page_title: Charles Bregler
section_title: Bregler Collection
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Bregler / Bregler Collection
context_page_description: Charles Bregler was an American portrait painter and sculptor, and a student of artist Thomas Eakins. Bregler wrote about Eakins's teaching methods, and amassed a large collection of his minor works, memorabilia and papers. Following Bregler's death, his widow safeguarded the Eakins collection for decades before selling it to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
context_section_description: Following Eakins's 1916 death, Bregler acted as assistant to his widow, Susan Macdowell Eakins (1851–1938), helping to catalogue, frame and clean his paintings. She gave Bregler a number of her husband's works, including one of only two known self-portraits (the other was Eakins's "diploma" portrait for the National Academy of Design). She also painted at least two portraits of Bregler.
  Following Mrs. Eakins's 1938 death, her executors emptied the house at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, removing the items that they deemed salable at auction. Bregler described the aftermath as the "most tragic and pitiful sight I ever saw. Every room was cluttered with debris as all the contents of the various drawers, closets etc. were thrown upon the floor as they removed the furniture. All the life casts were smashed... I never want to see anything like this again." "He gathered up letters, photographs, glass negatives, drawings, oil sketches, plaster casts, and clothing. Among the assortment of memorabilia he retrieved were the letters Eakins had written from Paris and the Dakota Territory, affidavits from William and Frances Crowell, the artist's paintbrushes and cowboy outfit, and an old leather wallet that Bregler had presumedly made and presented to Eakins."
  Bregler rescued a trove of Eakins's minor works, and disobeyed Mrs. Eakins's instructions to burn certain items. Of later importance to scholars, he rescued her journals listing when the works had been painted, where they had been exhibited, and to whom they had been sold or given. She had painted a posthumous portrait of her husband in the 1920s (probably from a photograph). Bregler donated the portrait to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1939, and later donated a sketch related to PMA's William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River.
  Bregler helped to organize the 1944 centennial exhibition of Eakins's works at PMA. He sold a number of Eakins works in the 1940s and 1950s, many of which are now in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He also donated a group of Eakins photographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  Following Bregler's death in 1958, his widow Mary safeguarded the collection in their South Philadelphia rowhouse. She resisted requests from art dealers to see the works or offers to broker a sale of them. At the urging of her attorney, William J. Kelly, Mary Bregler allowed PAFA curator Kathleen A. Foster and art historian Elizabeth Milroy to examine the works in 1983. That visit led to PAFA's 1985 purchase of the collection, with grants provided by the Mable Pew Myrin Trust and other funds.
  PAFA's Bregler Collection consists of nearly 1,600 items—29 paintings (most oil sketches for larger works), 12 sculptures, 261 drawings, 535 photographs, about 380 glass-plate negatives, 361 documents, and memorabilia such as Eakins's watercolor box and paintbrushes.
caption: Self-portrait (c. 1902) by Thomas Eakins, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
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