Peggy Macdowell Thomas, who died in November at the age of 89, was an only child who never had children. But she lived in the bosom of her family.

They looked down at her from their portraits on her walls. There was eccentric Aunt Lizzy, who had stayed at the Hotel Roanoke. Walter Macdowell, Peggy's grandfather, who helped start the railroad. And Aunt Susie and Uncle Tom Eakins, artists up in Philadelphia.

Several of the portraits were by Uncle Tom himself, who died when Peggy was just 3. Peggy never knew him - but she knew he was special.

That made Peggy special. She knew that, too.

If you want them to roll out the red carpet for you at a museum in Philadelphia, she joked to a reporter in 1998, "Just tell them you're a relative of T.E."

Thomas Eakins, who died in Philadelphia in 1916, was one of America's greatest painters.

On Nov. 16, 2001, his grandniece, who was born and died in Roanoke, followed him to the grave. Mary Elizabeth "Peggy" Macdowell Thomas left behind a treasure trove of Eakins family paintings and memorabilia.

As she had long promised, but few quite dared to believe until the end, she left everything to the Art Museum of Western Virginia, at Center in the Square.

Her cornucopia of Eakins-related goodies - more than 20 paintings, photographs and negatives, letters, sketches, sculpture, even Thomas Eakins' microscope - are now socked away in the museum's vault.

The collection's monetary value is beyond knowing, but museum executive director Judy Larson called it "obviously multiple millions of dollars."

It is not the only Eakins collection in the country. Other museums, such as the Philadelphia Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., have larger collections of his paintings. "We're not going to be the unique place," Larson said. "But we will have unique materials. If you're a scholar, you're going to have to come to Roanoke.

"I would expect the bequest of Peggy Thomas to catapult the museum to national prominence."

An untold story

The Eakins collection is the story behind the story of Roanoke's growing art museum - an open secret that couldn't be discussed publicly until the works were safe in the museum.

But its effects have been evident for years. Bits and pieces of the collection, including some 200 Japanese prints, have been trickling into the museum for a decade - although Peggy kept most of her precious portraits in her house until she died.

They were family, after all. "These are the intimate family pictures, the treasured prizes the family never let go," Larson said.

For the past few years, Heywood Fralin, using funds from his late brother Horace's charitable trust, has been buying up masterworks for the museum by Eakins contemporaries Childe Hassam, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer and others, to help give context to the Eakins collection.

"This is a bequest any museum in the world would love to have," said Fralin recently of Peggy's parting gift. It is also a compelling argument for a new building, Fralin said. The museum has announced its intention to build a combination art museum and IMAX theater a block away from its current location at Center in the Square but still must raise much of the $30 million cost.

"The existing museum is totally inadequate to house a collection of this quality," Fralin said. He said the museum at Center in the Square has badly placed water pipes, inadequate space and insufficient security, temperature and humidity controls.

The collection was no secret in the art world. Eakins scholars had been visiting Peggy for decades, some of them with their fingers crossed. At one time or another in the past few decades, museums in Philadelphia and Richmond had hoped the collection would be bequeathed to them.

"Peggy loved to be courted in general," said Sandra Lovinguth, an interim museum director in the 1990s and current museum board member. "Until a gift is irrevocably given, it's not given. One can't prohibit those kinds of things. It was Peggy's decision, not ours."

"We were all very dubious, because she had changed her mind several times," said Jenny Taubman, who chairs the fund-raising committee for a new museum. "There were many people who were romancing her for those paintings."

In the end, Peggy kept her word. After her death, museum officials removed her collection at last from her walls, study and bureau drawers, carefully bundled it up in waterproof wrapping and whisked it all away to the museum's vault.

There it will remain for some time as the museum seeks resources to clean 100 years of grime from the precious canvases and catalog the cartons of materials.

No one knows yet everything she had - even a Philadelphia scholar who has spent many hours in Peggy's house was surprised to learn museum staffers had turned up a stack of glass-plate photo negatives, possibly squirreled away because they showed nude models. Eakins was a pioneer in the use of photographs as an aid to painting and also in the use of nude models. More surprises doubtless lie ahead.

