A man of many talents—an officer in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, the founder of the Transatlantic Review as well as of a literary prize for young authors—Joseph F. McCrindle may have inherited not just a collection of old master paintings from his grandmother but also her passion for collecting. During years of residency in London in the 1960s and 1970s, he assembled one of the great collections of European paintings and drawings of our time. At the core of his collection was a group of over two thousand drawings by European and American masters from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

Beginning in 1962, a few years after moving to Princeton, McCrindle began giving works of art to the Museum, including an extraordinary oil painting by the sixteenth-century Netherlandish master Joos van Cleve, a large stained-glass design by the leading Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne- Jones, and a rare finished drawing of the head of Christ by the Italian Mannerist painter Bartolomeo Passarotti, given in honor of former Museum director Allen Rosenbaum. It was Rosenbaum who later initiated a survey exhibition drawn from McCrindle’s collection that was presented in Princeton in 1991 before traveling to four other museums.

At his death in 2008, the Museum was again the beneficiary of McCrindle’s generosity, along with museums across the country, in particular the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. McCrindle’s bequest for Princeton included not only a gift of more than twenty drawings and watercolors but also an education endowment that will allow the Museum to establish a series of paid academicyear internships for both undergraduates and graduates. The Museum expects to launch this program in fall 2010, building on the success of its summer internship program, in which students have interned in every operational area of the Museum from the curatorial to the Museum Store. In gratitude for McCrindle’s long-standing generosity, a selection of his gifts will be on view this spring in the Museum’s Renaissance and Baroque galleries.