Temple Gold Medal

Temple Gold Medal Nude (1924) by William Glackens. Winner of the 1924 Temple Gold Medal.

Joseph E. Temple Fund Gold Medal (defunct) was a prestigious art prize awarded by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts most years from 1883 to 1968. A Temple Medal recognized the best oil painting by an American artist shown in PAFA's annual exhibition. Recipients included James Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Robert Henri and Edward Hopper.

History

The medal was named for Philadelphia merchant Joseph E. Temple (1811–1880), a patron of the arts and PAFA Board member, whose bequest of $51,000 funded the awards.

Any American artist was welcome to submit works for PAFA's annual exhibitions. Juries in painting and sculpture, composed of PAFA faculty and invited artists, evaluated hundreds (and later thousands) of submissions and chose those for exhibition. The Painters' Jury of Selection also chose the medal winners in painting. An artist could be awarded a Temple medal only once. Sometimes the medal-winning painting was purchased for PAFA's permanent collection.

The process for the first Temple Medal was a fiasco.[1] To encourage American historical painting, PAFA added a $3,000 cash bonus to the 1883 gold medal if it went to a historical work.[1] But the art jury could not agree on a gold medal recipient.[1] A silver medal would have been awarded to William B. T. Trego for The March to Valley Forge, but he refused to accept it. Trego argued that if only one Temple medal was awarded it should be a gold, not a silver (which implied second place).[2] Trego sued PAFA to be named the gold medal winner and claim the cash bonus. After losing in a Philadelphia court, he took his appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which concurred with the lower court's ruling that PAFA's art jury had the right to issue awards as it saw fit.[3] After 1883, no cash prizes accompanied Temple medals.[1]

From 1884 to 1889, a gold medal was awarded for the best figure painting and a silver medal for the best landscape or marine painting. But the jury ignored the rules in 1890, awarding a landscape-with-cattle painting the gold medal.[a] In 1891 and 1892, a gold medal was awarded for the best painting regardless of subject, and a silver for the second-best. No second-place medals were awarded after 1892. From 1893 to 1899, two gold medals were awarded each year. Beginning in 1900, a single gold medal was awarded for the best painting in PAFA's annual exhibition regardless of subject.[5]

Famously, Thomas Eakins, who had been forced to resign as director of PAFA's school in 1886, accepted his 1904 award for Archbishop William Henry Elder by declaring, ”I think you’ve got a heap of impudence to give me a medal." He then rode off on a bicycle to the Philadelphia Mint, where he sold the gold medal for its melt-down value.[6]

William Glackens wryly changed the name of the figure painting that won him the 1924 award from Nude to Temple Gold Medal Nude.[7]

By the 1930s, PAFA's annual exhibitions had acquired a reputation for being parochial and nepotistic.[b] With the costs of transporting and insuring the works, they were also expensive. Beginning in 1954, PAFA's exhibitions became bi-annual. The last Temple Gold Medal was awarded to Helen Frankenthaler in 1968. Beginning in 1969, PAFA's annual exhibitions were dedicated exclusively to student work from its school.