"I think part of the fun for Roanoke will be the kind of chapter by chapter revelation," Lovinguth said.

The Roanoke connection

How did the paintings, papers and family heirlooms of a famous Philadelphia painter end up in Roanoke?

The answer lies in Roanoke's own beginnings, when railroad entrepreneurs in Philadelphia decided to extend a line to Big Lick.

Two of those who came down from Philadelphia in the 1880s to get things started were William and Walter Macdowell. Susan Macdowell Eakins, wife of the famous painter, was their sister. In later years, Peggy would knew her as Aunt Susie - in fact, Susan Eakins was her great-aunt.

William Macdowell eventually went back to Philadelphia. Walter Macdowell stayed here all his life, retiring as N&W's auditor of receipts in 1925. He was Peggy's grandfather. Thomas Eakins painted him in 1904, when he was middle-aged. With his starched collar, thinning hair and closely set eyes, he seems the very image of cautious respectability.

The collection bequeathed to the museum was retrieved by family members from the Eakins home in Philadelphia at the time of Susan Eakins' death in 1938.

The line of succession is a little murky after that - family members have given conflicting accounts - but it is certain there were two Eakins collections here at one point, divided between Walter Macdowell's two children.

One of those children, Walter Macdowell Jr., was Peggy's father, an N&W statistician. The other, Rebecca Macdowell, married a Roanoke doctor named John R. Garrett. The Garrett side of the collection has since been dispersed, and its five Thomas Eakins paintings, including Eakins' first serious work, "Street Scene in Seville," have been sold.

The other half of the collection came down to Peggy, who held onto it with all her might. Her collection apparently had been sweetened earlier by Aunt Lizzy - Elizabeth Macdowell Kenton, Susan Eakin's sister, who lived in Roanoke late in her life. Aunt Lizzy doted on Peggy's father, and left him her own collection when she died in 1953, according to Garrett descendants.

John R. "Jack" Garrett Jr., now 91, and his wife Nancy, 80, recalled Aunt Lizzy as a formidable figure in ankle-length black dresses who would fling up a hand to halt traffic when she wanted to cross the street. She was once summoned to court in Roanoke for violating a blackout order during World War II, the Garretts said. She showed up at 9 on the appointed morning, gave the judge a tongue-lashing for making her leave her house before breakfast, then turned around and walked out.

"She scared people to death," recalled Jack Garrett.

"She scared me to death," said Nancy Garrett.

Her sister Susan, on the other hand, had a heart of mush. Susan Eakins kept a pet turtle in her back yard in Philadelphia, recalled the Garretts, and even fed the household mice. "She was the sweetest person who ever lived," Jack Garrett said.

Susan had been Thomas Eakins' student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She gave up her own painting when she married Thomas but later took it up again. In 1916, the year he died, she painted a self-portrait.

It shows her from the neck up, her gentle large eyes closed, her head tilted back against a troubled red background.

The title: "Anguish."

Peggy gave it to the Roanoke museum years ago. It hangs there now.

'A piece of work'

By some accounts, Peggy had a little of Aunt Lizzy's vinegar. Born Mary Elizabeth Macdowell in 1912, she graduated from Jefferson High School in 1930, and then Hollins College and Juilliard. For awhile she lived in New York City with her first husband, lawyer William Staples, who died young. Back in Roanoke, Peggy married Francis Walters, whom she outlived as well. Her third husband, Bob Thomas, whom she married in 1980, survives her.

Peggy gave piano lessons to the sons and daughters of Roanoke's upper crust for many years. "It wasn't just a fluff class," said Judy Larson. "She was tough."

Longtime acquaintances recalled her as self-centered, talented and sure of herself. "Peggy would always come out on top with very little effort," said friend Katherine Ellett.

She also had a sense of humor. "She would say the most off-the-wall things," recalled Katherine Walters Richie, her stepdaughter. "There were times I was down, and I called her and said, 'Peg, make me laugh,' and she would. She was a piece of work."

