Maud Murray Thompson Dale was a collector of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French paintings together with her husband Chester Dale.
Background
Maud Murray Thompson Dale was born on June 25, 1875 in Rochester, New York, United States. The daughter of Frank L. Murray, then a compositor for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, and Agnes Jones Murray, she grew up in comfortable circumstances in Rochester and various other upstate New York communities. The family moved to New York City in 1886.
Education
Maud Murray enrolled at the Art Students League of New York in 1893. For a time Maud studied art in Paris with Theophile A. Steinlen, a disciple of Honore Daumier.
Career
Dale's career of an art collector began after her marriage to Chester Dale. The Dales led an active social life, visiting Paris in the winters and spending summers in Southampton, Long Island. Chester Dale's main interests were in business and sports, while in the 1920's Maud Dale, with a keen eye for aesthetics and quality, began directing her husband's interests toward acquiring important nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, predominantly of the French school.
The Dales were a team. Maud Dale would select the paintings, and her judgment was final. Chester Dale would then bargain for them; the haggling over price and the satisfaction of having made a good buy was his pleasure. Actually, Maud Dale claimed that once she had seen a painting, it remained in her mind and she did not need to own it.
As the collection grew, it was necessary to take larger quarters. In 1927, when the Hotel Beverly was opened on Fiftieth Street at Lexington Avenue, the Dales took an entire upper floor, four apartments, in which they enjoyed the novelty of private balconies with exposures in all four directions.
In the late 1920's Maud Dale began a surge of concentrated artistic endeavors to introduce French art to the American public. She sponsored an edition of books on modern art, writing brief texts about Picasso and Modigliani. Henry McBride, Murdock Pendleton, and Edward Alden Jewell wrote the other books in the series. Maud Dale also wrote short prefaces to about twenty other art books and brochures as well as about a dozen articles in newspapers and periodicals between 1928 and 1933. She was objective, seldom mentioning specific works, but describing rather the period and how the artists affected the painting styles. Although knowledgeable about recent art history, she tended to be repetitious in her writing.
Maud Dale also made stage designs, which she exhibited in Paris in 1925 and in New York the following year. In addition, she painted murals over the mantels of friends' houses and some oils of Parisian and African scenes, but since she herself discarded these latter works, it would appear that she wished to be remembered as a collector rather than as a creative artist.
In 1929 she designed the last and most luxurious of several automobile bodies that she devised, which she had custom-built in Belgium. It was the first car with a sliding roof, and its other unique features included steps instead of running boards, a convertible roof over the rear quarter of the car, and a speedometer in the back compartment.
Chester Dale joined the board of directors of the French Institute in New York in late 1929 or early 1930; soon thereafter he had the third floor of the institute's building refurbished as an art gallery. It opened as The Museum of French Art, French Institute in the United States, on January 20, 1931, with Maud Dale as chairman of the exhibitions committee. She immediately began a series of shows, all original in theme, with loans of works from the United States (many from the Dale Collection) and from abroad. The inaugural exhibition was entitled "Portraits of Women--Romanticism to Realism. " Others were "Picasso, Braque, Leger"; "Degas and His Tradition"; "Renoir and His Tradition"; "Fantin-Latour"; and "Derain, Vlaminck. "
A rift over policy questions at the French Institute developed two seasons after the new gallery was completed. As a result, Chester Dale resigned from the board and Maud Dale withdrew from the art committee. The New York Times called her resignation "one of the season's most serious setbacks". She continued to organize exhibitions elsewhere for the benefit of various charitable organizations for several years.
By 1931 the size of their collection had once again crowded the Dales out of their apartments, and they rented two penthouses--an entire floor--in the tower of the newly constructed Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue. Racks were built into the extra bathrooms for storage of the paintings, but even they proved insufficient, and several years later Chester Dale bought an elegant limestone mansion on East Seventy-ninth Street.
Maud Dale helped to entertain at the new home but chose never to live in it; she remained at the Carlyle for the rest of her life. She gradually became a recluse and virtually disappeared from the art scene, enfeebled by arteriosclerosis and suffering from glaucoma. She died in a nursing home in Southampton.
Maud Dale, as her friend, the critic Henry McBride, said, had "an intellectual passion for sequence". Like the exhibitions she arranged, the Dale collection stressed pictures in relation to each other, the same figures seen from different angles, series of still lifes, and especially series of portraits. Maud Dale liked representations of specific people. She wrote that "portraits are the documents by which not only the individual but his epoch can be recreated".
Quotes from others about the person
Chester Dale: "Maud taught me values. [She] didn't care who owned a picture. She loved the paintings. I did all the buying"
Connections
Maud Murray married Frederick M. Thompson, Mar. 31, 1898, in New York City. He was a Yale graduate and fellow art student who was simultaneously studying for a degree at New York Law School; his father, Robert Ellis Thompson, was a distinguished educator in Philadelphia. They had one son.
Her marriage was terminated by divorce in April 1911; later the same month, on April 28, she married Chester Dale in Greenwich, Connecticut. A stockbroker eight years younger than she, he had been a friend of her first husband. Dale, son of a department store salesman, had left Peekskill Military Academy before graduating and found a job as an office boy in Wall Street at five dollars a week. Clever, aggressive, hardworking, and ambitious, he quickly became a successful bond salesman, specializing in railroad mortgages and utilities. By the time he married, he had already amassed a considerable fortune.