By any standard, the rise of the Colby College Museum of Art has been extraordinary. Since its founding 50 years ago, the museum has grown from an expanded alcove in the Bixler building to the relatively sprawling museum that is nationally known, particularly for its important collection of American art.

In his new book, With the Help of Friends: The Colby College Museum of Art, The First Fifty Years, 1959-2009, College Historian Earl H. Smith tracks the growth of the museum, focusing more on people than on the art they helped collect.

The names are familiar: Jetté and Lunder, Cummings and Abbott, Marin and Katz, Schupf and Tsiaras, Mirken and Gourley, Strider and Cotter, among others. Smith reveals their roles in the museum’s evolution with prose that is both precise and lively—from the early years, when a collection of primitive portraits hung in Foss dining hall, to the present, when the gift of the Lunder Collection made national news. Peter ’56 and Paula Crane Lunder, “declined interviews with the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and others, but, as if to underscore a primary target of their gift, Paula spoke with a reporter from ... the Colby Echo.”

The museum is poised to follow its half-century birthday by growing anew, with completion of an expansion targeted for Colby’s bicentennial in 2013. The supporters of the museum have created “a most remarkable masterpiece indeed,” Smith writes.