In old age, Peggy could be vain, witty and a flirt. In a 1998 interview she walked about her house holding a male reporter's hand. She sat for a photograph with feigned impatience, then made faces between clicks of the shutter.

Peggy's cousin, Jack Garrett, described her as eccentric.

"She liked to tease people," said her husband, Bob Thomas. "Not everybody understood. But most people understood. A lot of people have come to offer their condolences. A lot of people."

Her passions were art and music. Larson used to take her for drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway, with the sun roof open and classical music blaring from the radio. "Peggy was just in heaven."

Peggy's father wanted her to donate the collection to the Pennsylvania Academy, said Ellett. A few years after his death in 1975, an exhibit was planned to showcase all the valley's Eakins treasures at North Cross School. Even for some who knew about the collections, seeing that show was an eye-opener.

"We knew it was important, but I didn't realize," said Jenny Taubman, who helped organize the show. For research they went to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and, "The Hirshhorn was so interested. They couldn't have been nicer."

After the North Cross show, a succession of local museum directors courted Peggy. Friends such as Ellett also argued for leaving the collection here.

Scholars and curators from museums as far away as London were visiting her as well, asking for loans of paintings or poking through the collection. "It was kind of a free-for-all," Katherine Walters Richie, her stepdaughter recalled. "She loved it."

Peggy apparently couldn't bear the thought of sending her beloved portraits away, however, even on loan.

"I've lived with them my whole life," she said in 1998. "They're like my home, my furniture. And this is where I live. If I sent them up to Philadelphia, they would get lost, maybe."

She hinted she might have given the paintings to the museum earlier if it were still at Cherry Hill, a stone's throw from her house, instead of at Center in the Square, all of two miles away.

Explained museum board member Ann Masters:

"I think she just decided they should be here. You have to remember Peggy had no children. This was a very tangible part of her family."

Neat stuff

To Eakins scholars, it is something more than that. Eakins looms large in American art history. His paintings of taut-muscled rowers on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia or the stomach-clenching realism of the Gross Clinic may be more famous, but Eakins also painted probing psychological portraits that seldom flattered his sitters, instead seeking the truth within. His friend, the poet Walt Whitman, once said Eakins "is not a painter, he is a force."

"He's up there. He's way, way up there," said Eakins scholar Amy Werbel of St. Michael's College in Vermont, when asked how Eakins ranks among American painters. "I think for me, he and Winslow Homer and Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent are probably the best American artists of the 19th century."

Douglass Paschall, exhibitions coordinator of the Pennsylvania Academy, spent many hours exploring Peggy's collection when he worked at the Philadelphia Museum, which recently concluded a major show of Eakins works.

"It's a very unique collection. It not only has portraits of family members, it also has a lot of objects you don't normally come across," such as childhood paintings and memorabilia, he said. "You get to see a much more intimate view of the artist than we usually encounter. Much of this stuff gets sold or tossed out."

One of the most striking paintings in the collection, a large portrait of her sisters Mary and Elizabeth (Aunt Lizzy), is by Susan Eakins. The collection also includes several works by Aunt Lizzy herself, a talented if uneven painter.

The strength of the collection, however, is the Thomas Eakins portraits, Paschall said. There are four in all, not including a childhood drawing. Two are of Eakins' father-in-law, William Macdowell, a picturesque Philadelphia engraver with long, flowing hair and a bushy beard; one is of Susan's cousin Alfred Reynolds, a hawk-eyed soldier with enormous whiskers. The fourth is of Walter Macdowell.

Paschall declined to estimate the paintings' value in dollars, although he said at least one of the portraits "is definitely in the low seven figures. None of them is shabby."

Paschall said he was aware the academy had once hoped to receive the collection. In fact, had it not been pledged to the Roanoke museum, "There's two museums up here that would gladly have leapt into the breach," he said.

"It's neat stuff. Please give my congratulations to the museum down there. They did well."

So did Peggy. She's gone now - but her family will remain behind, in Roanoke, forever.

On the Net: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/eakins /