When Prof. Bernard L. Herman was in the third grade, his teacher passed out postcard-sized reproductions of Jean-Francois Millet's masterpiece The Gleaners. Herman raised his hand and told the class that he had a Millet drawing at home. The teacher told him not to tell lies.

Herman did have an original Millet at home. His parents, Lucy and Fred Herman, had been collecting art since they were undergraduates at the College of William and Mary.

Lucy Herman set the teacher straight. She also took the Millet out of her living room and hung it in her son's room.

The teacher should have asked if the class could take a field trip to the Hermans' house. From a modest start when they snapped up a reproduction of a Degas pastel that they thought was the real thing, the Hermans collected European, American and Inuit drawings until original works were hung four-high on the walls of their Norfolk, Va., home.

College students came through the Hermans' rooms to view paintings and drawings by John Singer Sargent, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Francois Boucher, Kathe Kollwitz and Salvador Dali. The couple generously lent drawings for showings. Lucy and Fred Herman believed drawings gain by being shared­like good company, good music or good wine.

The Hermans also shared their knowledge. He was a decorated veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, fluent in French and German, who earned a Ph.D. in international law and diplomacy but was blackballed during the McCarthy era and turned to a career as an architect and university professor. He was in the vanguard of architectural preservationists. For her part, Lucy Herman worked as a therapist's aide, a draftsman and a store detective to put her husband through graduate school. Then, she found her place as a teacher for 35 years of children with learning disabilities.
"I got very interested in why such smart children couldn't read," she explains.

Long before Fred Herman's death in 2002, he and Lucy announced their intention to make gifts of art to their alma mater, the College of William and Mary, and to the University of Delaware, where their son Bernard, is now Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History.

Because of the couple's largesse, University students have up-close access to more than 200 pieces from one of the largest and most important private collections of Canadian Inuit drawings in the U.S. The Hermans have been amassing the drawings since the mid-1980s when they found European art prices had risen too high for their pocketbook.

Inuit art sprang from a Canadian government program that was the brainchild of James Houston, a government official who also was an artist. The intent was to help the nomadic Inuit make the transition from winter snow houses and summer skin tents to housing settlements after the depletion of caribou herds left them starvng.

The government art programs introduced the Inuit to drawing on paper--an activity that was entirely new to them. Their drawings in ink, crayon and even felt markers picture ice fishing, hunting, snow homes, shamanic ceremonies and other vestiges of Inuit nomadic life. In a few years, Inuit folk art was sought by collectors.

When the Hermans began collecting Inuit drawings in the 1980s, they looked for works that showed the Inuit way of life because they saw the drawings as anthropological records as well as art.

"What I would like is for students to be able to see the real drawings, not reproductions," Herman says. "If they're writing about one particular aspect of art or of culture, the collection should be able to be cross-referenced so it can be used by art students, anthropology students and history students."

When she looked around the University Gallery at the exhibit opening in September, Lucy Herman remembered the good times she and her husband had spending their art budget at galleries.

"He'd go one way and I'd go the other, and we'd write down our favorite five and rate them,'' she says, smiling as she reaches back 40 years in her mind. "Then we'd get together at the door and see what we both liked, and that's what we'd buy."