After 33 years of display in Doe Library’s Heyns Reading Room, the painting “Washington Rallying the Troops at Monmouth” was removed for preservation purposes in May.
Emanuel Leutze, a German American painter best known for “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” painted the recently removed artwork in the 1850s, depicting an angry George Washington on horseback surrounded by troops. It later came under the stewardship of the University Art Museum, an earlier form of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, which loaned the painting out for display in the Heyns Reading Room in 1993.
According to an email from BAMPFA public relations manager AJ Fox, the formal review process for the removal of the painting began in 2019 and concluded this year after seven years.
Collection specialists determined the display location in the Heyns Reading Room did not meet standards for exhibition, including maximum lighting levels, 50% relative humidity and “visibility to a security guard during public hours.”
The relocation follows another recent removal of artwork from the Heyns Reading Room. In 2023, a portrait of campus and city namesake George Berkeley was taken down due to his proslavery and racist beliefs.
Thirty-nine other art pieces are still on loan from BAMPFA in various locations on campus, including in various academic buildings, outdoors and in University House. One large collection of BAMPFA artwork resides in the entryway to Hertz Concert Hall, featuring seven paintings of California landscapes by early 20th-century painter Gottardo Piazzoni. They have been on display in Hertz Hall since 1987.
Fox confirmed the Leutze painting will eventually return to public view, but did not provide details about specific exhibition plans. A sign near the former location of the painting states that the painting will be displayed in context with other artwork from the same period, and that the Library is developing a new vision for the space.
Mary Ann Smart, a UC Berkeley music professor and chair of the music department, said she has been engaged with BAMPFA in conversations about removing the Piazzoni paintings for conservation as well, with no mention of future display plans.
“If conservation means taking it out of view for the foreseeable future, and especially not supplying something else that could have equivalent aesthetic and historic value for the population, then I think that’s too bad,” Smart said. “I might like to explore the possibility of keeping the paintings in the Hertz Hall lobby, and while also improving the conditions, so that the conservation could be ensured.”
Fox indicated in an email that BAMPFA had no confirmed plans to remove the Piazzoni paintings.