Charles Loeser notebook and diaries

The collector and scholar Charles Alexander Loeser was born in New York in 1864 into a family of German origin. After studying art history at Harvard University in Boston, in 1888 under the influence of his fellow student Bernard Berenson, Loeser decided to leave for Italy; he moved to Florence, where he met and married the pianist Olga Lebert Kaufmann, and spent the rest of his life there. In Florence Loeser cultivated his studies, centered on 15th-17th cent. drawings, and above all devoted himself to the collecting of works of art, like many other English and Americans resident in the city at that time. At his death, Loeser’s collection, brought together from 1915 in Villa Torri Gattaia in the environs of San Miniato al Monte, comprised over two hundred and fifty early prints and drawings, numerous period furnishings, paintings, sculptures, and works of applied art, for a total of almost one thousand objects. Most were works of Italian medieval and Renaissance art, but there were also contemporary works, such as the famous paintings by Cézanne, an artist whom Loeser was one of the first to appreciate. The collection was characterized by the austere sobriety with which these antiques and works of art furnished the various rooms of the villa. Charles Loeser died in New York in 1928. In his will drawn up two years earlier, he had ordained that on his death the entire collection of prints and drawings should be donated to the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, that the President of the United States could choose eight of his Cézannes "to adorn the White House," and that the selection of over thirty works of art and period furnishings indicated by him should be bequeathed to the City Council of his adoptive city and displayed in Palazzo Vecchio as the "Loeser Bequest." The Bequest still adorns various rooms in the Quartiere del Mezzanino of Palazzo Vecchio, laid out in line with aesthetic canons similar to those that characterized the interiors of the aristocratic mansions of Renaissance Florence, and which the collectors of Loeser’s time tended to reproduce in their private residences.