The twenty-seven paintings and three works on paper from the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection in the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, represent a small portion of the vast and wide-ranging collection of primarily American paintings and decorative arts that the Lynches assembled between the 1960s and Carolyn’s passing in 2015.¹

Dating from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, these spectacular gifts by twenty of the era’s most prominent artists, for which the McMullen is most grateful to Carolyn and Peter Lynch and their family were selected to enhance the educational and research mission of Boston College. That goal is furthered in this mobile guide by contributions from the University’s professors in a range of disciplines who volunteered to write interpretive labels. For example, the Lynch Collection’s outstanding landscapes by artists like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church, notable for their artistic excellence and art historical significance, also repay careful study by ecocritical viewers of what they reveal about the relationship between the artists’ visions and the American landscape during a period of population growth, industrial development, and westward expansion. Several seascapes and landscapes, especially those by Sanford Robinson Gifford, Fitz Henry Lane, Robert Salmon, and William Bradford, offer latent evidence about global trade and the role of artists as explorers and archaeologists in the nineteenth century. 

Martin Johnson Heade’s paintings of orchids and hummingbirds invite viewers to explore blurred boundaries between artists and naturalists traveling to South America in the wake of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and to study innovative workshop practices devised to meet increasing demand in a competitive American market for landscapes. Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt entice viewers to ponder concepts of gender, childhood, and motherhood. Jack Butler Yeats’s paintings provoke through his expressionist technique reconsideration of the trauma of emigration from Ireland, life in the nascent Republic of Ireland, and their resonance in Irish literature. 

We hope that viewers will find the labels here helpful in sparking their own dialogue with works of art as they tour the collection and that as Boston College faculty teach from this collection they will contribute new insights from their extensive areas of expertise in the form of additional labels to this digital resource. 

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1. For a history of the Lynch Collection see Dean Lahikainen, ed., A Passion for American Art: Selections from the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Collection, Peabody Essex Museum (Salem: Peabody Essex Museum, 2019).