List of recipients

Year	Artist	Image	Work	Collection	Notes	Ref(s)
1883 (silver)	William B. T. Trego		The March to Valley Forge	Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania	Trego refused the silver medal.
1884	George W. Maynard		Portrait of Francis Davis Millet (Dressed as a War Correspondent)	National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian		[9]
1884 (silver)	Thomas Hill		Yosemite Valley: View from Bridal Veil Meadow		Ex collection: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Deaccessioned 1898 Auctioned at Bonham's San Francisco, November 20, 2011; Sold for $2,500.	[10][11]
1885	Charles Sprague Pearce		Peines de Coeur (Troubles of the Heart)	Virginia Museum of Fine Arts	Exhibited: 1885 Paris Salon
1885 (silver)	William Trost Richards		Old Ocean's Gray and Melancholy Waste	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts	PAFA board member (later president) Edward Hornor Coates bought the painting from the exhibition. His widow, poet Florence Earle Coates, donated it to PAFA in 1923. It may have been the inspiration for her 1909 poem, "Mid-Ocean."	[12][13][14][15]
1886	No exhibition
1887	Clifford Prevost Grayson		A Fisherman's Family		Exhibited: 1885 Paris Salon Ex collection: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Deaccessioned 1898	[10]
1887 (silver)	T. Alexander Harrison		The Wave	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts	Exhibited: 1885 Paris Salon
1888	Charles Stanley Reinhart		Washed Ashore	Corcoran Gallery of Art	Honorable Mention: 1887 Paris Salon Vincent van Gogh was an admirer of the painting.[c]
1888 (silver)	Howard Russell Butler		Les ramasseurs de varech (The Seaweed Gatherers)	Smithsonian American Art Museum	Honorable Mention: 1886 Paris Salon
1889	Anna Elizabeth Klumpke		In the Wash House	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts	Exhibited: 1888 Paris Salon First woman awarded a Temple Gold Medal.
1889 (silver)	Arthur Parton		Winter on the Hudson		Honorable Mention: 1889 Paris Exposition	[17]
1890	William Henry Howe		Return of the Herd at Evening, Uplands of Normandy		Exhibited: 1887 Paris Salon Howe in his Paris studio with Return of the Herd at Evening:
1890 (silver)	Edward Emerson Simmons		St. Ives's Bay, Cornwall at Sunset, Looking East		Ex collection: Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia	[18]
1891 1st place	Abbott H. Thayer		Winged Figure	Art Institute of Chicago
1891 (silver) 2nd place	Kenyon Cox		Portrait of a Lady (The Artist's Wife)	Smithsonian American Art Museum	One of 13 works in Cox's medal-winning group at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
1892 1st place	Henry S. Bisbing		On the River Shore, Holland		Bronze Medal: 1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris One of 3 works in Bisbing's medal-winning group at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.	[19]
1892 (silver) 2nd place	George Inness		Autumn Oaks	Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas		[20][21]
1893	No exhibition
1894	John Singer Sargent		Portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady MacBeth	Tate Britain
1894	James Abbott McNeill Whistler		Arrangement in Black: Lady in the Yellow Buskin (Lady Archibald Campbell)	Philadelphia Museum of Art		[22]
1895	Edmund C. Tarbell		Arrangement in Pink and Gray (Afternoon Tea)	Worcester Art Museum
1895	John H. Twachtman		Sailing in the Mist	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts	Twachtman painted this following the death of his 8-year-old daughter Elsie.
