The medal was named for Philadelphia merchant Joseph E. Temple (1811–1880), a patron of the arts and PAFA Board member, whose bequest of $51,000 funded the awards.
Any American artist was welcome to submit works for PAFA's annual exhibitions. Juries in painting and sculpture, composed of PAFA faculty and invited artists, evaluated hundreds (and later thousands) of submissions and chose those for exhibition. The Painters' Jury of Selection also chose the medal winners in painting. An artist could be awarded a Temple medal only once. Sometimes the medal-winning painting was purchased for PAFA's permanent collection.
The process for the first Temple Medal was a fiasco.[1] To encourage American historical painting, PAFA added a $3,000 cash bonus to the 1883 gold medal if it went to a historical work.[1] But the art jury could not agree on a gold medal recipient.[1] A silver medal would have been awarded to William B. T. Trego for The March to Valley Forge, but he refused to accept it. Trego argued that if only one Temple medal was awarded it should be a gold, not a silver (which implied second place).[2] Trego sued PAFA to be named the gold medal winner and claim the cash bonus. After losing in a Philadelphia court, he took his appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which concurred with the lower court's ruling that PAFA's art jury had the right to issue awards as it saw fit.[3] After 1883, no cash prizes accompanied Temple medals.[1]
From 1884 to 1889, a gold medal was awarded for the best figure painting and a silver medal for the best landscape or marine painting. But the jury ignored the rules in 1890, awarding a landscape-with-cattle painting the gold medal.[a] In 1891 and 1892, a gold medal was awarded for the best painting regardless of subject, and a silver for the second-best. No second-place medals were awarded after 1892. From 1893 to 1899, two gold medals were awarded each year. Beginning in 1900, a single gold medal was awarded for the best painting in PAFA's annual exhibition regardless of subject.[5]
Famously, Thomas Eakins, who had been forced to resign as director of PAFA's school in 1886, accepted his 1904 award for Archbishop William Henry Elder by declaring, ”I think you’ve got a heap of impudence to give me a medal." He then rode off on a bicycle to the Philadelphia Mint, where he sold the gold medal for its melt-down value.[6]
William Glackens wryly changed the name of the figure painting that won him the 1924 award from Nude to Temple Gold Medal Nude.[7]
By the 1930s, PAFA's annual exhibitions had acquired a reputation for being parochial and nepotistic.[b] With the costs of transporting and insuring the works, they were also expensive. Beginning in 1954, PAFA's exhibitions became bi-annual. The last Temple Gold Medal was awarded to Helen Frankenthaler in 1968. Beginning in 1969, PAFA's annual exhibitions were dedicated exclusively to student work from its school.
^"[T]hese cattle pictures of Mr. Howe are admirable, and they are certainly among the most satisfying things exhibited here, but the gold medal was offered for 'the best figure picture by an American artist,' and these are not figure pictures at all, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the committee has made another mistake in awarding this medal in this way." — L. W. M. [Leslie W. Miller][4]
^Art columnist Jane Richter complained that more than 60% of the 258 paintings in the 1937 exhibition had been by members of the selection jury or by invited artists. While acknowledging the value of having "name" artists, she argued that PAFA needed to choose: make future exhibitions truly open-to-all or make them by-invitation-only.[8]
^"In Harper’s Weekly I found an illustration by Reinhart, by far the best I’ve seen by him up to now, Washed Ashore. A body has been washed up, a man is kneeling beside it to see who it is, a few fishermen and women give information about the shipwreck victim to a gendarme. So it looks somewhat like Victim of a Shipwreck that you have, but the drawing by R. has something of [Félix] Régamey, for example. It’s a very fine print." — Vincent van Gogh.[16][1]
References
^ a b c dMark Thistlethwaite, "Patronage Gone Awry: The 1883 Temple Competition of Historical Paintings," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 112, no. 4 (October 1988), pp. 545-78.
