The story
In 1925 the Fort Worth Art Association bought a painting from Susan Macdowell Eakins, the artist's widow, for 750 dollars. It was Swimming, Thomas Eakins's 1885 picture of himself and his students diving from a stone pier, painted while he ran the school of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Its plainly nude figures belonged to the teaching from life that cost him that post the following year. For 65 years the picture stayed with the city's art museum. In 1990, when that museum, by then the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, let it go, local foundations, businesses and residents raised the money to keep it in town, and it passed to the Amon Carter.
The museum is the legacy of Amon G. Carter, publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who began buying paintings and bronzes of the American West by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell in 1935. His will asked for a museum run for the benefit of the public. It opened in 1961 as the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, in a building by the architect Philip Johnson, faced in Texas shellstone with a front portico, modelled on Renaissance loggias, that looks out toward downtown. In 2010 it took its present name, for a collection that had grown well beyond the West.
Today Remington and Russell share the galleries with Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis and a large photography collection that includes Dorothea Lange. The museum also holds Grant Wood's Parson Weems' Fable of 1939, in which the preacher who invented the story of young George Washington and the cherry tree draws back a curtain on the scene.
