A Gift From the Heart

​Savannah has three art museums: Telfair Museums, SCAD MOA, and Beach Institute. Each has unique collections ranging from a celebrated folk artist, a leading African American artist collection, one of the great photographers of the 20th century, the largest collection of Kahlil Gibran’s art in North America, American Impressionists, silver,  and others. These collections have come into the museums’ possession because of the connections of Savannahians themselves have brought them into the three museums collections. For the next few weeks I would like to look at the stories of a few of these individuals. The first is Mary Haskell Minis.
Mary Haskell Minis once wrote, ‘"I am thinking of other museums ... the unique little Telfair Gallery in Savannah, Ga., that Gari Melchers chooses pictures for. There when I was a visiting child, form burst upon my astonished little soul." Mary had a cousin who lived in Savannah that she visited often and during those trips she would venture to the Telfair Museum. Gari Melchers a prominent American artist who was married to a Savannah woman Connie Lawton was creating a stir as he was amassing for the Telfair a prominent collection of American Impressionists and Ash Can School paintings. The museum was the first art museum in the South and the first museum founded by a woman in the United States, Savannah philanthropist Mary Telfair. Mary Haskell would come to Savannah to take care of her cousin during an illness from which she died. A year later she would marry her cousin’s husband a man from one of the first families to settle in Savannah Jacob Florence Minis.
Mary had been born into a wealthy South Carolina family and had received a good education. She ran a girls’ school in Boston. Her marriage to Minis allowed her to become an even greater patron of artists. It was here in Boston she would meet the painter Kahlil Gibran. Gibran at their meeting had not yet established a writing career. His work was being shown at the Day
Gallery and was attracting attention but to everyone’s horror the Gallery caught on fire and all of Gibran’s paintings were burned. While this must have been a gut wrenching experience it helped him to move strictly from a painting career to a career from which he would gain international fame: writing. He wrote at the encouragement and request of Mary. Mary had become his patron, guide and most say lover. She encouraged him to write in English because this language would help him gain international notice. He would eventually write his classic The Prophet. Gibran as William Blake before him would include in his book drawings that helped to amplify his written word. The Prophet was the second best-selling book in the nineteenth century, the sales only behind the Bible.
Although after their meeting and forming a relationship, she would move to Savannah in 1924 and marry Minis in 1926 the two never lost their passion for one another. Gibran would write of her:
When I am unhappy, dear Mary, I read your letters. When the mist overwhelms the “I” in me, I take two or three letters out of the little box and reread them. They remind me of my true self. They make me overlook all that is not high and beautiful in life. Each and every one of us, dear Mary, must have a resting place somewhere. The resting place of my soul is a beautiful grove where my knowledge of you lives.
Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931. Gibran left most of his studio and its belongings to Mary. He expressed the wish that he be buried in Lebanon. To fulfill this wish Mary Haskell and his sister Mariana purchased the Mar Sarkis Monastery in Lebanon, which has since become the Gibran Museum. The words written next to Gibran's grave are "a word I want to see written on my grave: I am alive like you, and I am standing beside you. Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you ...."
Mary also favored the museum she had first discovered form with over eighty works of Gibran, the Telfair Museum of Art. This collection is the largest in the United States. Excerpts of the over six hundred letters between Mary and Gibran were published in "Beloved Prophet" in 1972. In the letters they call each other “Beloved,” and talk about “greater selves” and how their meeting had transformed their lives. She also with her gift to the Telfair Museum was able to pay back the insight a museum once gave her.

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