Binney, Edwin, 1925-1986

Edwin Binney 3rd was an American philanthropost and collector. A Harvard graduate, he recieved his Ph.D. in Romance Languages. He became a collector at a very young age, and his intersts ranged from Persian miniatures, Ottoman art and South Asian painting to early American quilts. He amassed a large collection of ballet prints and theater books, which he bequithed to Harvard.
Binney was inspired to add dance to his collecting interests when he cataloged the existing dance collection at the Harvard Theatre Collection in 1961, as a graduate student volunteer then working on his doctoral dissertation on the Paris ballets of Theophile Gautier. In 1975 he became the Honorary Curator of Ballet at the Theatre Collection and remained a good friend until his death in 1986. His bequest included a large and significant collection of rare books on dance, numerous lavish souvenir volumes depicting European court and civic festivals of the 16th-18th century, his own working library on the history of ballet and dancing in general, the research files and notes for his many publications on dance, and what is said to be one of the largest collection of dance iconography in the world.

The Binney family fortunes began with an English immigrant, Joseph Walker Binney, founder of a chemical plant that specialized in the red oxide pigment used to paint barns. His son Edwin Binney Sr. and a cousin, C. Harold Smith, co-founded Binney & Smith, creating the first dustless white blackboard chalk in 1902 and producing the first box of Crayola crayons in 1903. That portmanteau name combines craie (French for “chalk”) and ola (for “oily/oleaginous”).

Ed (as the third-generation Edwin Binney called himself) lost his father a month before he turned four, and his paternal grandfather when he was nine. The boy’s mother and grandmother doted on him, ensured he was widely traveled, and exposed him to the world’s best art. He began his first collection—trolley transfer tickets—in Portland, Oregon, when he was five. At Harvard, he concentrated in French, graduating in 1948 after returning from wartime army service. He stayed on for his doctorate, and in 1965 published his dissertation, Les Ballets de Théophile Gautier, illustrated with prints from his burgeoning collection.
The 1986 bequest of 10,000 dance prints from Edwin Binney, 3rd, ’46, Ph.D. ’61, who became the HTC’s honorary curator of ballet, contributed significantly to its becoming one of the largest and most prominent performing-arts collections in the world.