Natalie K. Blair's "museum rooms" and the American Wing - New York Metropolitan Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2000 by Morrison H. Heckscher

It is no secret that a goodly number of the very finest pieces of early furniture in the American Wing come from the collection of Natalie K. Blair. [1] What is not generally known, however, is that before they came to the museum they furnished the "museum rooms m the attic of her house in Tuxedo Park, New York (see Pls. I-VI). What has also gone generally unnoticed is the breadth of her collecting interests. Among things American they included high-style Newport, Philadelphia Chippendale and Boston Federal furniture, pewter, wrought iron, lighting devices, and views of New York City. In each sphere, in terms of authenticity, aesthetic quality, and condition she held to the same extraordinarily high standard. Indeed, her importance is both as a major benefactor of this and other museums [2] and as a collector of Americana unsurpassed in connoisseurship by any of the better-known collectors of her generation, be it Francis P Garvan, Henry Francis du Pont, Ima Hogg, Katharine Prentis Murphy, or Electra Havemey er Webb. [3]

Natalie B. Knowlton was born in 1887 and grew up in New York City and at Echo Lawn in Balmvilie, near Newburgh, New York. In 1912 she married J. Insley Blair Jr. (1876-1940), an heir to a great fortune made in the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western and the Union Pacific Railroads. They spent the first years of their marriage at 22 East Forty-seventh Street in New York City, and later, whenever they were in the city, they lived at 465 Park Avenue (1929-1937), and in the Hotel Carlyle at 35 East Seventy-sixth Street (1938-1949). In 1949 Mrs. Blair moved just down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to 960 Fifth Avenue, where she died in 1952. The Blairs had two daughters: Natica, born in 1913, and Joan, born in 1915 (see Fig. 1).

In 1913 the Blairs purchased land in Tuxedo Park, a resort community established in 1886 by Pierre Lorillard (1833-1901) in the Ramapo Mountains forty miles west of New York City. (This was familiar territory for Natalie Blair, for in 1901 she had won the women's doubles tennis cup at the Tuxedo Club.) In 1914 the Blairs had Carrere and Hastings, the architects of the recently completed New York Public Library, build them Blairhame, [4] a large brick mansion in the neo-Jacobean style, where they lived pretty much year-round, although Mrs. Blair was often in the city for the theater and the antiques shops. It was in the commodious attic of this house that she created her private museum--her own American Wing.

Natalie Blair came to collect American furniture in a roundabout way. "Until 1916," she later recalled, "I had bought only English pieces, but as I began to learn, I also began to doubt many of these...." Her worst fears realized, she turned to American things. As she wrote:

At that time this faking in toto did not obtain in the American furniture--or rather not to any extent, except possibly some of the elaborate mahogany pieces, for which people were beginning to give prices. The chief danger in those days was buying cripples--genuine enough pieces-with new legs-or feet--or drawers, or old tops and bases that did not belong together but fitted to match. There was still enough of the real to be found so that dealers often bad it. [5]

Where and when Natalie Blair made purchases is all neatly chronicled in the inventories she compiled in 1943. [6] She bought extensively from the major New York dealers: fifty-four pieces from Collings and Collings (805 Madison Avenue) between 1916 and 1926; seventeen pieces from Henry V. Weil (247-249 East Fifty-seventh Street) between 1917 and 1930; fifteen pieces from Charles Woolsey Lyon (416 Madison Avenue) between 1921 and 1934; and thirteen pieces from Charles R. Morson of Brooklyn between 1921 and 1929. In addition, she had particularly close dealings with Willoughby Farr of Edgewater, New Jersey from whom she bought forty-five pieces between 1920 and 1937 (but mostly in the 1930s).

Natalie Blair was an intelligent, highly disciplined, and very hands-on collector. She recognized the benefits of the publications and public exhibitions that had begun to proliferate (The Magazine ANTIQTJES in 1922 and the American Wing in 1924), noting that "pieces now offered the collector can be compared to similar ones in museums and private collections and their relative desirability determined both as to their merit and condition." Indeed, she made good use of the American Wing. She was, she wrote,

impressed with the wonderful collection Mr. Bolles formed and which is now in the Metropolitan Museum [see pp. 170-175] Apparently he was only attracted by the best of its kind--and no seconds were allowed to creep in. In my first years of serious collecting I used to compare each piece offered me with its counterpart in this collection. If it came up to that standard--I never recall an instance where it excelled--then I would buy it and feel pretty confident I would not later see a better example. [7]

The objects in her collection, it must be said, belie this modest appraisal.