Final Severance

His name was John L. Severance, but his role in Cleveland was Lorenzo de' Medici's. A bearded, bespectacled man of placid temperament and steady habits who had inherited a vast fortune from his father, Standard Oil's Louis H. Severance, he made up for an otherwise uneventful life by making himself Cleveland's most lavish patron of the arts. As a patron, he had a tycoon's audacity.

Severance whipped the Cleveland Museum of Art into shape. He helped found the Cleveland Orchestra. He offered, in 1928, to put up a million dollars to give Cleveland the "perfect concert hall" if other Clevelanders would match him with a couple of million more. When depression caused other Clevelanders to welch, Patron Severance raised his ante to $2,500,000 and Severance Hall was built.

When John L. Severance died six years ago, nobody knew for sure how many millions he had spent on culture for Cleveland. Because he had no direct heirs, his baronial 180-acre estate went to a second cousin, Severance A. Milliken, husband of Broadway Actress Marta Abba (Tovarich). The contents of the mansion, one of the finest private art collections in the Middle West, he had willed to the Cleveland Art Museum.

Last week the Cleveland Art Museum announced that John L. Severance's art collection (valued at $3,000,000) had arrived and was tucked away in the museum's storerooms pending a big memorial show next fall. By the time it had been catalogued and analyzed, it was evident that the museum had received the biggest plum the art world has caught since the late John G. Johnson's collection fell into the Philadelphia Museum's lap last year (TIME, Nov. 10).

From the walls, tables and statuary niches of Patron Severance's palace had come: Sir Joshua Reynolds' idyllic portrait of The Ladies Amabel and Mary Jemima Yorke; a batch of first-water Rembrandts, including a famed Portrait of a Youth; Flemish Primitive Aelbrecht Bouts's well-known Annunciation; landscapes and portraits by Hobbema, Cuyp, Lawrence, Gainsborough, Turner and Van Dyck; remarkable collections of 15th-Century Italian sculpture, medieval Gothic tapestries, ceramics and an assortment of furniture equaled only in the Rockefeller and Hamilton Rice collections. The late John L. Severance had done his picking & choosing with an eye to the needs of the Cleveland museum, so the museum found little to weed out. Cleveland now has one of the best-balanced and richest art collections to be found in any museum in the Middle West.

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