^"Fifty-Fifth Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy," American Architect and Building News, December 13, 1884.
^"Not Good Enough for the Prize," The New York Times, April 20, 1886.
^"The Sixtieth Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy," The American: A National Journal, Volume 19, (American Company, 1889), p. 319.
^"Honors Awarded by the Temple Fund," Catalogue of the Annual Exhibition, (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1919), pp. 8-9.
^"Biography of Thomas Eakins," Philadelphia Museum of Art.
^ a bTemple Gold Medal Nude, from Sotheby's NY.
^Philadelphia Art News, January 31, 1938. sfn error: no target: CITEREFPhiladelphia_Art_News,_January_31,_1938 (help)
^Francis Davis Millet, from National Portrait Gallery.
^ a bMartin Gammon, Deaccessioning and Its Discontents: A Critical History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), p. 334.
^Yosemite Valley: View from Bridal Veil Meadows, from Blouin Art Sales Index.
^Old Ocean's Gray and Melancholy Waste, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
^Peter Hastings Falk, ed., The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1876-1913, (Sound View Press, 1989), p. 406.
^PAFA website: Exhibitions 1805-1999
^"Mid Ocean" by Florence Earle Coates, from Wikisource.
^Vincent van Gogh to Anthon van Rappard, 25 May 1883. sfn error: no target: CITEREFVincent_van_Gogh_to_Anthon_van_Rappard,_25_May_1883. (help)
^Winter on the Hudson
^Looking East at Sunset, St. Ives Bay, from SIRIS.
^"Bisbing's Great Work," Philadelphia Item, February 14, 1892.
^Autumn Oaks, from Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.
^Autumn Oaks, from SIRIS.
^Arrangement in Black, from Philadelphia Museum of Art.
^Le Domino Rose, from Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
^Mother and Child, from PAFA.
^Pearl Clouds, Moonlight, Brush & Pencil, August 1898, p. 230.
^The Violinist (Otto Roth), from Studio International, Volume 41, (London: National Magazine Company, 1907), p. 266.
^Lady with a Rose, from Ronald G. Pisano, William Merritt Chase: Portraits in Oil, (Yale University Press, 2007), p. 174.
^The Green Bodice, from Metropolitan Museum of Art.
^Madame Fisher, from Indiana Museum of Art.
^The Golden Screen, from WikiArt.
^Ethel Cochrane Cushing, from Art History Reference.
^The Chinese Statuette
^Open Sea, from EmilCarlsen.org
^Youth
^The Hill Country
^On the Valley, from The American Magazine of Art, March 1916, p. 180.
^On the Valley, from Blouin's Art Sales Index.
^The Orchard Window, from Philadelphia Museum of Art.
^Ice-Bound Falls, from Art Institute of Chicago.
^Lacquer Screen, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
^Sleep
^My Wife's Family
^George Marvin and His Daughter Edith, from Mutual Art.
^The Wee Woman, from Archives of American Art, Smithsonian.
^The Intruder
^The Sand Barge by Paul Bartlett, from Smithsonian Institution.
^Mrs. Scott's House, from Maier Museum of Art.
^Miners Resting, from Sheldon Museum of Art.
^Sleeping Black Girl, from SIRIS.
^Marianna, from Whitney Museum.
^"Philadelphians Win Art Awards," The Lewiston Daily Sun, February 7, 1939.
^Lighthouse, Cape Cod, from Annex Galleries.
^That Which I Should Have Done, from Art Institute of Chicago.
^Railroad Station Waiting Room, from Corcoran Gallery of Art.
^Portrait of Thomas Raeburn White, from Cleveland Museum of Art.
^Kiosk, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
^Death of Snappy Collins, from Walker Art Center.
^Majestic Tenement, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
^The Valley, from Woodstock Artists Association.
^Junkyard, from Carnegie Museum of Art.
^Noah Wolf, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
^Venice #2
^Mary Anne Goley, "What Fed Chiefs Like," The Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2010.
