Frank Vincent
Frank Vincent Jr. (1847, Brooklyn, NY ‑1916, New York, USA) was an American explorer, businessman and art collector.
The first American citizen to publish a detailed account on Angkor while he was a guest at the court of the King of Siam, left his important collection of Indo-Chinese art to the New York Metropolitan Museum. He was listed as “Patron” in the Annual Report of the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, No. 36 (1905).
Before him, D.O. King (David Olyphant King), a scion of the Vernon and King families of US-Asia traders from Newport, Rhode Island, had sent a letter to the Royal Geographic Society of London on Feb. 7, 1859, describing his visit to Nokon (Nakhon Wat, Angkor) the year before, and challenging several geographical assertions made by French bishop of Siam Mgr. Jean-Baptiste Pallegoix (1805−1862).
Nevertheless, a witness of that time, Jacob T. Child (1832−1905), who was Minister Resident (Consul General) of the USA in Bangkok from 1884 to 1888, wrote in his memoirs — The Pearl of Asia, Reminiscences of the Court of a Supreme Monarch or Five Years in Thailand, Donohue Henneberry & Co., Chicago, 1892 — that “while making a tour of the East, Frank Vincent, Jr., in company with Rev. S. I. McFarland, made a visit to Angkor, the first Americans that had penetrated the vast wilds of that section, and in his “Land of the White Elephant” gives an elaborate description of Nagkon Wat, which has also been described by M. Mouhut [Henri Mouhot, the American writer struggling with this family name, which he also spelled Mauhut and Mahout!], whose work he drew liberally upon for information, in which he describes this temple as “one of those temples a rival to that of Solomon, erected by some ancient Michael Angelo that might take an honorable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left us by Greece or Rome.” (p 91)
Paul Lavy noted in 2023
To the best of my knowledge, the first significant published account of an American visitor to Angkor is that of Frank Vincent Jr. (1847 – 1916), a businessman, explorer, and art collector who traveled throughout mainland Southeast Asia in 1871 – 1872.50 In 1885 he donated his collection of sculpture from Cambodia and Thailand to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, thus making it the first major American museum with holdings of Khmer sculpture, albeit mostly small heads of humble quality. Due however to a veritable French colonial monopoly over Cambodia, it should come as no surprise that the more typical path for Khmer sculpture into the United States occurred primarily through art dealers with offices in
Paris, such as Ching Tsai Loo (1880 – 1957), Paul Mallon (1884 – 1975), and Robert Rousset (1901 – 1981). Among the earliest American collectors to acquire Khmer art were Denman Waldo Ross (1853 – 1935) of Boston, a Harvard professor who visited Angkor in 1910; Alfred Fiske Pillsbury (1869 – 1950) of Minneapolis, the director of Pillsbury (flour) Mills; and lawyer and banker John Lionberger Davis (1878 – 1973) of St. Louis. Thanks to the donations of Ross, and his collaborations with the influential curator and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877 – 1947), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts developed a particularly noteworthy collection of Khmer sculpture by the 1920s. [Paul Lavy, “Many Lives of Ancient Khmer Sculpture: From the Pre-Angkorian Period to Contemporary Cambodia”, in B. Kim, K. Pyun (eds.), Teaching South and Southeast Asian Art, Springer, 2023, p 32.]
Frank Vincent’s Obituary in the New York Times, 1916.