1896	Gari Melchers		The Family		A Melchers painting of this title is in the Old National Gallery in Berlin, Germany.
1896	J. Humphreys Johnston		Le Domino Rose	Museum of Fine Arts, Boston		[23]
1897	John White Alexander		Isabella and the Pot of Basil	Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
1897	George de Forest Brush		Mother and Child	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[24]
1898	Edward Francis Rook		Pearl Clouds, Moonlight	Cincinnati Art Museum		[25]
1898	Wilton Lockwood		The Violinist (Otto Roth)	Skibo Castle, Dornoch, Scotland	3rd Prize: 1898 Carnegie Institute Owned by Andrew Carnegie in 1907.	[26]
1899	Childe Hassam		Pont Royal, Paris	Cincinnati Art Museum
1899	Joseph de Camp		Woman Drying Her Hair	Cincinnati Art Museum
1900	Cecilia Beaux		Mother and Daughter (Mrs. Clement Griscom and Frances C. Griscom)	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts	Second woman awarded a Temple Gold Medal. 1st Prize: 1899 Carnegie Institute Gold Medal: 1900 Paris Exposition
1901	William Merritt Chase		Portrait of a Lady with a Rose (Miss M. S. Lukens)	Private collection		[27]
1902	Winslow Homer		A Northeaster	Metropolitan Museum of Art
1903	Edward Redfield	under copyright until 2035	A Winter Evening	Private collection	Appraised on Antiques Roadshow, air date: September 22, 2014.[2]
1904	Thomas Eakins		Archbishop William Henry Elder	Cincinnati Art Museum
1905	J. Alden Weir		The Green Bodice	Metropolitan Museum of Art		[28]
1906	Eugene Paul Ullman		Portrait of Madame Fisher	Indianapolis Museum of Art		[29]
1907	Willard L. Metcalf		The Golden Screen	Private collection		[30]
1908	Frank Weston Benson		Portrait of My Daughters	Worcester Art Museum
1909	Frederic Porter Vinton		Portrait of Carroll D. Wright, President of Clark College	Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts
1910	Howard Gardiner Cushing		Portrait of the Artist's Wife (Ethel Cochrane Cushing)			[31]
1911	Richard E. Miller		The Chinese Statuette			[32]
1912	Emil Carlsen		The Open Sea	Addison Gallery of American Art		[33]
1913	Frederick Frieseke		Youth			[34]
1914	W. Elmer Schofield		The Hill Country	Woodmere Art Museum, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia		[35]
1915	Charles Webster Hawthorne		Provincetown Fisherman	Indianapolis Museum of Art
1916	Joseph Thurman Pearson Jr.		On the Valley		Auctioned at Sloan's, North Bethesda, Maryland, September 27, 1981; sold for $1,250.	[36][37]
1917	George Bellows		A Day in June	Detroit Institute of Arts
1918	George Luks		Houston Street	St. Louis Art Museum
1919	Daniel Garber	under copyright until 2028	The Orchard Window	Philadelphia Museum of Art		[38]
1920	Ernest Lawson		Ice-Bound Falls	Art Institute of Chicago		[39]
1921	Leopold Seyffert	under copyright until 2026	Lacquer Screen (The Model)	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[40]
1922	William Langson Lathrop		October Evening
1923	Walter Ufer		Sleep	National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma		[41]
1924	William Glackens		Temple Gold Medal Nude	Private collection	Auctioned at Sotheby's New York, May 19, 2011; sold for $254,500.	[7]
1925	Clifford Addams		Washington Square
1926	Hayley Lever	under copyright until 2028	The Harbor
1927	Leon Kroll	under copyright until 2044	My Wife's Family	University of Virginia Art Museum		[42]
1928	James Ormsbee Chapin	under copyright until 2045	George Marvin and His Daughter Edith	Dallas Museum of Art		[43]
1929	Robert Henri		The Wee Woman			[44]
1930	Arthur B. Carles	under copyright until 2022	Still Life
1931	Alexander Brook	under copyright until 2050	The Intruder		The intruder in the still life is a whimsical mouse.	[45]
