EARLY LIFE MATERIAL, 1910 - 1968

The Mary Bartlett Cowdrey Papers includes material related to Cowdrey's personal and professional life as an art historian, archivist, and writer, as well as information on material collected and curated by Cowdrey during the mid-20th Century, as well as a number of 19th Century materials from her collection.

Material related to Cowdrey's personal life include documents from her early life through her time at the New Jersey College for Women, which would later become Douglass College. These documents include certificates, identification cards, passports, clippings, and photographs. Her early life material documents Cowdrey's life until roughly 1937. Of note are a number of clippings detailing a scandal at Rutgers in the 1930s where a professor in the German department was accused of being a Nazi sypathizer, hiting a student with a book, and firing a professor for speaking out against the Nazis. Also included is a copy of a letter from Cowdrey on the matter to provide her account from when she was a student and took a class with one of the individuals involved in the scandal.

The correspondence found in these papers are primarily professional correspondence. Cowdrey corresponded with libraries, archives, museums, and universities including the Archives of American Art, Smith College, the New York Public Library, the Frick Art Reference Library, and more. Also of note are individuals she with whom she corresponded who have their own separate folders. The material in the correspondence sub-series primarily is professional in nature, but there is some personal correspondence included as well. This includes material about a car accident in 1955, and several research trips to England and Japan.

The correspondence sub-series makes up the bulk of the collection and primarily covers Cowdrey's correspondence from the late 1950s through 1971. There are notes suggesting that correspondence from before 1956 was donated to another archive, possibly to the Archives of American Art (now part of the Smithsonian), which was one of the institutions Cowdrey worked with.

Included are correspondence both to and from Cowdrey, as Cowdrey kept carbon copies of the letters she wrote. For some years, Cowdrey kept two carbon copies of her letters. These second carbon copies were kept in separate files, with the first carbon copies filed by correspondent.

Mary Bartlett Cowdrey was also an avid collector. She kept receipts and inventories of her purchases from the mid-1940s through the 1960s. She donated a number of these items to Rutgers in the early 1960s. There are detailed inventories of the items donated. The items that were donated include material primarily related to the history of American art, such as exhibition catalogs, monographs, and periodicals. These inventories, which were compiled by Cowdrey, show the titles of the donated material as well as an appraised value.

While the material in these inventories are not included in this collection, there are a number of 19th Century documents collected by Cowdrey that are represented. These are of special interest, as they document correspondence from and to artists and art dealers and those associated with the art world in the 19th Century as well as some sketches. Individuals of note are Rosa Bonheur, Samuel Putnam Avery, Albert Fitch Bellows, James Wells Champney, Frederick S. Church, William S. Mount, John Trumbull, and Robert Walter Weir. Noteably, there are a few illustrations by Thomas Nast found here.

Also included in this subseries are a few noteable objects, including a daguerreotype of John La Farge, and a carte de visite album with various 19th century photographs of individuals (many of which are labeled with the subject's name). Also included is a tome of apocrypha from around 1790, with notes by Cowdrey from 1960, and a family Bible, which may be Cowdrey's family Bible, through the Howe family.