He was responsible for the VMFA's acquisition of many treasured works of art, including arranging for the museum to purchase from John Lee Pratt the Francisco Goya portrait of General Nicolas Guye[1][2] and from the collection of Count Karol Lanckoroński of Vienna, Austria, a rare marble sarcophagus dating to the 2nd century B.C.
[4] In 1964 Pinkney Near, curator of paintings, selected American paintings for the Cincinnati Museum's survey exhibition, ranging from early painters such as John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and Washington Allston to later painters John Marin, Max Weber, George Bellows, Childe Hassam, Robert Vickrey, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Mark Tobey, Jane Freilicher, Milton Avery, and Tom Wesselmann.
[13][14] Through the years Near acquired for the museum some of its greatest treasures, including paintings by Théodore Géricault, Claude Lorraine's "Battle on a Bridge," Aristide Maillol's "The River," Claude Monet's "Irises by the Pond," Charles Willson Peale's "William Smith and His Grandson," Angelica Kauffmann's "Cornelia Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures," and Jean-Bapiste Blin de Fontenay's monumental "Buffet Under a Trellis."
In 1976 Near announced the VMFA's purchase of American sculptor Isamu Noguchi's polished stainless steel sculpture "Open Lock," completed in 1964.
[16] Among the exhibits curated by Near was one called Three Masters of Landscape: Fragonard, Robert and Boucher which, although small, presented interesting issues due to the variability of the works.
Near, along with two other art experts, Julien Binford (professor emeritus at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia) and William Campbell (Curator of American Paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) selected the paintings by the deceased artist Gari Melchers for permanent display in the Gari Melchers Memorial Gallery at Belmont, the Falmouth, Virginia, home of the artist.
[18] Near was an author of many of the VMFA exhibition catalogs and illustrated books, including French Paintings: The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.
Speakers in the series included Mia Genoni, Suzanne Foley, Robert Hobbs, Matthew Affron, Richard Woodward, Joseph Dye III, Mitchell Merling, Belle Pendleton, and Susanne Kilgore Arnold.