Subseries I: Administrative Files, 1925-1967

This subseries chiefly contains correspondence, but also includes budget information, notes, inventories, photographs, clippings, and other printed material regarding the establishment, administration, and activities of the Fine Arts Department. Files from the 1920s are of particular interest as they contain letters to and/or from prominent art historians and museum curators, as well as university officials during the time of the Department's founding. Correspondents include Richard Offner, Edward W. Forbes, John G. Bowman, Theodore Sizer, Paul J. Sachs, Homer Saint-Gaudens, Frederick Mortimer Clapp, and Walter Read Hovey. After Clapp's resignation from the University in 1937, Helen Clay Frick corresponded most frequently with Walter Read Hovey and Virginia Lewis about departmental matters, including budgets, course offerings, exhibitions, and special events. To a lesser extent, this subseries also documents Walter Read Hovey's own art collecting activities, and includes several folders of his correspondence with galleries and art dealers dating from the 1940s to the 1960s.