The Golden Age to the Modern Era: The Michael and Esther Droller Collection

It started when Michael Droller received a framed reproduction of a Maxfield Parrish painting as a graduation present from medical school. That gift ignited his passion for illustration, a passion that has long sustained Droller outside his career in medicine. 

Over 40 years, he and his wife Esther have amassed an enviable collection rich in literary history and artistic achievement. Artists from the Golden Age of Illustration—a period of extraordinary creative ferment from 1875 to World War I—include Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway, as well as later but accomplished practitioners Frank Adams, L. Leslie Brooke, and W. Heath Robinson. The Droller’s modern holdings, spanning the last quarter of the 20th century, comprise such luminaries as Barbra Cooney, Alice and Martin Provensen, and Maurice Sendak. Thematic subjects bridge both epochs, allowing artistic comparisons between Arthur Rackham’s and Jerry Pinkney’s versions of Aesop’s Fables to Charles Robinson’s and Michael Hague’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website