Samuel Bancroft was an American industrialist as well as a major collector of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood artwork.
19 Facts About Samuel Bancroft
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Samuel Bancroft was born on January 21,1840, in Wilmington, Delaware, United States.
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Samuel Bancroft's father was Joseph Bancroft, a member of a prominent Quaker family who started his own milling company, Bancroft Mills, in 1831.
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Samuel Bancroft's mother was Sarah Poole, the daughter of a Quaker miller and silversmith, William Poole.
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Samuel Bancroft was educated according to Joseph's religious values, and emphasized the importance of hard work in his children.
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Samuel Bancroft began working at the family mills at a young age before he began receiving formal schooling at age ten from Samuel Bancroft Alsop, a Wilmington Quaker.
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The Civil War proved extremely profitable to the company due to increased demand for its products, and in 1865, when Samuel Bancroft was 25 years old, his father managed to pay off all of the company's business debts.
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Joseph Samuel Bancroft died in 1874, leaving his two sons to run the company by themselves.
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Samuel Bancroft became the president of the new company, and younger managers began handling many of the firm's day-to-day affairs.
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Joseph Samuel Bancroft had immigrated to the United States from England, and many family members remained behind there.
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Samuel Bancroft fell in love with the art, and once Bancroft stepped back from directly managing the family firm in 1889, he began to purchase numerous pieces of artwork.
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Samuel Bancroft's collection began in 1890 with a work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose art and poetry featured prominently in Bancroft's further collections over the next 25 years.
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Samuel Bancroft maintained correspondence with other artists in the movement, and offered financial support to the families of some of them.
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Samuel Bancroft corresponded with critic, historian, and dealer Charles Fairfax Murray, an important figure in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and Murray helped advise Samuel Bancroft on future purchases.
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Samuel Bancroft continued adding to the collection for the remainder of his life, and built it into the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite works outside England.
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Samuel Bancroft was very interested in the Brandywine School of art begun by local illustrator Howard Pyle.
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In 1905, Bancroft built homes and studios for four of the most prominent students of Pyle: N C Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, Harvey Dunn, and Clifford Warren Ashley.
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Samuel Bancroft's children expanded on the collection and later, in seeking a way to memorialize their father, they contacted the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts which had been founded after Howard Pyle's death to collect artwork related to Pyle and his students.
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Samuel Bancroft's children donated the estate's collection of Pre-Raphaelite artwork to the Society and gave them land upon which to build a museum and an endowment to maintain it.