NEW YORK, NY.- John Wilmerding, a towering figure in American art whose eclectic career as a scholar, museum curator and collector was instrumental in elevating the cultural significance and market value of painters such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Fitz Henry Lane, died June 6 in New York City. He was 86.

His brother, James, said the cause of death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was complications of congestive heart failure.

When Wilmerding began teaching in the 1960s, American art was underappreciated, if not totally unknown. There were virtually no university survey courses in the subject, textbooks or major exhibitions.

“American art just didn’t hold the same sort of attention and respect that European art did, and certainly the art of the Renaissance or the old masters,” said Justin Wolff, chair of the art history department at the University of Maine and a former student of Wilmerding’s. “It was behind culturally. It didn’t really have an identity.”

Wilmerding helped give it one.

He published more than 20 books, including “American Masterpieces: Singular Expressions of National Genius” (2019), a collection of his columns on art in The Wall Street Journal.

From 1983 to 1988, he was the deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, where he donated his large collection of works by 19th- and 20th-century American painters.

And when Alice Walton, the daughter of Walmart’s founder, Sam Walton, opened the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart has its headquarters, she turned to Wilmerding as a kind of consigliere to help her acquire works.

“John was absolutely the standard-bearer,” Earl A. Powell III, the National Gallery’s director from 1992 to 2019, said in an interview. “He brought American art to the forefront.”

Wilmerding curated some of the most important exhibitions of American art over the past 50 years, including “American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875,” at the National Gallery in 1980. The event featured landscape paintings, watercolors, photographs and drawings by Lane and other 19th-century American artists, including Martin Johnson Heade, Sanford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church.

Art critic Paul Richard, writing in The Washington Post, called the exhibition “the best American painting show ever offered to the public by the National Gallery of Art.”

“It is beautiful and useful,” he added. “Its pictures portray light, light that fills the air, light that, glowing everywhere, calls the mind to stillness.”

Wilmerding’s ultimate accomplishment, Richard wrote, was having “shown the public something we had not seen before.”

John Currie Wilmerding Jr. was born April 28, 1938, in Boston and grew up in Old Westbury, New York, on Long Island. His father was a banker and yachtsman. His mother was Lila (Webb) Wilmerding.

Wilmerding had art in his DNA.

His great-grandparents, Henry Osborne Havemeyer, a sugar magnate, and Louisine Waldron Havemeyer, were prominent collectors and donated their extensive collection of European and Asian artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, who was an American folk art collector, founded the Shelburne Museum in Vermont.

Growing up, Wilmerding was only vaguely aware of his family’s importance in the art world.

“The great irony is, with all of my family’s collecting history, for all of my proximity to New York, I never was taken to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” he told the journal American Art in 2005.

He attended Harvard University, where he initially planned to study American literature. On a friend’s recommendation during his freshman year, he took an introductory art history class held in the basement of the campus art museum. Students called it “Darkness at Noon.”

“When the lights went out,” Wilmerding recalled, “there was this world of visual images that struck a nerve with me instantly, and the realization early on that you could look at facades or a ground plan — it didn’t matter from where or when — and suddenly a whole culture came to life. That was the experience that set me on the track.”

He changed his major to art history and was soon consumed by American art, especially paintings of the sea, which reminded him of sailing with his father. He wrote his thesis on Lane, a marine painter, and bought one of his paintings — “Stage Rocks and Western Shore of Gloucester Outer Harbor” (1857) — for $3,500 (the equivalent of about $38,000 today) at a Boston art gallery.

Two more acquisitions soon followed: “Mississippi Boatman” (1850) by George Caleb Bingham, and “Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes” (1871/1875) by Martin Johnson Heade.

“After that,” he told The New York Times, “there was no stopping me.”

Wilmerding graduated from Harvard in 1960. He earned a master’s degree there in 1961 and a doctorate in 1965.

Wilmerding taught at Dartmouth College from 1966 to 1977, when he left to join the National Gallery as a curator. He also taught at Princeton University from 1988 to 2007. He continued collecting throughout his career, and in later years, he focused on pop art.

“For me, the satisfaction of buying these pictures came from collecting in an area that the art market hadn’t discovered,” he told the Times in 2004. “The field was wide open, so you could make your own tracks.”

By then, paintings by Lane were selling for $3 million to $5 million.

In addition to his brother, survivors include his sister, Lila Wilmerding Kirkland; and three nieces and three nephews. He lived in the New York City borough of Manhattan and had another home in Maine.

During his time at the National Gallery, Wilmerding’s office looked out toward the Washington Monument. From his window, and in the American painters he championed, he could envision the national character.

“There is a sense of self-reliance, of our natural resilience and of our undercurrents of optimism,” he told the Times. “These are beliefs and attributes that have always stood us well. You see them over and over again, whether in Winslow Homer or Gilbert Stuart. There’s something optimistic about them.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.