Cultural historian who led race to save precious George Washington portrait
Marc Pachter, an American cultural historian at the Smithsonian Institution who as director of the National Portrait Gallery led a nail-biting scramble for donors in 2001 that kept a famed painting of George Washington from leaving the collection for possible auction, died on February 17 in Bangkok. He was 80.
Pachter described himself as a “a teller of lives” in his roles across the Smithsonian system, including overseeing a top-to-bottom renovation of the Portrait Gallery as director from 2000 to 2007.
He also served as acting director of the National Museum of American History from 2001 to 2002, becoming the first person to lead two Smithsonian museums at the same time.
At the Portrait Gallery, Pachter extended the opening hours to 7pm to get after-work visitors. Attendance shot up 30%. Pachter said he saw museums as not just repositories but also vital connective tissue in culture, putting art and objects into context of their time and place and significance. That was why he relished items such as the National Museum of American History’s acquisition of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz or obtaining a painting of comedian Stephen Colbert as his vainglorious talk show character for the Portrait Gallery in 2008. Pachter once gave a talk at the University of Oxford entitled The Museum as a SacredPlaceinaSecularAge.Whatwe watch, who we paint, what we argue over are all part of a big and complex cultural amalgam, he said.
“Museums,” he told the New York Times, “are about that visual knowledge, that emotional knowledge”.
And if the right outside benefactors can help with the mission, he added, they are more than welcome. That idea was put to the test by a startling message from a British aristocrat shortly after Pachter took over at the Portrait Gallery.
Harry Dalmeny, the scion of a titled British family, told the Smithsonian that he wanted $20 million for the celebrated Gilbert Stuart painting of Washington – depicted standing solemnly in black garb with his right hand outstretched – that had been on loan since 1968. If the Smithsonian could not come up with the money, then the 8-by-5-foot canvas might go to the highest bidder.
Dalmeny hoped the Smithsonian would meet his price. But there were “others,” he said, ready to step in. “It will be very difficult for me not to think about those other offers,” he told The Washington Post. Dalmeny placed an April 1, 2001, deadline for the Smithsonian to secure a deal to buy the painting, which was acquired a century earlier by Lord Dalmeny’s family.
A “patriotic emergency” was under way, Pachter said, as he crisscrossed the country for months in search of a deeppocket saviour. (Congress was not ready to step up with extra money.) It was inconceivable that a private collector – or a foreign museum – could snatch up the work, Pachter appealed.
“I think it does rank with the Bill of Rights,” he said. “This is the portrait of the presidency.”
Washington was always keenly aware of the symbolism and power of imagery. In the fall of 1796, he posed for Stuart, one of the finest portrait artists of the time, at his studio in Philadelphia. It was near the end of Washington’s second term as president, and still there were significant doubts whether the patchwork of states could hold together as a nation.
In the painting, Washington is shown as an American Cicero, reaching out as if addressing a crowd – perhaps, as some historians suggest, reliving his address to Congress the previous December. A sword, an allusion to the independence war he led, is at his left hip. “You can study art history without looking at it,” Pachter told The Washington Post, “but you can’t study American history without looking at it.”
The painting was commissioned by a Pennsylvania senator, William Bingham, as a gift for a British nobleman, Marquis of Landsdowne, who had supported American independence.
Stuart – who also painted the image of Washington that appears on the dollar – did several copies of the so-called “Landsdowne” Washington, including one that was saved by first lady Dolley Madison during the War of 1812 as British forces entered the capital. The original Landsdowne painting, however, carried the mantle as “the greatest historical painting in our nation’s history”, Pachter said in one of his many television appearances during the quest for donations.
“One person,” he said, “can save this great painting for the nation”.
In Las Vegas, the chairman of the Donald W Reynolds Foundation, Fred Smith, saw Pachter on NBC’s The Today Show on February 27, about a month before Dalmeny’s deadline. He called Pachter, who came to Las Vegas on March 3 to meet Smith. The foundation, set up by the late newspaper baron Reynolds, normally contributed to journalism training and health-related research.
This time, the trustees gave instant approval for $30m – to acquire the Stuart painting; the rest to expand its eventual exhibition space at the Portrait Gallery (which reopened in 2006) and fund an eight-city national tour of the Stuart work. The Reynolds Foundation made the announcement on March 12, with The Washington Post reporting the news under the cheeky headline A Washington Bailout.
Marc Jay Pachter was born in the Bronx on May 7, 1943, and grew up in Los Angeles. His father ran a variety store, and his mother was a homemaker.
“I come from a family that didn’t care what was on the wall,” he said. Gradually, he began to see connections between how images all around him – an album cover or a concert poster – could reflect as much about the culture as what he saw in museums and books.
Pachter graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1964 and was accepted at Harvard University for postgraduate study in colonial history, but left before receiving a degree when he was hired as chief historian at the National Portrait Gallery.
He later became the gallery’s assistant director and held other Smithsonian posts, including counsellor to I Michael Heyman, then the Smithsonian’s secretary.
Pachter was back in contact, too, with the Reynolds Foundation, which in 2005 donated an additional $45m to assist in the renovations at the Portrait Gallery. When Pachter retired in 2007, the gallery commissioned a portrait of him by artist Robert Liberace. Pachter had ended the rule – which didn’t apply to former presidents – that a person had to be dead for 10 years before the gallery acquired their portraits.
In 2011, he came out of retirement to serve until 2012 as acting director of the National Museum of American History, a decade after his first tenure.
His marriage to Elise Forbes ended in divorce. In addition to his son, survivors include daughter Gillian Pachter; two stepsisters; and four grandchildren.
At the Smithsonian, Pachter gained a reputation as a master interviewer of guests invited to museum programmes; he once did a TED Talk on the art of the interview.
One of his early challenges, he recalled, was playwright, former ambassador and socialite Clare Boothe Luce, who generally ignored his questions as she waxed on about everything from world affairs to her 1936 play, The Women. At one point, she turned to Pachter and asked if he knew the theatrical term upstaging.
“I’m learning,” he deadpanned. Luce was impressed with the quick wit. She started to answer his questions.