Remembering Duane Wilder (1929–2017)

One of the greatest pleasures of my work as director of this museum is the opportunity to work with and come to know so many extraordinary individuals, including alumni across several generations who hold Princeton near to their hearts. One such individual was Duane Wilder, Class of 1951, whom I visited all but immediately upon my arrival at Princeton in 2009 at his Park Avenue apartment. I still recall a hot summer day, an art-filled apartment, and a short walk to Duane’s favorite Italian restaurant, where a martini at lunchtime was clearly a happy tradition.

Until Duane’s death last August at age eighty-eight, visits to Duane at his homes in New York and Florida were happy punctuations in my calendar, especially as Duane’s declining health made his more active participation in the life of the Museum less possible. If Duane could not come to Princeton to see our exhibitions or participate in the work of the Advisory Council—of which he had been a member for decades, serving for some years as its chair— then I would do my best to take the Museum to him.

Duane welcomed me from the outset with a trusting kindness and ready regard that was a hallmark of how he faced the world, even before I had earned his friendship. And what I remember most from those visits were the stories and the art. Orphaned at an early age, Duane was happy to recount how his experiences first at the Lawrenceville School and, later, at Princeton had saved him—and, I suspect, set him on his path as a collector, even as he became known as an innovator in the steel industry. The art in Duane’s New York home showed a taste that was both wide-ranging and refined—from a single, extraordinary drawing by François Boucher, to landscape paintings from northern Europe in the seventeenth century by such masters as Gaspard Dughet or from the Italian school, to bronze sculptures from the nineteenth century by such leading lights as Frederic, Lord Leighton, to prints ranging from Hendrick Goltzius to Paul Cadmus, to contemporary photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Duane Michals.

In an act of remarkable generosity so typical of Duane, he bequeathed to the Princeton University Art Museum the whole of his collection, but with the stipulation that we should accept only the works we felt would have real value in the Museum’s galleries and in its teaching. Thus, on a bright November day, I found myself in Paris, in company with research curator of European art Betsy Rosasco, on a pilgrimage to the maisonette that had been Duane’s longtime Paris home. There, we discovered an environment that was clearly a labor of love assembled over many years, whose artistic contents were perhaps greater than those I had enjoyed at Duane’s New York apartment. Poring over paintings by Jan Both, Jacob de Heusch, and possibly even Claude Lorrain, discovering a complete suite of prints by Claude, and smiling over charming drawings by Niki de Saint Phalle was to be reminded in a profoundly bittersweet way of a man whose life had been so enriched by art and who in turn had done so much for us. As I write, we continue to process the works that Betsy, our fellow curators, and I chose for Princeton, highlights of which we look forward to sharing in our galleries soon.

James Christen Steward
Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director