The following is an extended version of the article that appears in our March 2024 issue.
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Closed in 2020, Edward Valentine’s studio reopened in January 2024, telling a more complete story of the statuary created there. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
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Photo by Jay Paul
Let’s say you are an impulsive collector who gathers items from prehistoric shark’s teeth to oil paintings to old letters and books. As your agglomeration increases, your house begins to resemble a cabinet of curiosities — and we know how painful that can be.
Do you go full Marie Kondo and winnow the collection of collections? Tough to do when almost everything you’ve assembled sparks joy in you.
Mann Satterwhite Valentine II chose instead to lean in.
Valentine made his fortune when, on New Year’s Eve 1870, he went to the basement and mixed up a sort of medicine derived from meat extract for his ailing wife, Ann Maria, who was unable to consume nutrients. Ann Maria recovered her strength, and soon Valentine was running a business that put his seven sons to work. He dubbed the restorative Valentine’s Meat Juice.
Decades passed, and the collection grew. When Valentine died in 1893, he bequeathed to the city his home, a Federal-style house built for early-19th-century attorney John Wickham, his collection and an endowment. The Valentine museum opened on Nov. 21, 1898. The former Richmond Dispatch newspaper proclaimed, “Richmond has long been in need of such an institution, and therefore it satisfies a public want.”
From 1902 onward, general education classes were held there for Black and white young people — the first institution in Richmond to host integrated educational classes. Those classes have since evolved into the Sara D. November Education Center.
Through the decades there’ve been several expansions and improvements within and without. After one period of renovation closed the museum for a couple years, then president Granville Gray Valentine worried in correspondence to acting director Laura Bragg that the museum wasn’t ready to reopen in 1930. Bragg responded, “A finished museum is a dead one,” and the doors opened again.
When the museum required more space, nearby houses were acquired, and, later, the Bransford-Cecil House was plucked off Fifth Street and transported to the museum. The Marshall Street studio of Mann’s brother and the family’s artist, Edward V. Valentine, joined The Valentine fold in 1937.
In 1948, The Valentine added a mission statement to its title: “A Museum of the Life and History of Richmond,” which it continues to embody via programming and public discussions.
Members of the Richmond Art Club gather at the institution to sketch the plaster casts of classical statuary. Places to exhibit art weren’t plentiful, and the museum held a biennial series, “Richmond In Paintings and Drawings,” during 1949-72.
In 2015 came the establishment in Shockoe Slip of The Valentine First Freedom Center on the site of the First Virginia Capitol at 14 S. 14th St. There, Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom was passed, which declared that no tenet of faith, or lack thereof, should prevent anyone from citizenship or public office.
The Valentine holds one of the largest collections of textiles in the Southeast and an enormous trove of photographs, among 1.5 million other items. The pandemic years allowed the current museum to do what Mann Valentine couldn’t: sift and sort through everything, deaccession objects not representative of Richmond’s complicated story and, importantly, conduct a massive makeover of the library, research centers and storage facilities of all those paintings and artifacts and clothes. Edward Valentine’s studio and statuary commemorating Confederate leaders received a recent and powerful multimedia redesign entitled “Sculpting History at the Valentine Studio: Art, Power, and the ‘Lost Cause’ American Myth.”
Explore 125 years of The Valentine through the photography exhibition “An Unfinished Museum,” which continues through Sept. 2. Opening April 10, the exhibit “Turning Point: Richmond in the 1890s” focuses on a new generation navigating a segregated society and the long impact of the tumultuous decade (the exhibition continues through Feb. 2, 2025).
Now the city’s memory palace is ready for your visit, and be assured: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
