Robert de Forest and the founding of the American Wing - New York Metropolitan Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Amelia Peck

Every man, woman, and child, particularly every child...has an inherent right to be able to see, at least occasionally, good works of art, for the same reason that every dweller in a crowded city should sometimes have the opportunity of seeing the green of the country. It is part of the "pursuit of happiness" which our Declaration of Independence declared to be our American birthright. Much of our enjoyment of life depends upon it; for only through the eye can the sense of beauty be awakened and called into being. [3]

Almost immediately after the Bolles collection was purchased, the idea of placing it in period room settings was discussed. On October 29, 1909, Henry Kent wrote to Luke Vincent Lockwood (1872-1951), a furniture scholar and adviser to the museum, "I have talked with Mr. de Forest with regard to the installation of the Bolles collection, and I have suggested that you and I might be able to propose a scheme for the arrangement of the pieces according to the German method or room arrangement." [4] The "German method" to which Kent refers was explained more completely in an article he wrote in 1922 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, announcing the building of the American Wing:

With the upbuilding in Switzerland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, in the last half of the nineteenth century, of museums intended to show the arts and crafts of certain of their cities or states, a new arrangement of such collections as were therein embraced came into practice....This system expressed itself in two ways: by the exhibition in sequence of rooms, taken from historic houses architecturally expressive of given periods, and arranged to the least detail with the objects belonging in them--furniture, ceramics, metalwork, etc.; and by the bringing together in galleries introductory to these rooms, and harmonious architecturally with them, of the bulk of the museum material of the periods. [5]

He goes on to cite the Swiss National Museum (Schweizerisches Landesmuseum) in Zurich and a museum in Munich as museums that had successfully installed their collections according to the new system, as well as discussing the few American museums that had introduced period rooms on a small scale, such as the Essex Institute (now the Peabody Essex Museum) in Salem, Massachusetts, and the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Toward the end of his article, he states proudly that "In the new wing, shortly to be erected, the Zurich method will have a complete exemplification." [6]

Halsey, Kent, and a young curator, Durr Friedley (later Freedley; 1888-1938), searched the East Coast for appropriate rooms for the new installation. Friedley remembered:

I spent one winter hunting through the thirteen original colonies for Colonial woodwork and panelled rooms, which were afterwards installed in the American Wing... Most of these rooms were taken from derelict houses forgotten by local historians and doomed to early destruction. Among such I discovered and saved George Washington's Alexandria Ball-Room, then a junk shop, and the room from the Powell [Powel] House in Philadelphia, then a storage for hides. [7]