1932	Paul Bartlett	under copyright until 2035	The Sand Barge			[46]
1933	S. Walter Norris	copyright?	Pool at Ilk
1934	Yasuo Kuniyoshi	under copyright until 2023	Fruit on Table
1935	Edward Hopper	under copyright until 2037	Mrs. Scott's House	Maier Museum of Art, Randolph College, Lynchburg, Virginia		[47]
1936	Paul Starrett Sample	under copyright until 2044	Miners Resting	Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska		[48]
1937	Henry Lee McFee	under copyright until 2023	Sleeping Black Girl	Los Angeles County Museum of Art		[49]
1938	Eugene Speicher	under copyright until 2032	Marianna	Whitney Museum of American Art		[50]
1939	Henry McCarter		The Pinnacle			[51]
1940	Morris Kantor	under copyright until 2044	Lighthouse (Lighthouse, Cape Cod)	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[52]
1941	Max Weber	under copyright until 2031	Reading	Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
1942	Ivan Albright	under copyright until 2053	That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door)	Art Institute of Chicago		[53]
1943	Raphael Soyer	under copyright until 2057	Waiting Room (Railroad Station Waiting Room)	Corcoran Gallery of Art		[54]
1944	Franklin C. Watkins	under copyright until 2042	Portrait of Thomas Raeburn White	Cleveland Museum of Art		[55]
1945	Abraham Rattner	under copyright until 2048	Kiosk	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[56]
1946	Gregorio Prestopino	under copyright until 2054	Death of Snappy Collins	Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota		[57]
1947	Arthur Osver	under copyright until 2076	The Majestic Tenement	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[58]
1948	Eugene Ludins	under copyright until 2066	The Valley	Woodstock Artists Association and Museum		[59]
1949	Henry Koerner	under copyright until 2061	Junkyard	Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania		[60]
1950	Harvey Dinnerstein	under copyright still alive	Noah Wolf	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[61]
1951	William Congdon	under copyright until 2068	Venice #2			[62]
1952	O. Louis Guglielmi	under copyright until 2026	New York 21	Federal Reserve Art Collection, Washington, D.C.	In 2010, this hung in the office of then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.	[63]
1953	Rico Lebrun	under copyright until 2034	Figures on the Cross with Lantern
1954	John Marin (posthumous)	under copyright until 2023	The Jersey Hills			[64]
1955	Student exhibition
1956	Ben Shahn	under copyright until 2039	Chicago (Allegory)	Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth	Depicts Chicago's 1947 Hickman tenement fire, with the flames forming into a mythical beast.	[65]
1957	Student exhibition
1958	Philip Evergood	under copyright until 2043	Threshold to Success	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[66]
1959	Student exhibition
1960	Lee Gatch	under copyright until 2038	Fish Market	Newark Museum
1961	Student exhibition
1962	Julian E. Levi	under copyright until 2052	Orpheus in the Studio	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[67]
1963	Student exhibition
1964	Stuart Davis	under copyright until 2034	Letter and His Ecol	Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts		[68]
1965	Student exhibition
1966	George L.K. Morris	under copyright until 2045	Elegy on the Pennsylvania Station, No. 1	Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1967	Student exhibition
1968	Helen Frankenthaler	under copyright until 2081	Tobacco Landscape		Third woman awarded a Temple Gold Medal. Last Temple Gold Medal awarded.

