summer 1979), 3–5.
⁴ Schrader, “Barnard,” 6.
⁵ Elizabet Bradford Smith, “George Grey Barnard: Artist/Collector/Dealer/Curator,” in Medieval Art in America: Patterns of Collecting (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1996), 141.
⁶ Schrader, “Barnard,” 6.
⁷ Smith, “Barnard,” 138.
⁸ Schrader, “Barnard,” 23.
⁹ E. Bruce Glenn, Bryn Athyn Cathedral: The Building of a Church (Bryn Athyn, PA: The Bryn Athyn Church of the New Jerusalem, 1971), 30.
¹⁰ Kevin J. Harty, “Philadelphia’s Medieval(ist) Jewels,” in The United States of Medievalism, ed. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 51.
¹¹ Glenn, Bryn Athyn Cathedral, 30–43.
¹² Glenn, Bryn Athyn Cathedral, 70.
¹³ Jane Hayward and Walter Cahn, Radiance and Reflection: Medieval Art from the Raymond Pitcairn Collection (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982), 33–34.
¹⁴ Glenn, Bryn Athyn Cathedral, 136. For an image of stained glass on view in the home of Henry C. Lawrence, see Michael C. Cothren, “Seven Sleepers and Seven Kneelers: Three Thirteenth-Century Stained-Glass Panels from Rouen,” Glencairn Museum News 3 (2019).
¹⁵ Martin Pryke, A Quest for Perfection (Bryn Athyn, PA: The Glencairn Museum, Academy of the New Church, 1990), 25–31.
¹⁶ Pryke, Quest for Perfection, 25.
¹⁷ For discussion of the stained-glass making process, see Glenn, Bryn Athyn Cathedral, 133–42.
¹⁸ Hayward and Cahn, Radiance and Reflection, 39.
¹⁹ Hayward and Cahn, Radiance and Reflection, 39.
²⁰ Pryke, Quest for Perfection, 14.
²¹ Hayward and Cahn, Radiance and Reflection, 39.
²² Hayward and Cahn, Radiance and Reflection, 37.
²³ Hayward and Cahn, Radiance and Reflection, 39.