Marc Pachter, key in saving George Washington portrait, dies at 80

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 Feb. 17 in Bangkok. He was 80.

He had a heart attack at an apartment he rented during an extended stay in Thailand, said his son, Adam Pachter.

Pachter described himself as a “a teller of lives” in his roles across the Smithsonian system, including overseeing a topto-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. He stepped in after the resignation of director Spencer Crew during internal disputes with Lawrence Small, then the Smithsonian’s secretary.

Small was a strong advocate for courting philanthropic partnerships and promoting exhibits and innovations aimed at getting people through the door. Pachter, a raconteur and cultural omnivore as much at home with high art as pop TV culture, fit right in.

At the Portrait Gallery, Pachter extended the opening hours to 7 p.m. to get after-work visitors. Attendance shot up 30 percent.

He relished items such as the National Museum of American History’s acquisition of the ruby slippers from the 1939 Hollywood musical “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 titled “The Museum as a Sacred Place in a Secular Age.” What we 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 that had been on loan since 1968. If the Smithsonian could not come up with the money, 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 underway, Pachter said, as he crisscrossed the country for months in search of a deep-pocketed savior. It was inconceivable that a private collector or a foreign museum could snatch up the work, Pachter argued.

In the fall of 1796, Washington posed for Stuart at his studio in Philadelphia.

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.

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 did several copies of the so-called “Landsdowne” Washington.

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.

In Las Vegas, the chairman of the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation,

Fred Smith, saw Pachter on NBC’s “The Today Show” on Feb. 27, about a month before Dalmeny’s deadline. He called Pachter, who went to Las Vegas on March 3 to meet Smith. The trustees gave instant approval for $30 million.

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.

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.

His marriage to Elise Forbes ended in divorce. In addition to his son, survivors include daughter Gillian Pachter; two stepsisters; and four grandchildren.