See also

• Beck Gold Medal
• Mary Smith Prize
• Widener Gold Medal

Notes

1. "[T]hese cattle pictures of Mr. Howe are admirable, and they are certainly among the most satisfying things exhibited here, but the gold medal was offered for 'the best figure picture by an American artist,' and these are not figure pictures at all, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the committee has made another mistake in awarding this medal in this way." — L. W. M. [Leslie W. Miller][4]
2. Art columnist Jane Richter complained that more than 60% of the 258 paintings in the 1937 exhibition had been by members of the selection jury or by invited artists. While acknowledging the value of having "name" artists, she argued that PAFA needed to choose: make future exhibitions truly open-to-all or make them by-invitation-only.[8]
3. "In Harper’s Weekly I found an illustration by Reinhart, by far the best I’ve seen by him up to now, Washed Ashore. A body has been washed up, a man is kneeling beside it to see who it is, a few fishermen and women give information about the shipwreck victim to a gendarme. So it looks somewhat like Victim of a Shipwreck that you have, but the drawing by R. has something of [Félix] Régamey, for example. It’s a very fine print." — Vincent van Gogh.[16][1]

References

1. Mark Thistlethwaite, "Patronage Gone Awry: The 1883 Temple Competition of Historical Paintings," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 112, no. 4 (October 1988), pp. 545-78.
2. "Fifty-Fifth Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy," American Architect and Building News, December 13, 1884.
3. "Not Good Enough for the Prize," The New York Times, April 20, 1886.
4. "The Sixtieth Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy," The American: A National Journal, Volume 19, (American Company, 1889), p. 319.
5. "Honors Awarded by the Temple Fund," Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition, (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1919), pp. 8-9.
6. "Biography of Thomas Eakins," Philadelphia Museum of Art.
7. Temple Gold Medal Nude, from Sotheby's NY.
8. Philadelphia Art News, January 31, 1938. sfn error: no target: CITEREFPhiladelphia_Art_News,_January_31,_1938 (help)
9. Francis Davis Millet, from National Portrait Gallery.
10. Martin Gammon, Deaccessioning and Its Discontents: A Critical History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), p. 334.
11. Yosemite Valley: View from Bridal Veil Meadows, from Blouin Art Sales Index.
12. Old Ocean's Gray and Melancholy Waste, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
13. Peter Hastings Falk, ed., The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1876-1913, (Sound View Press, 1989), p. 406.
14. PAFA website: Exhibitions 1805-1999
15. "Mid Ocean" by Florence Earle Coates, from Wikisource.
16. Vincent van Gogh to Anthon van Rappard, 25 May 1883. sfn error: no target: CITEREFVincent_van_Gogh_to_Anthon_van_Rappard,_25_May_1883. (help)
17. Winter on the Hudson
18. Looking East at Sunset, St. Ives Bay, from SIRIS.
19. "Bisbing's Great Work," Philadelphia Item, February 14, 1892.
20. Autumn Oaks, from Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.
21. Autumn Oaks, from SIRIS.
22. Arrangement in Black, from Philadelphia Museum of Art.
23. Le Domino Rose, from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
24. Mother and Child, from PAFA.
25. Pearl Clouds, Moonlight, Brush & Pencil, August 1898, p. 230.
26. The Violinist (Otto Roth), from Studio International, Volume 41, (London: National Magazine Company, 1907), p. 266.
27. Lady with a Rose, from Ronald G. Pisano, William Merritt Chase: Portraits in Oil, (Yale University Press, 2007), p. 174.
28. The Green Bodice, from Metropolitan Museum of Art.
29. Madame Fisher, from Indiana Museum of Art.
30. The Golden Screen, from WikiArt.
31. Ethel Cochrane Cushing, from Art History Reference.
32. The Chinese Statuette
33. Open Sea, from EmilCarlsen.org
34. Youth
35. The Hill Country
36. On the Valley, from The American Magazine of Art, March 1916, p. 180.
37. On the Valley, from Blouin's Art Sales Index.
38. The Orchard Window, from Philadelphia Museum of Art.
39. Ice-Bound Falls, from Art Institute of Chicago.
40. Lacquer Screen, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
41. Sleep
42. My Wife's Family
43. George Marvin and His Daughter Edith, from Mutual Art.
44. The Wee Woman, from Archives of American Art, Smithsonian.
45. The Intruder
46. The Sand Barge by Paul Bartlett, from Smithsonian Institution.
47. Mrs. Scott's House, from Maier Museum of Art.
48. Miners Resting, from Sheldon Museum of Art.
49. Sleeping Black Girl, from SIRIS.
50. Marianna, from Whitney Museum.
51. "Philadelphians Win Art Awards," The Lewiston Daily Sun, February 7, 1939.
52. Lighthouse, Cape Cod, from Annex Galleries.
53. That Which I Should Have Done, from Art Institute of Chicago.
54. Railroad Station Waiting Room, from Corcoran Gallery of Art.
55. Portrait of Thomas Raeburn White, from Cleveland Museum of Art.
56. Kiosk, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
57. Death of Snappy Collins, from Walker Art Center.
58. Majestic Tenement, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
59. The Valley, from Woodstock Artists Association.
60. Junkyard, from Carnegie Museum of Art.
61. Noah Wolf, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
62. Venice #2
63. Mary Anne Goley, "What Fed Chiefs Like," The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2010.
64. Jersey Hills^[permanent dead link‍]
65. Allegory, from Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
66. Threshold to Success, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
67. Orpheus in the Studio, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
68. Letter and His Ecol, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.