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| JEANNETTE GENIUS McKEAN |
Jeannette Genius McKean (1909-1989) founded the Morse Museum of American Art as the Morse Gallery of Art on the Rollins College campus, naming it in honor her industrialist grandfather who retired from Chicago to make Winter Park his final home.
As a child, she visited Winter Park and had fond memories of her grandfather and Osceola Lodge on Lake Osceola, the craftsman-style home he remodeled. It stands today a few blocks from the Morse Museum exactly as it was when she visited in the early 1900s.
Jeannette McKean grew up in the gracious Kenwood section of Chicago in the Richardson Romanesque-style mansion her grandfather had built and later gave to her parents as a wedding gift. The home was richly detailed with stained-glass windows and carved mahogany cabinetry, and her artistic mother, Elizabeth Morse Genius, bought American Impressionist paintings, many of which are in the Morse collection today, to hang on the walls. As with many wealthy families of the period, the Geniuses also collected Tiffany glass.
Educated in private schools in Chicago and at Dana Hall in Wellesley, Mass., and Pine Manor Junior College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., Jeannette Genius then studied art at Columbia University, the Grand Central Art School and Art Students League in New York City. Later she studied with Hans Hofmann and John Sutton, and she continued painting throughout her life. Exhibitions of her work were held in such diverse venues as the Norton Gallery in Manchester, N.H., the Kunst Museum in Bern, Switzerland, the Royal Scottish Academy Galleries in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Chateau de la Napoule in La Napoule, France.
A lifelong interest in Rollins College began when she studied there in 1926 for a summer session. She served on the Rollins College Board of Trustees from 1942 to 1975 and quietly funded many college projects, including those to advance its cultural and educational programs. In 1962 the college awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree. In 1942 she founded the Morse Gallery on campus and named Hugh F. McKean, then a Rollins art professor, as its director. In 1945, Hugh and Jeannette were married.
Thirteen years after she founded the Morse Gallery, Jeannette McKean staged an exhibition, "Works of Art by Louis Comfort Tiffany," that was the first serious showing of Tiffany work since the turn of the century. For decades Tiffany's work had fallen from favor, but Jeannette McKean, remembering the satiny, iridescent glass in her family home, still thought his work exceptionally elegant.
In 1957 when the McKeans received word from one of Tiffany's twin daughters that his estate, Laurelton Hall, had burned, it was Jeannette McKean who made the decision to rescue the Tiffany 'treasures' then considered not worth saving. Her husband remembered her exact words at the scene of the devastation: "Let's buy everything that is left and try to save it." With that decision she created the nucleus of a collection that would grow into the most comprehensive collection of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany in the world. In addition to her service and benefactions to Rollins College and her careers as an artist and interior designer, Jeannette McKean was a businesswoman. She was the president of the Winter Park Land Co., which controlled much of her grandfather's Winter Park holdings, and the founder and director of Center Street Gallery. For all of her civic and cultural work on behalf of the community and state, she received many awards, among them the Florida governor's first annual Award for the Arts in 1973.