Gertrude Bass Warner.

About Gertrude Bass Warner

Gertrude Bass Warner (May 14, 1863 – July 29, 1951) was an American twentieth-century art collector, with particular interests in Asian art, religious artifacts, daily-life textiles, ceramics, paintings, and photographs. She lived, traveled, and collected art in East Asia from 1904 to 1938. In 1922 she became the curator for life and first director of the University of Oregon Museum of Art (today, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art) at the University of Oregon, helping to design the historic building with famed architect Ellis F. Lawrence. She had the museum built to house the collection of more than 3,700 works of art, the Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art, named after her late husband, Murray Warner. She donated the collection to the university in 1933. She traveled throughout China, Japan, Korea, and Russia purchasing works of art and artifacts, taking photographs, and writing extensive field notes. She visited thousands of cultural sites and studied Shinto, Buddhism, and Chinese and Japanese etiquette, and the human experience, and became an innovator in the promotion of Asian art and culture appreciation, Asian studies, and multiculturalism. She is considered a female pioneer of museum studies.