Catharine T. Patterson Collection of Walter Crane

Catharine Tinker Patterson was born in 1874 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of the Reverend Anson Phelps Tinker (1844-1886, Yale 1868) and Martha Jane White Tinker (1846-1880). An 1897 graduate of Emerson College of Oratory in Boston, Massachusetts, she taught school in Minnesota and Massachusetts before joining the faculty at Emerson in 1900. From 1906 until 1917 she taught at Hartford Public High School in Hartford, Connecticut, and in 1917 settled in New York City when she married George Lewis Patterson (1869-1942), founder and president of Stanley & Patterson, manufacturers of electrical signal apparatus. After her husband's death, Catharine Patterson returned to Connecticut to live near her brother Chauncey Brewster Tinker (1876-1963, Yale BA 1899, MA 1901, PhD 1902), professor of English at Yale University from 1903 to 1945 and the first keeper of rare books at Yale University Library. She died in Hartford on September 11, 1963, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Portland, Maine, with her husband and his first wife Alice Carter Patterson (1869-1915).

In an essay published in The Christian Science Monitor on July 26, 1941, Catharine Patterson described a life of collecting that began with the buttons, stones, and seashells she and her brother had saved as children. Their early adult lives took them in different directions, but they developed their passion for Walter Crane's work while traveling together in England where, she wrote, “the spell of the Pre-Raphaelites was upon us. Everything belonging to the Brotherhood beckoned us.” They began by studying the paintings, drawings, furniture, stained glass, and other decorative arts created by Burne-Jones, Millais, and Rossetti, and made a special pilgrimage to Kelmscott House, the home and workshop of William Morris in the London suburb of Hammersmith. Through Morris they discovered the decorative book work of Crane, his friend and follower, in particular that which illustrated the stories the Tinkers had loved so much as children. The siblings set out to acquire books, manuscripts, letters, original drawings, textiles, and other items related to Crane, and to lend selections from their collection to public exhibitions. The earliest known loan was to the Brooklyn Museum in 1923 when “an extensive collection of books and prints and an original drawing by Walter Crane, from the collection of Mrs. George L. Patterson” were shown. A 1939 New York Public Library exhibition described their Crane collection as being “made by [Mrs. George L. Patterson] and her brother, Professor Chauncey Tinker of Yale University, who acquired a large part of it from a son of Walter Crane.” The collection was shown again in 1953 at Princeton University, three years prior to its arrival at the Yale University Library.

Catharine Patterson wrote that she was delighted when she found that the collection, which she and her brother had always intended to donate to Yale, had a counterpart at Harvard University in the Caroline Miller Parker Collection of Works by Walter Crane, formed by Caroline Parker (1874-1922) and given to Harvard in 1928 by her husband Augustin H. Parker. Today the Beinecke Library's Catharine T. Patterson Collection of Walter Crane stands as the third largest collection of Crane material after the Walter Crane Archive at the University of Manchester in England and the Parker Collection at the Houghton Library.

Walter Crane (1845-1915), English author and illustrator best known for his work in children's literature. Among the most important illustrators of the nineteenth century, Crane was also a painter, essayist, and decorative artist who created designs for wallpapers, tiles, printed textiles, posters, stained glass, embroideries, and pottery. His formal education consisted of an apprenticeship served with the wood engraver and illustrator W. J. Linton from 1858 to 1862; later he was a founder of The Art-Workers' Guild (1884) and a founder and first president of The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (1888).