Amanda Shepard, Vice President and COO
Friends of the Fort Wayne Museum of Art will know that glass has been a collection focus for well over a decade now, and the reasons for that are many. I’ve written before that a museum’s collection is not a given: it’s the result of its institutional capacities and of its community’s collectors and resources. It can also be the result of fortuitous wanderings into the art world where the vast network of relationships among museums, galleries, collectors, and artists very often leads to surprise opportunities. In our case, a 2013 staff visit to the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Michigan, opened our eyes to the visual feast of glass sculpture. It was the door to the very enthusiastic world of glass lovers and artists eager to help us in the pursuit of bringing glass sculpture into the realm of museums.
This is the short take of a decade-plus journey of going from a handful of glass sculptures in our collection, to nearly 1,000 works representing every major glass sculptor of the last 60 years and numerous emerging artists. We’re ecstatic to be where we are, and we aspire for much more. And if I’m being honest, I’ll tell you that as a trained painter, I long for a painting collection that is just as compelling and destination-worthy.
Many of this blog’s readers may have visited the best painting collections around the country, and if you trace their origins, one will find wealthy patrons that formed those collections in the 19th century and provided the endowments that would enable their continuous growth. Figures like those can be found in the FWMoA story, but not to the degree that catalyzed the great Midwestern collections of Toledo, Indianapolis, or Detroit.
So, what’s a museum like ours to do? Keep riding the glass wave and become a center for glass in the Midwest? Yes. Strike out boldly to build our collection of the traditional fine arts, like American painting of the last 200 years, to match the quality of our glass collection? Also yes.
This venture (and it really is like starting a new business—you need strategy, time, investors, and believers) is nascent, but the progress is real. It is my pleasure to tell the story of one of those believers who later became an investor, Dorothy Shaffer of Fort Wayne.
Many in Fort Wayne will know Dorothy as a kind and elegant woman who has devoted her life (100 years on June 15, 2026, in fact) to raising her family, supporting her husband (the late Paul Shaffer), and contributing meaningfully to her favorite charitable causes, especially in the last decade. In our visits with Dorothy, we came to appreciate that Dorothy’s elegance was a reflection of her belief that beauty matters and that it positively affected people’s lives. This belief led to two transformational projects with the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.
First: glass. Dorothy is not a big fan of the modernist aesthetic tendency in much of contemporary glass, but neither is she interested in a sentimental, cutesy style that so often fills tourist galleries. Thus, we predicted that she might like the work of Paul Stankard, the world’s preeminent flame worker known for his tiny but elaborate botanical worlds flourishing inside immaculate paperweight orbs. After looking through one of Paul’s latest books, Dorothy simply said, “We must have these!” and the Dorothy L. and Paul E. Shaffer Collection of Master Glass Artist Paul Stankard was born.
Last year over lunch, we thanked Dorothy again for her vision to help us build the Stankard collection of 25 botanical paperweights, which is on permanent display in the Glass Wing. More ideas for the collection peppered the conversation—glass, contemporary realism, and others—but we kept coming back to the memory of the florals that so captivated her in the Stankards. Soon, we were on to dreaming about the great many American paintings we’d like to have (the list is long), and Dorothy encouraged us to look for paintings of floral still lifes.
On many more visits with Dorothy, we looked at dozens of floral paintings that were on the market at the time. Some were large and lush, others were solitary stems in simple vases. A few were exploding with life symbolized by dewdrops, buzzing insects, and juicy fruits surrounding the arrangements. We considered Severin Roesen, Adelheid Dietrich, Martin Johnson Heade, and their contemporaries. At last, though, Dorothy seemed to settle on the work of John Ross Key (1832-1920), a lesser known but fascinating figure whose story has roots in the founding of our country.
The Key painting that Dorothy loved most was a stately but modest painting of hydrangeas and phlox, the flowers boldly standing with their heads held high against a subtle burnt gold background. Key painted them basking in light from the East, perhaps greeting a sunrise known only to him. And though each petal was rendered in intricate detail, we both admired the simplicity of the composition—no fuss, no contrivance—just flowers in their natural glory.
American history experts might take notice of the artist’s surname. John’s great-grandfather, also John Ross Key (1754-1821), was a general in the Revolutionary War, and his grandfather, attorney and author Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) wrote the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As a boy, Key’s natural artistic talents inspired him to learn drafting techniques, and by the age of 19, he had been recruited by the United States Coastal Survey as a draftsman and mapmaker. With civil war unfolding, however, he was drafted into the Confederate Army and while stationed in Charleston from 1863-65, Key made the sketches that would inspire his best-known work, Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Siege of Charleston Harbor, 1863, which, until 1986, had been attributed to Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902).
After the war, Key spent time in New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, and later Boston, developing a series of subjects that included the California landscape, and floral still lifes. Perhaps the still lifes satisfied the decorating tastes of East coast families and thus paid the bills, but Key was publicly praised by critics at the time as one of the few painters to reveal to us the arresting reality of flowers:
The trouble with most flower paintings is that they are so practically treated, so refined and sentimental that the strength is polished out of them. In Mr. Key’s pictures there is refinement, but it is always subordinated to strength, and we get flowers that seem to be not ideal flowers but real flowers (“Art in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, April 17, 1881; “The Fine Arts,” Daily Inter-Ocean, April 30 1881).
And so we find ourselves, thanks to Dorothy’s vision and generosity, the grateful owners of John Ross Key’s Hydrangeas and Other Garden Flowers, a work that was likely made in Chicago soon after he began exhibiting there to expand his clientele beyond the Northeast. We can only imagine the fine homes that displayed this work, perhaps in Chicago and later back East, and the families who enjoyed it. Now we can celebrate that this American souvenir, having traveled across space and time and holding stories of founding, wars, anthems, artists, and families, lives on in Fort Wayne to tell the tale.
To see more works from our permanent collection, plan your visit to FWMoA!