When Eleanor Deane Audigier (1864–1931) died in 1931, her widower, Louis Audigier [pronounced O T J] wished to donate much of her extensive eclectic collections to UT. A condition of his gift was that UT would provide an appropriate fireproof building to house the collection. In July 1932 the trustees decided that an addition to the newly opened library (later named for James D. Hoskins) would be an appropriate structure and appropriated $20,000 for the effort. Two months later Audigier turned over property to the university to pay for the expansion. The addition, a tower, was scheduled to open in fall 1933, but delays deferred the dedication until 1934.
At the June 1934 commencement, the university formally accepted the Audigier Collection. The formal opening of the collection, a gala for four hundred, was held June 4, 1934. The gallery was on the second floor of the library, at the top of the grand staircase. The art curriculum of the institution at the time was in “related arts” and under the jurisdiction of the School (later, College) of Home Economics. The one related arts faculty member, Amy Prescott Morse, had the task of organizing, cataloging, and staffing the displayed collection. In the design and operation of the collection, a committee consisting of Mary P. Charlton, chair; Mary E. Baker; Harriet Andrews; James P. Hess; and Charles Barber assisted her.
When Morse asked to be relieved of the assignment, it went to Thomas N. Lewis in the mid-1940s. Madeline Kneberg then became curator of the collection. (Both Lewis and Kneberg pressed for the establishment of a museum on campus, but their interest was anthropology, not art, and the Audigier collection was not a major focus of their attention.) With the opening of the McClung Museum, responsibility for the Audigier Collection passed to the head of the McClung Museum, Alfred K. Guthe, an anthropologist, whose previous experience was as a curator of anthropology. The Audigier Collection continued to be an ancillary activity for the museum, with no full-time staff. By the late 1960s, open hours of the gallery were limited to Sundays, from two to five o’clock.
The addition of an interested staff member in the McClung Museum served to increase the open hours from 1971 to 1973. But the largest art theft in Knoxville until that time occurred in 1973, when artifacts from the Audigier collection were stolen. The police thought the theft was an inside job, but no one was arrested. UT did not offer a reward for information or for return of the objects, and only a few minor objects were recovered. The insurance paid $39,825 (the value minus a $5,000 deductible). Additional thefts occurred in 1976, 1977, and 1978. The remainder of the collection was moved to the McClung Museum in 1978, and a portion was displayed from 1979 to 1990, when virtually all the remaining items were stored with other museum collections to create space for a new exhibit on ancient Egypt.
The Audigys were native Knoxvillians who traveled the world. Louis Audigier served for many years as the photographic representative of the New York Times in Rome. Their donated collection consisted of more than four hundred objects, both originals and reproductions, including antique furniture dating to the 1400s, paintings, china and glassware, jewelry, and a library of several thousand volumes of art and travel literature. Students who visited the collection were also impressed by the collection of cameos, miniature paintings, carved ivory, pipes, and steins. They also saw two extremely valuable rugs. A rare old Turkish Rose Rug, contained a rare blue color, the making of which had become a lost art. That rug had won medals at a number of art fairs and exhibits. The other rug, the Rug of One Hundred Heads, featured depictions of heads woven into a diamond in the center of the rug. A Serbian princess had formerly owned this rug. Two sculptures, Return of the Hunter and Colleoni, were of particular interest.